Suchergebnisse

Is the New Year really new or old? Happy or sad? Is it only part of the process and the cycle of seasons making one look back and think of death? Is it a time to wish to stay where one is or hope for opportunities and possibilities? Like a point in a circle, is every day a New Year's day? Is it a time for nostalgia and reminiscence or promises and resolutions for the future? With the (Gregorian and the British Government) changes in the Western calendar at different times in history and with different countries/cultures celebrating the New Year at different times of the year and with the fiscal year, political (election) year, and academic year being different from the traditional New Year of January 1st, does the New Year mark the beginning and the ending in just an arbitrary way? Centuries ago Britain's earliest Poets Laureate introduced the tradition of writing a New Year poem. Since then there have been many authors writing New Year essays and poems. They include Robert Herrick, Charles Cotton, Johann Von Goethe, S. T. Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Lord Alfred Tennyson, William Cullen Bryant, Helen Hunt Jackson, Emily Dickinson, George Curtis, Thomas Hardy, Fiona Macleod (William Sharp), D. H. Lawrence, Rabindranath Tagore, and Sylvia Plath, among others.

Overlapping and interconnected, interdisciplinary and heterogeneous, amorphous and multi-layered, and deep and broad as it is, countless topics on ecoliterature make ecocriticism a comprehensive catchall term that proposes to look at a text--be it social, cultural, political, religious, or scientific--from naturalist perspectives and moves us from "the community of literature to the larger biospheric community which […] we belong to even as we are destroying it" (William Rueckert).

Overlapping and interconnected, interdisciplinary and heterogeneous, amorphous and multilayered, and deep and broad as it is, countless topics on ecoliterature make ecocriticism a comprehensive catchall term that proposes to look at a text--be it social, cultural, political, religious, or scientific--from naturalist perspectives and moves us from "the community of literature to the larger biospheric community which […] we belong to even as we are destroying it" (William Rueckert).

This article is about what the author argues to be the ideal contents of an annotated poetry textbook for the native Arab students in the Arabian Gulf considering their not so well developed command/proficiency in English, their limited exposure to English, and their conservative society compared with the rest of the world. It suggests that only short, simple, and charming lyrics, containing moral and didactic lessons, about the love of God, country, humanity, pastoral simplicities of nature, religion (any religion), elegiac lament, local culture, and country house traditions would be the ideal contents of a textbook for the young college students in the Arabian Gulf. Poems about revolutionary politics, physical love, and queer sexual orientations being out of line/place with the culture of the region, the article considers the existing textbooks not suitable. The proposed textbook should also consist of what are called "good bad" poems by Orwell. At the same time, the textbook in question to be used during the delivery of a course on introduction to poetry should include some well-known definitions of poetry as well as some simplified basics of modern literary and critical theory.