IGNOU MEG 06 FREE Solved Assignment 2021-22 PDF : MEG 06 Solved Assignment 2022 , MEG 06 Solved Assignment 2021-22, MEG 06 Assignment 2021-22, MEG 06 Assignment, IGNOU Assignments 2021-22- Gandhi National Open University had recently uploaded the assignments of the present session for MEG Programme for the year 2021-22. Students are recommended to download their Assignments from this webpage itself.
1. Analyse Death of a Salesman as a realistic tragedy.
Ans. Death of a Salesman as a realist tragedy, As he gets more established he understands that his life is lessens away when he is still far away from accomplishing his fantasy. He neglects to acknowledge and make new dream and get vanquished by his reclamation and make an assurance of ending it all.
Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman addresses loss of identity and a man’s inability to accept change within himself and society. The play is a montage of memories, dreams, confrontations, and arguments, all of which make up the last 24 hours of Willy Loman’s life. The play concludes with Willy’s suicide and subsequent funeral.
Miller uses the Loman family — Willy, Linda, Biff, and Happy — to construct a self-perpetuating cycle of denial, contradiction, and order versus disorder. Willy had an affair over 15 years earlier than the real time within the play, and Miller focuses on the affair and its aftermath to reveal how individuals can be defined by a single event and their subsequent attempts to disguise or eradicate the event. For example, prior to discovering the affair, Willy’s son Biff adored Willy, believed all Willy’s stories, and even subscribed to Willy’s philosophy that anything is possible as long as a person is “well-liked.” The realization that Willy is unfaithful to Linda forces Biff to reevaluate Willy and Willy’s perception of the world. Biff realizes that Willy has created a false image of himself for his family, society, and even for himself. Death of a Salesman as a realistic tragedy.
Willy is not an invincible father or a loyal husband or a fantastically successful salesman like he wants everyone to believe. He is self-centered. He fails to appreciate his wife. And he cannot acknowledge the fact that he is only marginally successful. Hence, Willy fantasizes about lost opportunities for wealth, fame, and notoriety. Even so, it would be incorrect to state that Miller solely criticizes Willy. Instead, Miller demonstrates how one individual can create a self-perpetuating cycle that expands to include other individuals. This is certainly the case within the Loman family. Until the end of the play, Willy effectively blocks the affair out of his memory and commits himself to a life of denial. He cannot remember what happened, so naturally he does not understand why his relationship with Biff has changed. Willy wants Biff’s affection and adoration as before, but instead the two constantly argue. Willy vacillates, sometimes criticizing Biff’s laziness and ineptitude, other times praising his physical abilities and ambition. Death of a Salesman as a realistic tragedy.
Willy’s first spiritual redemption starts with his idol salesman. Throughout the play, it is revealed that Willy has potential of being carpenter as he is talented in it and also enjoys doing it. However, he was inspired by extremely successful salesman called Dave Single man. Because of him, he made a huge mistake of his life, choosing to be a salesman. He gets his American dream from here, which causes him to struggle with problems all the time. Willy’s mistaken job as a salesman does not benefits him very much. In fact he has to borrow money from his successful friend ‘Charley” fifty dollars a week to lie to his family that he is still making some money though he did not. His redemption of being a salesman prevents him from several chance of being more successful than his present job. This constitutes tragedy as Willy fails to accept his failure and create new dream. For example, he disagrees to follow his brother to the jungle, which eventually made his brother rich. Also, when Charley offers Willy a better job under him, he refuses to accept the offer and continues to borrow money from him. This shows how powerful his spiritual redemption regardless of tempting offers or great opportunity. Death of a Salesman as a realistic tragedy.
Since Willy is plagued by an unrealistic American Dream of becoming successful salesman through recognition, he obstructs with many spiritual redemption. When his son Biff was in high school, he used to be very popular among his friends. He was handsome and a high school football star. For Willy, Biff was in a perfect condition of achieving Willy’s American Dream. Thus, Willy was so focused on Biff. Willy, who had yet to fill out his dream, put all his hopes into his son. An example of Willy upholding Biff is when Biff steals a football from his school. Willy thinks it is okay from biff to do that as he think Biff’s coach will generously forgive Biff and praise him for practicing on his own instead. His American dream obstructs his son in this case, Biff learns a bad habit which leads to his own problem later on. Willy’s dream of Biff achieving his American dream starts to fall when Willy gets caught having affair with another woman by Biff. He always respected his father regardless of his condition of living, but he is now filled with betrayal and disappointment. Biff quits his job as a businessman and leaves his family to go work in a farm. This proclaims Biff’s success and release from his father’s redemption. He betrays his father’s dream and finds his own dream of doing what he really wants. Even though Biff forsakes his father’s dream, Willy could not free from his redemption. He keeps his hope until the end, choosing death with a hope of his son’s success. Although Biff here is successful, Willy still fails to overcome his spiritual redemption, which constitutes tragedy as Willy is lead until deadly downfall. Death of a Salesman as a realistic tragedy.
Willy is trapped in many of his spiritual redemption. He struggles to overcome and eventually fails to achieve any of his goals as his spiritual redemption works as an obstacle of many problems. He eventually fails to achieve one thing out of his burst of heroic determination in defeat. In other words, Willy, finally realise that he cannot do or accomplish anything and chooses his destiny to leave his legacy of his dream on Biff. Death of a Salesman as a realistic tragedy.
When Willy founds hope from his son, Biff, of following his American Dream, he gets defeated by his spiritual redemption and makes a determination. He commits suicides to get his life insurance. In my opinion, Willy has made another mistake because there are always alternative ways of making situation better. For example, he could have simply, accepted his circumstance of failure and try to do new things and creating new dreams. Also, he could have accepted many opportunities such as job offer from his friend, Charley. In addition, his decision of committing suicide failed once again because it is shown in chapter requiem that Biff does not follow his father’s dream but finds his own life instead. We can identify what the title refers to. One is the actual death of Willy the Salesman and the second is the death of his hope of Biff becoming a salesman. Therefore, this refers to another failure of Willy.
On the other hand, Willy’s determination can be seen as success. Although he has failed to achieve any of his own dream, but the positive effect of his death is that it has lead Biff to choose right and realistic dream of his own. Biff pity his father for his choice and all the failure he made, which triggers him to think in other way of his father, to choose to do what he really loves and want. Moreover, Willy’s American Dream has not been quite ended. Happy, Willy’s second son chooses to continue his father’s pathway of becoming successful salesman. He always admired his father and wanted to attention from him as Willy always cared about Biff. This triggers Happy to choose to be salesman and gives opportunity to dead Willy as Happy might be able to achieve his dream though it is unintended to anyone. Death of a Salesman as a realistic tragedy.
Life of Willy Loman is full of obstacles and troubles. Willy who believes in recognition as the way of success lives his life as a inappropriate salesman. His spiritual redemptions make him to struggle his life and eventually commits suicide to leave his legacy upon his son Biff. Arthur Miller, the author of this play refers tragic hero as common person. He clearly explains this using Willy as his character, which successfully identify the tragedy of his life. Death of a Salesman as a realistic tragedy.
2. Write a critical note on the dramatic form in the 20th Century.
Ans. An important movement in early 20th-century drama was expressionism. Expressionist playwrights tried to convey the dehumanizing aspects of 20th-century technological society through such devices as minimal scenery, telegraphic dialogue, talking machines, and characters portrayed as types rather than individuals. Notable playwrights who wrote expressionist dramas include Ernst Toller and Georg Kaiser (German), Karel Čapek (Czech), and Elmer Rice and Eugene O’Neill (American). The 20th cent. also saw the attempted revival of drama in verse, but although such writers as William Butler Yeats, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Christopher Fry, and Maxwell Anderson produced effective results, verse drama was no longer an important form in English. In Spanish, however, the poetic dramas of Federico García Lorca are placed among the great works of Spanish literature.
Three vital figures of 20th-century drama are the American Eugene O’Neill, the German Bertolt Brecht, and the Italian Luigi Pirandello. O’Neill’s body of plays in many forms—naturalistic, expressionist, symbolic, psychological—won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936 and indicated the coming-of-age of American drama. Brecht wrote dramas of ideas, usually promulgating socialist or Marxist theory. In order to make his audience more intellectually receptive to his theses, he endeavored—by using expressionist techniques—to make them continually aware that they were watching a play, not vicariously experiencing reality. For Pirandello, too, it was paramount to fix an awareness of his plays as theater; indeed, the major philosophical concern of his dramas is the difficulty of differentiating between illusion and reality.
World War II and its attendant horrors produced a widespread sense of the utter meaninglessness of human existence. This sense is brilliantly expressed in the body of plays that have come to be known collectively as the theater of the absurd. By abandoning traditional devices of the drama, including logical plot development, meaningful dialogue, and intelligible characters, absurdist playwrights sought to convey modern humanity’s feelings of bewilderment, alienation, and despair—the sense that reality is itself unreal. In their plays human beings often portrayed as dupes, clowns who, although not without dignity, are at the mercy of forces that are inscrutable.
Probably the most famous plays of the theater of the absurd are Eugene Ionesco’s Bald Soprano (1950) and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953). The sources of the theater of the absurd are diverse; they can be found in the tenets of surrealism, Dadaism, and existentialism; in the traditions of the music hall, vaudeville, and burlesque; and in the films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Playwrights whose works can be roughly classed as belonging to the theater of the absurd are Jean Genet (French), Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt (Swiss), Fernando Arrabal (Spanish), and the early plays of Edward Albee (American). The pessimism and despair of the 20th cent. also found expression in the existentialist dramas of Jean-Paul Sartre, in the realistic and symbolic dramas of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Jean Anouilh, and in the surrealist plays of Jean Cocteau.
Somewhat similar to the theater of the absurd is the so-called theater of cruelty, derived from the ideas of Antonin Artaud, who, writing in the 1930s, foresaw a drama that would assault its audience with movement and sound, producing a visceral rather than an intellectual reaction. After the violence of World War II and the subsequent threat of the atomic bomb, his approach seemed particularly appropriate to many playwrights.
During the last third of the 20th cent. a few continental European dramatists, such as Dario For in Italy and Heiner Müller in Germany, stand out in the theater world. However, for the most part, the countries of the continent saw an emphasis on creative trends in directing rather than a flowering of new plays. In the United States and England, however, many dramatists old and new continued to flourish, with numerous plays of the later decades of the 20th cent. (and the early 21st cent.) echoing the trends of the years preceding them.
3. Discuss the development of the revolutionary prose in America.
Ans. By the time of the American Revolution (1775–83), American writers had ventured beyond the Puritan literary style and its religious themes and had developed styles of writing that grew from distinctly American experiences. (The Puritans were a group of Protestants who broke with the Church of England; they believed that church rituals should be simplified and that people should follow strict religious discipline.) The colonial fascination with science, nature, freedom, and innovation came through in the writings of the Revolutionary period. The colonists developed their own way of speaking as well, no longer copying the more formal style of British writers. (Noah Webster’s Blue-Backed Speller, published in 1783, helped to standardize the new American version of English.)
Author David Hawke offered an example of the American literary style in The Colonial Experience. Founding Father Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), he noted, “took the seventeenth-century saying ‘Three may keep counsel, if two be away’ and converted it into ‘Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.'”
Some of the best literature of the colonial era described everyday life in New England and, in the process, depicted aspects of the fledgling American character. The colonists who would form a new nation were firm believers in the power of reason; they were ambitious, inquisitive, optimistic, practical, politically astute, and self-reliant.
Colonial children read
Up until about twenty-five years before the Revolutionary War began, the reading material for American children was restricted basically to the Bible and other religious works. Gradually, additional books were published and read more widely. Rivaling the Bible in popularity were almanacs. Children loved to read them for the stories, weather forecasts, poetry, news events, advice, and other assorted and useful information they contained. The most famous of these was Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack, first published in 1732. Franklin claimed to have written Poor Richard because his wife could not bear to see him “do nothing but gaze at the Stars; and has threatened more than once to burn all my Books… if I do not make some profitable Use of them for the good of my Family.” We have Poor Richard to thank for such lasting sayings as: “Eat to live, and not live to eat”; “He that lies down with Dogs, shall rise up with fleas”; “Little strokes fell big oaks”; and “Early to bed and early to rise/Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”
All the American colonies had printing presses by 1760, but Americans and their children continued to rely on England as the source for most of their books. A London publisher by the name of John New berry (1713–1767) is said to have had the greatest influence on children’s literature in pre-Revolutionary America. He began publishing children’s books in the 1740s. Most of them were educational, with titles such as A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies or A private tutor for little Masters and Misses and The Pretty Book for Children.
Books were quite expensive in the 1700s, though, so children usually advanced from the Bible and religious verses straight to adult-type literature. Especially popular in that category were storybooks such as Robinson Crusoe and Arabian Nights.
Prior to the Revolution, schoolbooks were imported from England and were available only to the wealthy. These books stressed self-improvement through hard work and careful spending. Such qualities, it was believed, could lead to wealth, which was the lesson learned in the popular storybook Goody Two-Shoes: The Means by which she acquired her Learning and Wisdom, and in consequence thereof her Estate (1765). Goody Two-Shoes was a girl named Margery Meanwell, an orphan who was thrilled to receive two shoes to replace her one. She rose from humble beginnings, learning to read and later becoming a teacher; she went on to marry a wealthy man and matured into a “Lady” and a generous person.
The role of satire in the Revolutionary era
Up until the Revolutionary era, the Puritans who had settled New England had a profound influence on what was printed in the colonies: nearly all publications centered on a religious topic of some sort. The Puritans frowned on dramatic performances, as well. But by the mid-1700s, the Puritan influence was fading. In 1749 the first American acting troupe was established in Philadelphia. Seventeen years later, America’s first permanent playhouse was built in the same city; in 1767 the Southwark Theatre staged the first play written by a native-born American, Thomas Godfrey’s (1736–1763) Prince of Parthia.
By the mid-1760s, political writings by colonists were increasingly common and more and more forceful in nature. James Otis (1725–1783), a lawyer from Boston, published The Rights of British Colonists Asserted and Proved in 1764. And the hated Stamp Act, a tax law passed by the British in 1765 Rebellion, prompted an even greater outpouring of writing of a political nature. (Parliament, England’s lawmaking body, passed the Stamp Act to raise money from the colonies without receiving the consent of the colonial assemblies, or representatives.)
One of the most popular forms of political writing was satire, especially plays, essays, and poems. Satire pokes fun at human vices and foolishness. While most satiric works were written by men, some of the best-known plays of the day were written by a woman named Mercy Otis Warren.
4. Write a note on imagism in Ezra Pound’s poetry. Cite instances from his poems
prescribed in your course.
Ans. Imagism was born in England and America in the early twentieth century. A reactionary movement against romanticism and Victorian poetry, imagism emphasized simplicity, clarity of expression, and precision through the use of exacting visual images.
Though Ezra Pound is noted as the founder of imagism, the movement was rooted in ideas first developed by English philosopher and poet T. E. Hulme, who, as early as 1908, spoke of poetry based on an absolutely accurate presentation of its subject, with no excess verbiage. In his essay “Romanticism and Classicism,” Hulme wrote that the language of poetry is a “visual concrete one….Images in verse are not mere decoration, but the very essence.”
Pound adapted Hulme’s ideas on poetry for his imagist movement, which began in earnest in 1912, when he first introduced the term into the literary lexicon during a meeting with Hilda Doolittle. After reading her poem “Hermes of the Ways,” Pound suggested some revisions and signed the poem “H. D., Imagiste” before sending it to Poetry magazine in October of that year. That November, Pound himself used the term “Imagiste” in print for the first time when he published Hulme’s Complete Poetical Works.
A strand of modernism, imagism aimed to replace abstractions with concrete details that could be further expounded upon through the use of figuration. These typically short, free verse poems—which had clear precursors in the concise, image-focused poems of ancient Greek lyricists and Japanese haiku poets—moved away from fixed meters and moral reflections, subordinating everything to what Hulme once called the “hard, dry image.”
Pound’s definition of the image was “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” He said, “It is the presentation of such a ‘complex’ instantaneously which gives the sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.” In March 1913, Poetry published “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste.” In it, imagist poet F. S. Flint, quoting Pound, defined the tenets of imagist poetry:
- Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective.
II. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
III. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.
By 1917, even Lowell began to distance herself from the movement, the tenets of which eventually became absorbed into the broader modernist movement and continued to influence poets throughout the twentieth century.
One way of reading the poem would be this: the “instance of time” is the act of the speaker looking at something. This may be a crowd of people in a metro station, which reminds the speaker of a bough of petals; or it may be a bough of petals, which reminds the speaker of a crowd of people; or the speaker may be looking at both things at once in his/her imagination.
The “intellectual and emotional complex” lies in the presentation of the images and their relation to each other. As we have seen above, it is not actually clear what the speaker is looking at. The faces are described as an “apparition” – are they really there The word certainly gives the impression of a speaker in a dreamy mood. “These faces” is specific, but the speaker does not follow up on this, instead moving on to the image of the petals. The speaker is both observing and contemplating, disengaged from the crowd s/he describes.
But the speaker is not disengaged from us – although we do not know anything about them, we still get a strong impression of their “intellectual and emotional” activity. Pound presents a mind making connections – and also experiencing that weird déjà vu-like feeling we’ve all had, where you’re in one place but you suddenly get a really strong impression of another.
If we look at the poem in terms of the three aims of Imagism, we see how Pound is interacting with these guidelines. You certainly can’t accuse him of using too many words! And he uses a regular rhythm in the first line and then changes it in the second line, beginning with that forceful ‘Petals’. It is not a completely regular beat.
Whether he writes directly about the subject of his poem is a bit more complicated. He certainly goes straight for the image – he doesn’t tell us anything about who the speaker is, why they are there, how they got to the station and which one it is, etc. But by rubbing the two images up against each other with no explanation, and by using words like “apparition”, Pound makes the poem very ambiguous. He is not simply reporting two separate images; he gives us a speaker whose intellect and emotions are subtly affecting the way the images are presented.
You may well read the poem in a slightly different way – this is just one reading. It’s a very rich poem, and it shows the great potential in Pound’s own description of the image and the aims of the Imagist group. It also shows us that Pound, one of the founders of the Imagist group, is flexible with its guidelines. It may well be that writing directly about the subject of your poem is ultimately impossible. After all, you always have to choose what you include and what you leave out.
5. Write a critical note on the ideology of Puritanism reflected in American
literature.
Ans. Puritan literature is a genre created by the Puritans, a religious movement which fought to remove the remnants of the Catholic Church from the Church of England. This led to conflict in England and to the founding of several colonies in the Americas, including settlements in Connecticut, New Hampshire, Maine, and other parts of New England. The movement began in 1530 and lasted well into the 17th century.
Religion was the central tenet of Puritan life. The movement began as a way to reform the Church of England, and its practitioners believed in creating a covenant with God and being humble. Their communities were governed by religious doctrine, a concept which clashed with the emerging modernity of science and reason. For example, during the Salem Witch Trials, a famous Puritan and author named Cotton Mather urged the court to not simply accept hearsay as evidence for the charge of witchcraft and instead rely on hard evidence.
Puritan literature is the result of this movement and lifestyle. Much of it is in the form of letters and journals written by Puritans regarding their experiences. Puritan writing is primarily made up of sermons, poetry, and historical narratives, but Puritan writers created very little fiction. Much like their lifestyles, Puritans used simple, straightforward sentences when writing.
Puritan Authors
Puritan authors preferred to write in first person and in as plain a style as possible. While they believed in sharing their experiences and beliefs, they also wanted to avoid drawing unwanted attention to themselves, hence the simple style which contrasted the more elaborate style popular in Europe. Writing was a major part of their lives, and even simple letters were treated as though they were instructive. Puritans did not believe literature was meant for entertainment.
Major Puritan writers produced works that have also become major works appreciated as literature and not just religious writings. This, of course, is highly ironic, as the idea of famous Puritans is antithetical for the concept of not drawing attention to oneself.
- Cotton Mather: Mather was a writer and minister in Massachusetts who combined both a belief in old superstitions like witchcraft and a belief in more modern ideas like vaccinations. After overcoming a speech impediment, he joined the clergy. He wrote more than 400 works, including Magnalia Christi Americana in 1702, ”an ecclesiastical history of America”. He also wrote works justifying slavery and instructing masters on how convert their slaves, such as The Negro Christianized in 1706.
- Anne Bradstreet: Bradstreet is widely considered the first American poet and was the first woman published in both America and England. Despite having no formal education, she was drawn to poetry and created works which were widely praised, including by Cotton Mather. Her collection of poetry, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, was published with corrections in 1678 and contained unpublished poems which covered her illnesses, love letters to her husband, and her fears of dying in childbirth. The book proved popular enough that King George III had a copy in his library.
- John Dryden: A poet during the English Restoration, Dryden wrote a poem to eulogize Oliver Cromwell entitled ”Heroique Stanzas” in 1658. In later years, he would write satires of fellow poets and politicians. Despite writing fiction and plays, his works still had many of the themes of Puritanism, and he was himself a proponent of many Puritan causes, such as reforming the Church of England.
- John Milton: Milton is often considered not just a Puritan poet, but one of the greatest English poets of all time. His works espouse Puritanical views, and his 1667 ”magnum opus”, Paradise Lost, showed his optimism in humanity despite the failure of the Puritan Revolution.
IGNOU MEG 06 FREE Solved Assignment 2021-22 PDF get here all ignou solved assignment 2022-23 , ignou guess paper , ignou help books and ignou exam related material. We help students to get their assignment done with our handwritten services, you can access our all material and services through WhatsApp also , 8130208920