The Scholar’s Life

Assignment Paper E-C-302 Research Methodology

Topic- The Scholar’s Life

Rajyaguru Mansi D

M.A. Part – 1

SEM- I

Roll No -12

Year – 2010-11

Department of English

v Introduction:

The scholar’s business is in part constrictive to add to the sum of knowledge relating to literature and its makers and in part constrictively destructive to expose and dispel the mistakes that, as the present chapter will show, fox the pager of the literary record

(1)              Error: Its prevalence, progress, and persistence.

Good researchers are, by virtual definition, thoroughgoing skeptics. Though in personal, relations they may be benevolent and trusting, professionally they may be benevolent and trusting, professionally they must alliterate a low opinion of the human capacity for truth and accuracy beginingwith themselves. The wellspring of wisdom in research, as else where in life, is self-knowledge, Human beings, it seems, have an inherent tendency to shy away from the exact truth, and even thought our profession enjoins upon us the most rigid standards of procedure, in the most rigid standards of  procedure in research and writing none of us also, is infallible simply because we are made of mortal flesh,  we have to reconcile ourselves to a small, irreducible margin of error in our work. But fatalism cannot under any circumstances rationalize carelessness,. Granted that perfection is beyond our reach, we must devote every ounce of resolution and care to eliminating all the mistakes we can possibly detect. In the end, our conscience can be at rest. If a slip or two have survived our scrutiny, we can lay the omission to the postlapsarian stall of the race to which we belong one compelling reason why a myth persists despite exposure is that it is often so much more picturesque than the prosaic truth; a good anecdote, however doubtful its credentials, appeals to the romanticist in us. Thus a course of investigation sometimes results in a clash within us of two opposed inclinations the scientist’s devotion to alls ere fact and the artist’s sense of the superior beauty that resides in what might have been. Our choice as scholars, is clear, irrupt our rejection of the palpably under or unlikely often is accompanied by a certain regret.

    In fact, every scholar who has had occasion to compare the pre-1920 printed texts of a literary figure’s private papers with the manuscripts themselves has blood curdling tales to tell of the liberties their editors took. Sometimes, to be sure, the printed deviations from the original are accidental, the result of this occurs in the life, journals, and correspondence of salute  peps (1841), where sir Robert satchel is represented as saying in alerter to peps that he has lost his health “by sitting money years at the sack-battle” Reference in the manuscript reveals that what satchel really sat at was not the sack-bottle but the “nick-bottle” which is a quite difference kind of mansion the lesson is plain: by accepting on faith, in an article we publish, something we would have discovered was an error had we checked it a mistaken reading of a line by john claret, for example we become an inadvertent accomplice in passing the error one further step down the line and often the pleasure of exposing an inaccurate statement or a slippery assumption is reward enough for the labor it has cost.

            Furthermore,aspinall failed to take into account the foreign visitor’s characteristic readuness to convert the exceptional into the rule. In evaluating any piece of historical information, especially when it occurs in a primary source, a good working knowledge of human nature is one of the most effective pieces of equipment a scholar can passers “man” as George Eliot remarked in Felix Holt, “cannot be defined as on evidence giving animal.

2. Examining the existence.

So back to the sources Isis, then, if scholars wish to erase the mistakes that are all too likely to have occurred in the process of historical transmission back to the documents; back to the people with whom our information began; back to the “collateral evidence” that according to our sagacious monthly reviewer in 1757, is melded to “determine everything of a questionable nature” but  primary and collateral evidence noels to be weighed every bit as carefully as the statements of intermediate sources a documents age and unchallenged authenticity are no warrant of the truth of its wnternts. Again the scholar must bring into play his or her sense of the manifold ways by with full deliberation, distort the facts-or imagine them

            The scholar’s task is no easier when great writers leave of a single episode. Shelley told the story of expulsion from oxford at least five different times, never twice in exactly the same way. Add four more versions from other sources, also disagreeing in certain details, and your have a real puzzle a hands. Confronted with several variant accounts one can seldom reconcile the conflicts by counting the number of times frequently recounted one as thirtieth Majority rule is an admirable foundation-stone of democratic politics, but a slippery procedure in scholarship instead, one must carefully examine the probability of each detail as well as the circumstances under which each version was uttered. And the subject’s own versions must then be compared with the testimony of others-testimony that must in itself be delicately evaluated for a possible tincture of fanciful elaboration, slips of memory, personal bias, and so on In the end it is not usually possible for a scholar to say with absolute confidence that this, and this along, is what happened in a given episode; the best one can do is assert that, everything insider, the probabilities favor one set of details more than another

            “Exactly who said what?”-and, as we have seen, it is equally important to ask when: soon after the event, or at a long remove from after the event, or at a long remove frame it? Moreover, as we analyze primary evidence, we must, also wnsider how and under what circumstances The very language of a statement sometimes is a clue to its veracity An emotional person is an event or a judicious opinion; and the overwrought terms in which a piece of evidence is phrased may well cast doubt upon its dependability except as an index to the waitress’s state of mind

            In our own more “liberal” times, the autside pressures that once enforced evasiveness and reticence upon an auto’s biographers have diminished almost to the vanishing point But personal resentments, the jealous defense of turf, and other private motives still flourish, to complicate the problems faced by biographers of writers only recently deceased; the cases of salvia path and Anne sexton and the contentious pwple they left behind are possibly the best known present-day instances.

            3. Two applications of the critical spirit: fixing dates and testing authenticity

                  When most people’s  historical perspective is unreliable regarding events that happened before their Owen lifetime, scholars must take partial care to cultivate an acute awareness of time by very definition, the concern of literary history is with events that occurred in a certain order and are often causally related chronology often provides a decisive answer to questions of relationship where other evidence is vegue, ambiguous, or simply nonexistent. By applying our sharp time sense to the documents and received negatives before us, we can often place an event more precisely in the sequence to wich it belongs, and even more important, we may there by prove or disprove a doubtful statement. 

Out and out foreigners turn up most frequently in connection with authors who are, or have been , fashionable among collectors and whose holographs have therefore brought unusually letters, and even today a relic of the spate of bous Shelleyaa present-day Swiss collector is said to own an impressive assemblage of fake Byron manuscripts. 

           But these are isolated instances. Schools encountedr forgeries try no means are often as writers about the adventures side of library research, eager for a touch of melodrama, may imply. Nevertheless, every investigator  must, as a matter of prudent routine, keep alert to the possibility that a manuscript  or book he is examining was produced with deceptive if not clearly criminal, intent. The date may be eironeous ; the document’s handwriting may not be that of the putative author; a “ new edition of a book ay contain a text that has been reprinted without change or on that other hand, has been silently abridged . All that glisters is not gold, and as James Sutherland abserved when he was writing about the progress of error in biographies of the actress Mrs. Cantilever “ The Price of ….. truth, appears, indeed, to be eternal vigilance, and eternal skepticism”.

Alone person achieve with abstracts. Nobel award wiener was a first world war’s ambulance driver. :-

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899. He was the second son of Clarence Hemingway, a doctor and Grace Hall Hemingway who had been aspiring opera singer, In May  of 1918, Hemingway Volunteered for duty in world what I, serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian front. This experience later served as the source material for a farewell to arms , He like the novel’s protagonist was wounded (in the legs, the old man and the sea was published in 1952 to wide critical acclaim. It had ben twelve years since Ernest Hemingway’s previous critical success Two years later, Hemingway was awarded the noble prize for literature but as he approached his sixties Hemingway’s health began deteririorating . He once robust adventurer now stiffed from hypertension, mild diabetes, depression, and paranoiac , despite treatment for mental health issue . Hemingway committed suicide on 2^nd July, 1961. He is remembered as one of the great stylistic innovators of modern American Literature.

 Submitted to Dr Dilip Barad,

Department of English,

Bhavnagar University.