READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM

Reader-response criticism focuses on reader’s responses to literary texts. Reader’s responses are important to enough to become the focus of literary interpretation. Reader-response is a broad, exciting, evolving domain of literary studies that can help us learn about our own reading processes and how they related to specific elements in the text we read, our life experiences, and the intellectual community of which we are a member. Reader-response theory maintains that what a text is cannot be separated from what it does. Reader-response theorists share i) the role of the reader cannot be omitted from our understanding of literature and ii) that readers do not passively consume the meaning presented to them by an objective literary text; rather they actively make the meaning they find in literature. The second belief that readers make meaning, suggests that different readers may read the same text quite differently.

Marxist Criticism

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Marxist criticism

Marxism is not a viable theory. Communities societies which are based on the principles developed by Karl Marx (1818-1883) have been oligarchies in which a small group of leaders controls the money and the guns and forces it’s polices on a population kept in the line through physical pressure. Even if communist countries were true Marxist societies and even if all of them had failed, Marxist theory would still give a meaningful way to understand history and current events. One could use Marxist to interpret the failure of Marxist regimes.

What is Structuralism?

Structuralism is the name that is given to a wide range of discourses that study underlying structures of signification. Signification occurs wherever there is a meaningful event or in the practise of some meaningful action. Hence the phrase, "signifying practices." A meaningful event might include any of following: writing or reading a text; getting married; having a discussion over a cup of coffee; a battle. Most (if not all) meaningful events involve either a document or an exchange that can be documented. This would be called a "text." Texts might include any of the following: a news broadcast; an advertisement; an edition of Shakespeare’s King Lear; the manual for my new washing machine; the wedding vows; a feature film. From the point of view of structuralism all texts, all meaningful events and all signifying practices can be analysed for their underlying structures. Such an analysis would reveal the patterns that characterise the system that makes such texts and practices possible. We cannot see a structure or a system per se. In fact it would be very awkward for us if we were aware at all times of the structures that make our signifying practices possible. Rather they remain unconscious but necessary aspects of our whole way of being what we are. Structuralism therefore promises to offer insights into what makes us the way we are

Sociology/Anthropology (B. A. 1st Year)

History of Human Society and Culture:

Paleolithic

The first or the oldest pre-historical culture is known as Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. The word Paleolithic has come from the Greek word ‘Palaios’ meaning old and ‘lithos’ means stone. Paleolithic refers to the pre-history of mankind covering the period from the first appearance of tool using human until the emergence of Mesolithic stage. Paleolithic people lived as hunter-gatherers without agriculture and without formal pottery production. The Paleolithic has traditionally been subdivided into three successive phases, namely

1. Lower Paleolithic age

2. Middle Paleolithic age

3. Upper Paleolithic age

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