The Vocation of The Researcher

Name                -            Vyas Foram Y

Roll no:             -            21

M.A.Part-2       -               Sem-3

Paper                -               02, Ec-302

Paper name     -             Research Methodology 

      

Topic for Assignment – The Vocation of the Researcher

                     

Submitted To: Dr.Dilip Barad

  Department of English,

  Bhavnagar university,

  Bhavnagar.                  

·    The Vocation of the Researcher

Ø Introduction:-

Some professional students of literature prefer to regard themselves, primarily as critics.  Some as Scholars; but the dichotomy between the two is for more apparent than real and every good student of literature is constantly combining the two roles often without knowing it.  The critic’s business is primarily with the literary work itself – with its structure, style and content of ideas.  Scholars, on the other hand, are more concerned with the facts attending its genesis and subsequent history.  The inseparability of the two disciplines has been well started by the late scholar critic.

George Whaley: “No true Scholar can lack critical acumen; and the Scholar’s eye is rather like the Poet’s – not, to be sure in a fine frenzy rolling.”

·                           It is the Product of an individual human being’s imagination and intellect; therefore, we must know all we can about the author.  Moreover no one writes in a vacuum whatever private influences are involved, authors, whether conformists or rebels, are the products of time and so place, their mental set fatefully determined by the social and cultural environment to understand a book, we must also understand the manifold socially derived attitudes – the normality the myths, the assumptions, the biases that it reflects or embraces.  Most the especially is it necessary to book’s shape and content.  No poet, no artist of any Sault.” Wrote T.S. Eliot in his seminal essay on” Traditional and Individual Talent,” has his complete meaning alone.  His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.  You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.”  But at the same time, he must be set among the poets and artists who were to come.  His book has cast its shadow across later ages, perhaps inspiring new fashions and traditions, and in any event affecting other writers and suggesting the farm and manner of other works.  To read Gulliver’s Travels or Erewhon with ideal Perception, we have to know how they fit into the perennial quest for a happier society, either through satire or through the vision of utopia: and that means ranging from Plato’s Republic, Juvenal’s Satires, and medieval Celtic imprecation to candied, News from nowhere, and 1984.

·                    Literary research them is devoted, for one thing, to the enlightenment of criticism – which may or may not take advantage of the proffered information literary history constitutes one of the strands of which the history of civilization itself is woven.  Like its sister disciplines of musicology and art history, it finds its material in the vast array of records we have inherited of the representation in language of the experience.  Literature preserves for us, for example the poignancy of the medieval aspiration toward Haven through held down by moral chains; the excitement of the Renaissance awareness of the Splendors that environ western mankind in the here and now; the cool and candid re-estimate of the world and the human self that the eighteenth century made under the auspices of revolutionary science and skeptical philosophy; and the spiritual chiaroscuro of waste land and earthly paradise, to which modern society has been subjected in the past two centuries.

·                              Finally there are the un-measurable but intensely real personal satisfactions that literary research affords men and women of a certain temperament; the sheer joy of finding out things that have previously been unknown and thus of increasing; it but by a few grains, the aggregate of human knowledge.  Dramatic discoveries do not occur as often now as they did earlier in the century, when a steadily enlarging body of scholars first studied great hoards of ware books and manuscripts, in both institutional and private ownership which had hitherto been inaccessible to inquirers or were simply unknown.  Two notable discoveries in English Renaissance.

·                    A second hand bookstore in Lincoln, Nebraska, “Right next to Marie’s oasis bar and – on the other side – Dirty Dick’s Pawn Shop and too far from the adult Bookstore and cinema X,” is not the most likely or even the most suitable place for the long last sermons of a colonial poet and divine to resurface.  But, as mignon says.  Rising up out of this Scum I think would some now have pleased Taylor.”

·                              Williams flew at once to England and, welcomed by Lord Compton and his household staff, was given the rediscovered manuscript to inspect prior to tiling it away to be microfilmed. “After I had examined the manuscript for about thirty minutes.”  As a consequence of this recent dramatic expansion of the scope of literary interest, it is certain that given a fair degree of imagination, originality of approach, solidity of learning, and the wish and the will to see works of literary art and their creators from new perspectives, everyone called to the profession will discover amply rewarding projects.  It is to the “Publish or Perish.”

·                              As Dr. Johnson held, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money”, if so the history of literary scholarship at its best is populated with amiable block – heads.  Scholars may value the creature comforts as highly as do people in any other line or work, but it is their itch to know made, not primarily the prospect of enlarged salary checks, that draws them to the library after their classes are met, their papers graded, their committee meetings attended.”

·                    Among the readers of this book there probably are under graduates contemplating careers as students and teachers of literature, and graduate students, some of whom may be wondering, as well as do now and then.  A bit of self examination therefore is in order what are the chief questions and quality of mind and temperament that go to make up a successful and happy scholar?

·                              The practice of law requires a through command of the principle of evidence, knowledge of how to make one’s efficient way through the accumulated “literature” on a subject, and devotion both to accuracy and to detail.  It was perhaps no accident that James Boswell himself, who often would.

“Run half over London, in order to fix a date correctly.”

·                              Both professions, moreover, require organizational skill, the ability to put facts together in a pattern that is clear mind, if controversy is involved, persuasive.  Ideal researchers must love literature for its own sake, that is to say, as an art.  They must be insatiable readers, and the earlier they have acquired that passion, the better.  Unlike the natural sciences, however, literary research tolerates to a degree the subjective impression, as it is inevitable in a discipline that deals with the human consciousness and the art it produces.

·                              To wind up, uniting all these qualities, and imparting conference and meaning to the facts collected must be a creative imagination without it the scholar is “lost as words worth put it “In a gloom of uninspired research.”  Human limitation being what they are, the profession has always had its share of members resembling Scott’s Dr. Dryasdust and George Eliot’s Mr. Casaubon.

·                              These are more or less random examples of the data and procedures that characterize literary research and of the results that make it something more.  It is pithily embodied in a proverb that H.L. Mencken attributes to the Japanese:

“Learning without wisdom is a load of books on an ass’s back”

·                              They have both the wisdom and the knowledge that enable them to put facts in their place, in two senses.  They are never either engulfed or overawed by mere data.