 This lecture is titled critical reading of important writers. This lecture is divided into two parts, reading as a writer and stages of the writing process. We keep a sharp eye on the processes and therefore we would like to draw your attention to the stages of the writing process and of the implications of that term. In the second part, we look at Margaret Atwood, the great Canadian writer, her autobiographical postcolonial perspective, her point of view about the modern writer's equivocal sense and also thereby the writer's double the double within. That is a very very different position from the position of Albert Commune and therefore let us also go over some of the ground that we covered last time, when we indicated that the reading of the journals of writers and artists is very useful in helping you develop your own writing work and in addition to Albert Commune's example, which is not covered in by the writer's workbook. You can look at other examples that they have chosen, but I quite like what they have to say about the writer's journals, because this statement captures the unique value of this genre. According to the writer's journal, write up, the greatest writer's diaries are marked by their dedication to the craft of writing and also by their emotional honesty. So that's a very important outlook and there are many, many examples that you can explore and see which one suits you most. Commune of course, had pointed out in the carnets that these were literary notebooks and he made an attempt to work out a separation between autobiographical writing and fictional crystallization of experience, observations, themes, but of course you know all what can say is that these are attempts, because it's a very difficult thing to separate out these kinds of ideas, but you see these signposts that's the term we had used last time and the other point that perhaps will become very important as we go along is related to the notations in carnets regarding the constant engagement of self with self. Camus says in carnets, I do not know what I could wish for rather than this continued presence of self with self. As I said this is a very important outlook and sure enough we really will have to problematize it, because Atwood's point of view is entirely different and therefore when we investigate these writers as we have indicated earlier these are prescribed texts, but they are not prescriptive in any way, because I think creativity really demands that you explore ideas with a sense of provisionality and a sense of independence. At the same time you have to learn to examine ideas of a particular writer from his or her own point of view. Interlinked reading was another concept that we introduced you to this is not really in some ways a very unusual concept, but the reason we devised this term interlinked reading is related to writer's journals along with the writer's literary work. Discovering points of contact between the two and this in particular helps you get a glimpse into first person narrative and fictional distancing. You can see that whole process unfold and it also helps you position your own writing. I may remind you of module one where Salman Rishhti had talked about midnight's children and how he was really, he felt like he didn't really have a sort of feel for a form that would suit him till he actually discovered the first person point of view and also related issues. Camus too has talked about these issues, but I think what will be very useful for you right now is to understand it textually so you can read the outsider and you can see how Camus has tried to deal with it. So you get a glimpse into first person narrative and also fictional distancing and you learn to interpret the view of the world presented or implied in the work. There is a useful statement that Paul Dawson has made with reference to composition which is a result of this reading process and I like to place that observation before you. He says recreate the process of composition as if you were the writer. The student writer's focus should be on the choices authors considered when composing writing students need to become active readers to study the point of view, the tone, the plotting and other techniques that the authors employ. What caught my attention was this phrase as if that he has used a phrase that later on in the third module you will discover again because Stanislawiski, the great teacher of acting, he posed that as a basic device of getting into the world view of the character, the actor and character sort of dynamics which requires transformation and sense of the other. And in that sense I think this is a very interesting outlook also the element of magic you can add here. So you can magically become a particular writer and try and examine the world from the point of view of this writer. But in any case whatever you read whichever way you want to apply it for composition this exercise of interlinked reading will certainly help you understand form and content much better. In the creativity and creative writing course there were certain assumptions regarding this process that we made. Our video course also assumes sort of some kind of preliminary exposure to introductory literature courses which provide the experience of reading and interpretation of significant milestones of literature. So we take it that you are already used to certain amount of sustained close reading but at the same time now we would like you to modify your you know approach to reading and read for your own composition. So it sort of it puts different demands on you. For creative composition we encourage our students to try out their own independent writing project. At the same time analysis of the impulse to write should be undertaken to generate momentum for writing. It should not be just a sort of purely spontaneous thing. I think analysis really helps you sustain that work better understand your own consciousness better. So that is also a process of search that we have you know emphasized earlier and we would like to remind you that this is where we are located. So this interlinked reading helps you understand certain aspects of literary composition. For example, in fictional or dramatic creations you have character who is imagined by the writer. For example, Albert Camus imagined Mure salt that is he created Mure salt the character and the feelings and thoughts of this character are presented in first person point of view through the first person narrative technique. Point of view is a lens through which the connection with the reader is established. So you have first person point of view, third person point of view limited or omniscient. You have dialogue which drives the action it reveals or conceals the motivations of a character. For example, the character of Mure salt does not reveal his inner agony or his inner sense of void through explicit statements. You have to infer it. In fact many of the dialogues hide or complicate this sense inner sense of Mure salt. So dialogue does not necessarily add to understanding of the character. Sometimes it is actually a way of concealing and complicating the inner world of the character. Plot consists of series of events with a beginning, middle and end. Voice brings all the elements of writing together in a distinctive manner. So I would say that we have really given primacy to the process of writing and this preliminary understanding is absolutely necessary for further development of writing. Although it is fruitful to read writer's notebooks and essays on writing with the individual writer's creative work but in a departure from traditional literary approach we have given primacy to writing oriented texts by significant writers. The qualities of the chosen writer's imagination can be critiqued we feel only after reading some of their significant work. It is beneficial also to deal with philosophical or theoretical implications of their ideas. You can try and locate the qualities of the specific writer's imagination within the metaphors referred to in our first module lecture 10. Now let me explain that a little bit to you. When we talk about the imagination of the writer we certainly are using the word imagination in number of different ways but at this point in time I would like you to look at some of the enabling metaphors that were referred to earlier. We had suggested at that time that you could start thinking about it, about those concepts and ideas. Today we will explain those ideas in some detail although we will at the same time leave them open-ended so that you can place Camus and Atwood in your own way and you can also continue to use those metaphors in order to generate both creative and critical analysis. So the idea that we had mentioned related to imagination was related to imagination as a mirror. This is from Rob Pope's book where in turn he has referred to Kearney's conception of creative imagination as a refinement of M. H. Abraham's the mirror and the lamp. So these three metaphors are imagination as a mirror which he describes as mimatic, flexionist or representational model. Imagination as a lamp which is an expressivist, generative or effective model and imagination as a laborant of looking glasses and this metaphor is self-referential, metatextual or virtual simulacrum model. Now some of the terms may confuse you but we will explain them little by little. So this is right now like a building block for your discussion and for your consideration. This as we indicated derives from Kearney's model and he in turn has based this model on the ideas of creativity. So he is concerned with creativity in the western culture. According to him western culture is civilization of the image. Kearney himself is a philosopher of narrative imagination, hermeneutics and phenomenology and his main concern in this book I think it is called the wake of imagination. This seems to be to analyze the threat to the human imagination posed by the onslaught of the media. As he says one can no longer be sure who is actually making our images a creative human subject or some anonymous system of reproduction. So there is a lot of stress, a lot of tension around traditional modes of critiquing the human imagination because the modes of making images itself has undergone such radical transformation. So this is just to give you a sense of where these ideas come from and I think Kearney has sort of argued that we need to revisit the older metaphors and what they offer to us by way of finding our own bearings in contemporary very complex setup. So the three metaphors are placed historically to show their differences and contemporary possibilities. Each is built around this enabling metaphor and it may be used to model a particular kind of imagination as well as specific historical stage. The three historical stages one can say are classical and actually I am quoting from Rob Pope, classical and early modern so far as the metaphor of the mirror is concerned. It evokes this period and this the practice the dominant practice of this period. Classic and post-romantic is linked to the image of a lamp and modern and post-modern is linked to a labyrinth of looking glasses. So with that open ended sort of possibility we would now shift our attention to Margaret Atwood where the notion of the self is problematized in entirely different ways. But let us see who Margaret Atwood is and how she has articulated these issues in the book we have chosen. This is based on classroom reading of selected chapters of her book Negotiating with the Dead a writer on writing. Margaret Atwood is a marvelous presence and highly engaged writer. She is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist and environmental activist. We would like you to go to her website where she has very generous comments and resources that she has offered for young writers. She also has her take on lots of issues that are placed there very methodically. In addition to that she has we have picked up one or two remarks from this website where she says that currently she is immersed in the final draft of other worlds science fiction and the human imagination. Now, to me personally this is a matter of great interest because I deal in my research work with cultural narratives and constructs around the notion of science. The you know constant shifts and balances and changes that these cultural narratives display and I remember quite amazed that she rejected the term science fiction very vociferously earlier by labeling her fiction as speculative fiction. So I would be really, really very interested in looking at her observations. Margaret Atwood has been deeply engaged with the imperialist political system if we may describe it that way that define the economics and politics of globalization. And what she seems to have done is to look at the dark shadows of these systems both through her fiction and through her non-fiction. You can read more of her to discover this in greater depth. Her writing is highly evocative and evocative in the sense one associates that term with feminine humanistic consciousness that is I think there is a very unique vantage point from which she looks at the systems that have been constructed over centuries. To quote from her novel Lady Oracle she creates gothic gone wrong, very provocative indeed. These are the book, the particular book that we have chosen. These are series of six Emsen lectures that she gave at the University of Cambridge in the year 2000 and it was delivered to an audience of students, scholars and the general public. As we said earlier also pointed it out earlier this deals with the process of writing and its products. The book is intended for writers at an early stage of their writing career that is what she has mentioned time and again although I think it has relevance for other writers at a mature level of their writing career. So it is very interesting observation of the writer's processes. The title refers to the influence of previous generations of writers, the dead writers but also the influence that their writing exerts and also one's relationship with one's ancestors. I think she refers to that in a very large sense of that term. The introduction is titled into the labyrinth. You remember in terms of the enabling metaphors, this was the addition that Kearney made in the labyrinth but in any case there are no looking glasses that she mentions here but she talks about writing as a struggle or path or journey into the dark to illuminate it. So I would recommend that you look at the YouTube short piece on Atwood's creative process to get a feel for this idea. The idea itself otherwise will seem very daunting if you read the full introduction but certainly in terms of this basic outlook this is like taking a leap into the dark areas of human consciousness and trying to in order to retrieve light at the end of it. The first chapter of this book is autobiographical and it deals with the writer's struggles for her voice with a mixture of postcolonial and postmodern concerns. Now we have placed these two terms here and we have used this terminology earlier too. I wanted to ensure that we are on the same page and therefore I have tried to give a simple definition of the two terms. Postcolonial is related to colonization and its shall we say insidious consequences on the thought processes of the colonized. Postmodern refers to all the previous certainties and definitions that writing and thought and knowledge systems after the modern period have questioned. This term is sometimes used in a sort of chronological sense in order to show a sharp division between modern and what happened after modernism reached its peak. It is seen also with reference to the two world wars and the post world war two phenomenon that unfolded. I think the best introductory guide is provided by the Cambridge book of postmodernism in which not only literature, drama, fiction, poetry but also all the other branches of knowledge are put together in order to show the postmodern direction in the work, in engineering, science, architecture, etc. So it is a very sort of broad term but certainly what it denotes is a questioning of previously widely held definitions in different fields of knowledge and human endeavor. So far as writing is concerned in postmodernism the form of writing itself is viewed ironically. So nothing is taken for granted in other words. Margaret Atwood herself describes her experimentation with different forms and also the acute sense of marginalization of Canadian literature that she experienced and others like her experienced. In her process of search Frye's statement during her university days had a revolutionary impact on her where Northrop Frye mentioned that the center of reality is wherever one happens to be and its circumference is whatever one's imagination can make sense of. In other words, in the postcolonial situation since Canada was also a colony, there was always this sense that nothing important happened there, everything that was important and culturally valuable happened in metropolitan centers elsewhere. And therefore, this was sort of with the shock of recognition many writers in that period realize that their own lives really needed articulation in a totally different way and they need not look at models outside in an imitative mold. So this was a very key point of growth as far as my understanding goes. This is where she locates her change of consciousness and her increased confidence as a writer. There is according to her one characteristic that sets writing apart from most of the other arts. And I thought I would place this idea before you because apart from this idea about the postcolonial consciousness and its internal struggle in order to find one's own authentic voice, I think the other idea that she mentions is related to the democratic elements of writing. And let me read this. There is one characteristic that sets writing apart from most of the other arts. Its apparent democracy by which I mean its availability to almost everyone as a medium of expression. Although this seems to be definitely a very important observation and at the same time immediately one's feeling was that this does not really take into account the non-literates, their oral traditions and also cultures of silence which are actually not all that silent, but they are perceived as silent because they are not linked to literacy and power. This is just a very strong response to her observation, but certainly within the parameters of literate cultures this is an important idea because writing does not demand anything but one's own sort of sense of the self and one's ability to express one's ideas in any language form that one wants. The second chapter deals with the post romantic writer's double consciousness and I paused here because now this is a slightly different kind of take on the writing process. And she locates this sense of the writer's double consciousness to certain lingering effects of romantic movement. So let us see how this can be understood. We thought that the best way would be to look at a second chapter which is titled Duplicity, the Jekyll hand, the Hyde hand and the Slippery double why there are always two. Remember she is talking about a writer's sense of dubbleness and she links it to a certain amount of uncertainty about the writer's own craft and art. She calls it the equivocal sense view of the self. It is certain uncertainty about it. Now let us see how she develops this idea. The lineage of the romantics of course has already been mentioned in my last slide itself. According to her the romantics fixed dubbleness in the popular consciousness as a thing to be expected and expected above all of artists. On the same page she goes on to say that the secret identities and powers of the artists were constantly referred to in different ways by the romantics. According to this take it is the artists who possess the secret identities, the secret powers. So they are very special people with secret identities and secret powers and therefore they have access to knowledge. They have access to insights that really others have lost touch with. Them in their garrets starving and creating works of genius. So they also strive to be in touch with these secret identities and these secret powers in their garrets starving and creating works. And we suggest that you have a look at the opera La Boheme to decipher the recurrence of this romantic notion. Pussini's La Boheme act one title the four Bohemians garret in particular is highly recommended. I think this you it will immediately give you a sense of what this whole metaphor is all about. All right now the notion of the writer's double is was also influenced according to Atwood by the romantics fascination for folk stories and folklore. All stories about the doppelganger and the motif of twins and doubles in mythologies. So far as the term romanticism is concerned it covers myth 18th and early 20th centuries practice and it really is used in wide variety of ways but we will restrict ourselves to whatever Atwood has to say. In this choice of the doppelganger theme and the conventions of Gothic literature one can discern certain amount of ambivalence on the one hand a sense of the secret power but also there are other elements of certain kind of ambivalence that you begin to discern and that is why we would like you to also look at the term Gothic here which refers to a form of artistic expression that focuses on what is mysterious and beyond the realm of human control. So this is in the beginning Atwood talked about writing you know by calling it in the Labyrinth. I think that sense will be captured better when you have the sense of the Gothic. The narratives that Atwood has selected are those of the sinister double. So this is the notion of the double and the double within but she also looks at number of sort of varieties or number of references that we would like you to look at also. The sinister double for example Jekyll and Hyde which of course you know this novel refers to the tale of an earnest physician leading a double life partly as himself and partly as a fanged madcap. So this sense of the double within is it sinister or is it helpful. So that is the question I think that she is trying to articulate by also pointing out how this whole plot unfolds if you look at it thematically. The noble double for example is another option here which she refers to through brothers Grimm's folk tale the gold children in which through twists and turns of fortune the gold child is saved by his twin. So that is a helpful twin, the helpful other if you are locating these stories within the notion of the double within. The double within she emphasizes through the story of Narcissus and Borgias and I by the great Argentine writer. The Narcissus myth is the myth of self-love which torments Narcissus leading to his annihilation. We will place these stories before you in the next lecture and we will also show you the response of our students to these through their creative composition. Borgias refers to this intriguing and unresolvable connection between the protean self and the writer's persona. So there is basically the sense of the split that Margaret Atwood ascribes to the romantics their impact and also the doppelganger theme that she explores almost as a sort of romantic writer but of course she is trying to understand where this contemporary implication of the double within comes from. According to her the double within is more than a twin or sibling. He or she is you a you who shares your most essential features your appearance your voice even your name and in traditional societies such doubles were usually bad luck. Now our take is that there are certain unstated connections that one can one discerns in this articulation of Atwood's where the female Gothic seems to be a looming presence in her consciousness although she has not really developed that idea in this essay at all and this is I think result of our interlinked readings. She also seems to sort of locate the ambivalence in anxieties of creation whether it is artistic, scientific or biological and this take of hers of the split within is reminiscent of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and his creature which again was a feminine romantic foray that we will discuss later on textually if possible and in terms of interlinked reading we would like to refer to Oryx and Crick which is as we pointed out earlier is speculative fiction and it is a significant extension of this multifaceted creative position to quote her essay you know in terms of creative anxieties writing Oryx Oryx and Crick she says that the as novelist Alistair MacLeod has said writers write about what worries them and the world of Oryx and Crick worries me right now it is not a question of our inventions all human inventions are merely tools but of what might be done with them for no matter how high the tech homo sapiens remain at heart what he has been for tens of thousands of years the same emotions the same preoccupations Oryx and Crick projects a dystopic future to warn readers about the dangers contemporary high tech has created for the human race as well as the environment in the very first chapter snowman describes his stages of extinction in phrases such as there are a lot of blank spaces in his stub of a brain where memory used to be and so on and so forth. So in other words I think Margaret Atwood's notion of the double is a problematic one although in this particular essay she relates it to the inner quest of the writer and in that sense she also locates it in terms of her kind of transformation that occurs in the process of writing but we personally feel this is a very complex idea. However if we were to stick to this essay she says that another reason why this equivocal sense of the writer is very very pronounced element of contemporary writers consciousness that is perhaps related to features of writing as a form that have contributed to this syndrome the syndrome of the writer's anxiety about this other self as well as the suspicion that he has one she feels that this is linked to the wider dissemination of printed work wherein the work gains different meanings in different contexts to quote her that writer and audience may be unknown to each other because the act of creation is separated in time from the act of receiving it and the infinite replicability of the book. These two factors contributed greatly to the modern writer's equivocal view of himself seems very gendered way of putting the ideas but I think we limited that we have as usual the work cited list provided and we definitely encourage you to look at it teaching the gothic and the scientific context in particular although it is a short essay we think it provides very interesting connections for our own generative search and we will have that for further discussion enjoy the ideas and see whether at would helps you out understand your writing process better or it is Albert commune or is some other writer or in the process of you know being provoked by these possibilities you have found your own voice that will be the ideal situation will move on to the work that our students did you know with reference to at would in the next lecture. Thank you.