English Language Teaching in India: Problems and Prospects August 2015

Silver Jubilee Year 2015-2016
UGC Sponsored National Seminar
English Language Teaching in India:
Problems and Prospects
August 27 and 28, 2015

Organised by
Department of English
Sonapur college, Sonapur
Kamrup (M), Assam

English Language Teaching in India: Problems and Prospects August 2015

English Language Teaching in India: Problems and Prospects August 2015

Workshops on Technology & Second language Acquisition 1-6 May 2015

Workshops
on
Technology &
Second language Acquisition
1-6 May 2015

Regional English Language Office
Bengaluru

Workshops
on
Technology &
Second language Acquisition
1-6 May 2015

8th National Conference on Methods and Outcomes of Research in English

SRM University
The Department of English and Foreign Languages
Faculty of Engineering and Technology
8th National Conference
on
Methods and Outcomes of Research in English
on March 31, 2015

8th National Conference
on
Methods and Outcomes of Research in English

8th National Conference
on
Methods and Outcomes of Research in English

Isak Dinesen

Isak Dinesen 

Dinesen, Isak, pseudonym of Baroness Karen Christence Blixen-Finecke, née Dinesen (1885-1962), Danish writer, born in Rungsted. She studied painting in various European cities. In 1914 she married her cousin, Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke, and went to live in British East Africa (now Kenya) on a coffee plantation. After her divorce in 1921 she remained in Africa, returning to Denmark in 1931. Her first book of stories, Seven Gothic Tales (1934), dealt in highly polished and subtle prose with the world of the supernatural, as did most of her later fiction. Out of Africa (1937), which was made into a movie released in 1985, was based on her experiences on the plantation. Her only novel, The Angelic Avengers (1944; trans. 1947), was published under the name Pierre Andrézel; it describes in allegorical terms the plight of Denmark during the German occupation in World War II. Dinesen's later works include Winter's Tales (1943); Last Tales (1957), another collection of stories of the supernatural; and Shadows on the Grass (1960), Sketches of African life. She wrote both the Danish version and the English version of all her works.

Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing is one of the most prolific and celebrated authors writing in English today. Her work ranges from realistic early novels, many of which draw directly from her African childhood, to later books that experiment with literary genre (including science fiction) and form. In addition, Lessing has written poetry, drama, nonfiction, and a series of memoirs. Deeply influenced by her early exposure to racial, class, and sexual inequality, Lessing raises in her writing questions about politics, society, religion, work, and family—meditations at the heart of her most influential work, The Golden Notebook (1962).After two marriages and two divorces, in 1949 Lessing moved from Salisbury (the Southern Rhodesian capital, now Harare, Zimbabwe) to London, England, taking with her only the youngest of her three children. She also brought the manuscript that would become her first novel, The Grass is Singing (1950). Literary success came quickly; over the next ten years, Lessing published four more novels, in addition to stories, plays, reviews, and essays. She gained a reputation as a writer whose work probed both the personal and the political—particularly for women.. Along with her interest in racial and gender politics and intergenerational relationships, Lessing began to draw from the teachings of Sufism, a mystical form of Islam. Hints of the supernatural in the series' last entry are expanded in the five-volume science-fiction series Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979-1983). Later novels include The Good Terrorist (1985), The Fifth Child (1988), and Love, Again (1996); works focused on Africa include Collected African Stories (1973), African Laughter (1992), and Going Home (1996). Lessing has also published two volumes of her ongoing autobiography, Under my Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997). Critics praise Lessing's fierce, unsentimental honesty and her unique imagination, and many consider her one of the finest novelists writing in English today.

Aimé Césaire

Aimé Césaire

Innovative Martinican poet, playwright, and political leader, a founder of the Négritude movement and one of the most important black authors writing in French in the 20th century. As a historical movement, Négritude received two competing interpretations. Césaire's original conception sees the specificity and unity of black existence as a historically developing phenomenon that arose through the highly contingent events of the African slave trade and New World plantation system. This formulation was gradually displaced in intellectual debate by Senghor's essentialist interpretation of Négritude, which argues for an unchanging core or essence to black existence. As this later formulation gained currency, it was widely attacked, all the more so as Senghor, then president of an independent Senegal, came to use the term ideologically to justify his own political platform. Senghor's Négritude nonetheless served to reverse the system of values that had informed Western perception of blacks since the earliest voyages of discovery to Africa. Césaire's developmental model of Négritude, on the other hand, continues to offer a model for the ongoing project of black liberation in all its fullness, at once spiritual and political.

Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe

Nigerian author, whose novel Things Fall Apart (1958) is one of the most widely read and discussed works of African fiction. In his first novel, Things Fall Apart, Achebe retold the history of colonization from the point of view of the colonized. The novel depicted the first contact between the Igbo people and European missionaries and administrators. Since its publication, Things Fall Apart has generated a wealth of literary criticism grappling with Achebe's unsentimental representations of tradition, religion, manhood, and the colonial experience. Immediately successful, the novel secured Achebe's position both in Nigeria and in the West as a preeminent voice among Africans writing in English.Achebe subsequently wrote several novels that spanned more than a century of African history. Although most of these works deal specifically with Nigeria, they are also emblematic of what Achebe calls the "metaphysical landscape" of Africa, "a view of the world and of the whole cosmos perceived from a particular position." No Longer at Ease (1960) tells the story of a young man sent by his village to study overseas who then returns to a government job in Nigeria only to find himself in a culturally fragmented world. As the young man sinks into materialism and corruption, Achebe represents a new generation caught in a moral and spiritual conflict between the modern and the traditional. Arrow of God (1964) returns to the colonial period of 1920s Nigeria. In this novel, Achebe focuses on a theme that underscores all of his work: the wielding of power and its deployment for the good or harm of a community. A Man of the People (1966), a work Achebe has characterized as "an indictment of independent Africa," is set in the context of the emerging African nation-state. Representing a nation thought to be based on Nigeria, Achebe portrays the vacuum of true leadership left by the destruction of the governance provided by the traditional village. Achebe's critical political commentary continues in Anthills of the Savannah (1987), in which he uses a complex mythical structure to depict an African nation passing into the shadow of a military dictatorship.Achebe helped found a publishing company in Nigeria with poet Christopher Okigbo and in 1971 was a founding editor for the prominent African literary magazine Okike. In addition, he published children's books and award-winning poetry collections.Responding to critics such as Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who point to the political and cultural implications of writing in the colonial language, Achebe has defended his use of English, asserting that as a "medium of international exchange," the language is a lingua franca (common language) that will connect the communities of Africa."Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him," Achebe wrote in his essay "The Truth of Fiction."