Thousand miles to go!! -Subajana Jeyaseelan Lecturer in English. Vavuniya Campus

A mixture of Students from
North and South East and West
Landed for the first time in Vavuniya
Not knowing the short- comings and the drawbacks
Poor buildings and infrastructure facilities
With many dreams and imaginations footed
Searching with curiosity on finding the Vavuniya campus
Looking for huge and gigantic buildings
With beautiful architecture
But! Alas!! Five little buildings in five different corners
Shattered hopes and expectations - Seeing it
Beats the heart ‘lab tub’ ‘lab tub’
Sounds of the beats echoed in the ears of the other
The voice comes ‘Madam where is ELTU’?
The heart knoweth its own pain
No more energy to direct the place
My heart weeps –without knowing to anyone
Again mustered, my courage showed locations
Students blinking with confusion and staring at me
Eyes showed the astonishment!
Faces gone dark with gloominess
Some frowned and some in melancholy
But, they are young ducklings incapable to digest the fact
I remember telling one ‘No I want to go home’ with meek voice and pale face
Encouraged them by explaining
Education depends on hard work not on buildings
At last, places were shown
Administration, library, labs, faculties and tiny ELTU
Days become weeks and weeks turns into month
Months swallowed by year
With the wheel of time span comes the maturity
Gradually adapted to the system
Even nature shows partiality
Quenching thirst becomes challenging
Water concentrated with calcium creates ailments
Many a coin fritter on water
No matter goes the money
Learning and teaching
Twin actions become serious
It over took all the agonies and nightmares
Everyone realizes; no pain, no gain
Incessant cycling and walking to the lectures
Here and there in Scorching sun and heavy showers
Reaches the small thatched hall with cadjan roofing
Lesson of English started in huts with natural atmosphere
This is the story of a decade or two!!!
Lecturers and students with the beam of hope
Dawning for tomorrow - To
Free from routine thousand miles to go! By: Subajana Jeyaseelan


It is really interesting. You seem to have great sympathy towards some characters of your students.You talked about reality.Congratulations!

D.N. Aloysius

Mother Weeps! By Subajana Jeyaseelan Leturer in English -Vavuniya Campus 25.02.2011

Mother Weeps!

The colour of red was pretty!
Once upon a time- but,
Now our motherland is
Sinking in the stream of blood
The blood! The red
On the streets, in the lanes
Everywhere humans are left as corpse!!
No dignity for human soul indeed!
Each and everyone has license to
Take the life of somebody!—but
Nobody cares!
Why? Why? Because the direction of cannon
Can be turned – And sprinkle the bullets
At them;
Pierce heart and head
Thirst is quenched!!
The stains of cold blood seem to be
Dried in the sand! The red
Oh my motherland!
When are you going free from
These agonies; torments and tortures
No peace in the country
It’s shrouded with gloomy clouds
Full of darkness with evil mindedness
Scary expressed in meek eyes
Mouths opened only for munching food
Motherland weeps! And weeps! And weeps!
Her tears also red –the symbol of danger
Oh! Mother how can we live in peace?
No one else- but two brothers fighting for
THEIR MOTHER!
Mother! I beg you for justice and
Let’s live in PEACE.


D.N. Aloysius-25.02.2011

Wuthering Heights - Wuthering Heights Plot Analysis-Internal Degree Rajarata University-23.02.2011 Year 2 Semester-1

Wuthering Heights Plot Analysis
Most good stories start with a fundamental list of ingredients: the initial situation, conflict, complication, climax, suspense, denouement, and conclusion. Great writers sometimes shake up the recipe and add some spice.
Initial Situation
Lockwood meets Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights and, forced to spend the night, describes mysterious happenings in the house.
Lockwood arrives at Wuthering Heights to become a tenant at Thrushcross Grange, owned by the surly but provocative Heathcliff. He is recording all of these events in his diary so, in a sense, we are reading his private notes. Lockwood reveals that he had a failed romance at the seaside. That's pretty much all we ever find out about him, because he is way more interested in the goings on in the two houses. He sleeps one night at the Heights, where a ghost named Catherine Linton haunts him. Then he establishes himself at Thrushcross Grange, where he eagerly listens to the story of the Lintons and the Earnshaws, as told by his housekeeper, Nelly Dean.
Conflict
Mr. Earnshaw brings Heathcliff home to live with his wife and two children, who are not happy about their new brother.
Mr. Earnshaw brings home a little child whom he claims to have found in the streets of Liverpool – though it's possible that the boy, Heathcliff, is his own illegitimate son. His own children, Cathy and Hindley, do not like the boy. In fact, no one likes him. He is labeled a "gipsy," an "imp of Satan," and all sorts of other cruel names. Finally, Cathy warms up to him, and they console each other after Mr. Earnshaw dies and Hindley becomes a raging jerk.
Complication
One day Catherine and Heathcliff venture down to Thrushcross Grange to spy on the Linton children. Upon discovering the intruders, they embrace Catherine and reject Heathcliff.
While Heathcliff has always been treated like an outsider, at least he had Catherine. But when she meets the Lintons, she becomes socially ambitious. She wants to be a lady of the house – something that would never happen if she married Heathcliff. So even though she really loves Heathcliff, Catherine decides to marry Edgar. Heathcliff disappears for three years, and it's never entirely clear where he goes.
Climax
Heathcliff returns as in love with Catherine as ever, but he marries Edgar's sister Isabella so that he can get their property.
The climax lasts a long time, because Catherine gets a "brain fever" from all of the stress of Heathcliff and Edgar arguing, and the fact that she is not with the man she really loves. After a wrenching reunion with Heathcliff, Catherine gives birth to Catherine (Cathy) Linton, then she dies. Heathcliff begs her ghost to torment him for the rest of his days.
Suspense
Now what? Catherine is dead, so what does Heathcliff have to live for?
With the love of his life dead, Heathcliff dedicates himself full-time to revenge, most particularly on Hindley, the brother who made his childhood a living hell, always reminding him of his status as swarthy interloper. Part of his revenge consists of getting his sickly son to marry Catherine Linton; that way he will get Thrushcross Grange too.
Denouement
Heathcliff achieves his goal of becoming master of the two houses. Then he dies.
Having spent every last ounce of energy driving Hindley into the grave and gaining control of the house (and losing his wife and son along the way), Heathcliff is left with two housemates – his nephew Hareton Earnshaw, and his daughter-in-law Cathy Heathcliff. He admits to Nelly that all the vengeance has exhausted him and, after some seriously strange behavior, he dies in Catherine's bed.
Conclusion
Hareton Earnshaw and Cathy Heathcliff inherit the houses.
The whole nasty property and inheritance tangle is sorted out when Heathcliff dies and the houses revert to their proper owners – Hareton Earnshaw and Cathy Heathcliff. Brontë offers some nice, neat closure with the impending marriage of these two youngsters. She also offers some unsettling conclusions by reuniting Heathcliff and Catherine Linton in death, and suggesting that they will haunt the moors together. If this were a movie, we'd almost expect a sequel.

Sources: www.shmoop.com/wuthering-heights/plot-analysis.html

Rajarata University- Internal Degree- Wuthering Heights 23.02.2011 Year -2 Semester.!

Wuthering Heights Summary
Wuthering Heights is a novel that is told in a series of narratives, which are themselves told to the narrator, a gentleman named Lockwood. Lockwood rents a fine house and park called Thrushcross Grange in Yorkshire, and gradually learns more and more about the histories of two local families. This is what he learns from a housekeeper, Ellen Dean, who had been with one of the two families for all of her life:

In around 1760, a gentleman-farmer named Earnshaw went from his farm, Wuthering Heights, to Liverpool on a business trip. He found there a little boy who looked like a gypsy who had apparently been abandoned on the streets, and brought the child home with him, to join his own family of his wife, his son Hindley, his daughter Catherine, a manservant named Joseph and the little maid, Ellen. He named the boy Heathcliffafter a son of his who had died. All the other members of the household were opposed to the introduction of a strange boy, except for Catherine, who was a little younger than Heathcliff and became fast friends with him. Hindley in particular felt as though Heathcliff had supplanted his place, although he was several years older, and the true son and heir. Hindley bullied Heathcliff when he could, and Heathcliff used his influence over Earnshaw to get his way. Heathcliff was a strange, silent boy, who appeared not to mind the blows he received from Hindley, although he was in fact very vindictive. Earnshaw's wife died. Hindley was sent away to college in a last attempt to turn him into a worthy son, and to ease pressures at home.
After some years, Earnshaw's health declined and he grew increasingly alienated from his family: in his peevish old age he believed that everyone disliked Heathcliff, because he liked him. He did not like his daughter Catherine's charming and mischievous ways. Finally he died, and Catherine and Heathcliff were very grieved, but consoled each other with thoughts of heaven.
Hindley returned, now around twenty years old ¬ Heathcliff was about twelve and Catherine was eleven. He was married to a young woman named Frances, to the surprise of everyone at Wuthering Heights. Hindley used his new power to reduce Heathcliff to the level of a servant, although Heathcliff and Catherine continued their intimacy. Catherine taught Heathcliff her lessons, and would join him in the fields, or they would run away to the moors all day to play, never minding their punishments afterward.
One day they ran down to the Grange, a more civilized house where the Lintons lived with their children Edgar (13) and Isabella (11). They despised the spoiled, delicate Linton children, and made faces and yelled at them through the window. The Lintons called for help and the wilder children fled, but Catherine was caught by a bulldog, and they were brought inside. When the Lintons found out that the girl was Miss Earnshaw, they took good care of her and threw Heathcliff out.
Catherine stayed at the Grange for 5 weeks, and came home dressed and acting like a proper young lady, to the delight of Hindley and his wife, and to Heathcliff's sorrow (he felt as though she had moved beyond him). In the next few years, Catherine struggled to maintain her relationship with Heathcliff, and to socialize with the elegant Linton children.
Frances gave birth to a son, Hareton, and died soon after of tuberculosis. Hindley gave into wild despair and alcoholism, and the household fell into chaos. Heathcliff was harshly treated, and came to hate Hindley more and more. Edgar Linton fell in love with Catherine, who was attracted by what he represented, although she loved Heathcliff much more seriously. They became engaged, and Heathcliff ran away. Catherine fell ill after looking for Heathcliff all night in a storm, and went to the Grange to get better. The older Lintons caught her fever and died of it. Edgar and Catherine were married when she was 18 or 19.
They lived fairly harmoniously together for almost a year ¬ then Heathcliff returned. He had mysteriously acquired gentlemanly manners, education, and some money. Catherine was overjoyed to see him; Edgar considerably less so. Heathcliff stayed at Wuthering Heights, where he gradually gained financial control by paying Hindley's gambling debts. Heathcliff's relationship with the Linton household became more and more strained as Edgar became extremely unhappy with the situation. Finally there was a violent quarrel: Heathcliff left the Grange to avoid being thrown out by Edgar's servants, Catherine was angry at both of the men, and Edgar was furious at Heathcliff and displeased by his wife's behavior. Catherine shut herself in her room for several days. In the mean time, Heathcliff eloped with Isabella (who was struck by his romantic appearance) by way of revenge on Edgar. Edgar could not forgive his sister's betrayal of him, and didn't try to stop the marriage. Catherine became extremely ill, feverish and delirious, and nearly died though she was carefully tended by Edgar once he found out her condition.
A few months later, Catherine was still very delicate, and looked as though she would probably die. She was pregnant. Heathcliff and Isabella returned to Wuthering Heights, and Isabella wrote to Ellen to describe how brutally she was mistreated by her savage husband, and how much she regretted her marriage. Ellen went to visit them, to see if she could improve Isabella's situation. She told them about Catherine's condition, and Heathcliff asked to see her.
A few days later, Heathcliff came to the Grange while Edgar was at church. He had a passionate reunion with Catherine, in which they forgave each other as much as possible for their mutual betrayals. Catherine fainted, Edgar came back, and Heathcliff left. Catherine died that night after giving birth to a daughter. Edgar was terribly grieved and Heathcliff wildly so ¬ he begged Catherine's ghost to haunt him. A few days later Hindley tried to murder Heathcliff, but Heathcliff almost murdered him instead. Isabella escaped from Wuthering Heights and went to live close to London, where she gave birth to a son, Linton. Hindley died a few months after his sister Catherine.
Catherine and Edgar's daughter, Catherine, grew to be a beloved and charming child. She was brought up entirely within the confines of the Grange, and was entirely unaware of the existence of Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff, or her cousin Hareton there. Once she found the farmhouse while exploring the moors, and was upset to think that such an ignorant rustic as Hareton could be related to her. Ellen told her she could not return there.
Isabella died when Linton was about 12 years old, and Edgar went to fetch him to the Grange. Linton was a peevish and effeminate boy, but Catherine was pleased to have a playmate. That very day, however, Heathcliff sent Joseph to fetch his son to Wuthering Heights, and when Catherine woke up the next morning her cousin was gone. Though sad at first, she soon got over it, and continued her happy childhood.
On her sixteenth birthday, Catherine and Ellen strayed onto Heathcliff's lands, and he invited them into Wuthering Heights to see Linton. Catherine was pleased to renew her acquaintance, and Heathcliff was eager to promote a romance between the two cousins, so as to ensure himself of Edgar's land when he died. When they returned home, Edgar forbade her to continue visiting there, and said that Heathcliff was an evil man. Catherine then began a secret correspondence with Linton, which became an exchange of love letters. Ellen found out, and put an end to it.
Edgar became ill. Heathcliff asked Catherine to return to Wuthering Heights because Linton was breaking his heart for her. She did so, and found Linton to be a bullying invalid, but not without charm. Ellen fell ill as well and was unable to prevent Catherine from visiting Wuthering Heights every day. She felt obliged to help Linton, and despised Hareton for being clumsy and illiterate. Ellen told Edgar about the visits when she found out, and he forbade Catherine to go any more.
Edgar was in poor health and didn't know about Linton's equally bad health and bad character, so he thought it would be good for Catherine to marry him ¬ since Linton and not Catherine would inherit the Grange, most likely. A system was fixed up in which Linton and Catherine met outside. Linton was increasingly ill, and seemed to be terrified of something ¬ his father was forcing him to court Catherine. Heathcliff feared Linton would die before Edgar did, so eventually he all but kidnapped Catherine and Ellen, and told them Catherine couldn't go home to see her dying father until she married Linton. Catherine did marry Linton, and escaped in time to see Edgar before he died.
After Edgar's funeral (he was buried next to his wife) Heathcliff fetched Catherine to Wuthering Heights to take care of Linton, who was dying, and to free up the Grange so he could rent it out (to Lockwood, in fact). He told Ellen that he was still obsessed by his beloved Catherine, and had gone to gaze at her long-dead body when her coffin was uncovered by the digging of Edgar's grave.
Catherine had to care of Linton alone, and when he died, she maintained an unfriendly attitude to the household: Heathcliff, Hareton (who was in love with her), and Zillah, the housekeeper. As time passed, however, she became lonely enough to seek Hareton's company, and began teaching him to read.
This is around the time of Lockwood's time at the Grange. He left the area for several months, and when he returned, he found out that while he was gone:
Heathcliff began to act more and more strangely, and became incapable of concentrating on the world around him, as though Catherine's ghost wouldn't let him. He all but stopped eating and sleeping, and Ellen found him dead one morning, with a savage smile on his face. He was buried next to Catherine, as he had wished. Hareton grieved for him, but was too happy with the younger Catherine to be inconsolable. When the novel ends, they plan to marry and move to the Grange.

Sources:www.gradesaver.com/wuthering-heights/study.../short-summary/

Wuthering Heights - Internal Degree Rajarata University-23.02.2011 Year 2 Semester-1

Plot
Prologue (chapters 1 to 3) Mr. Lockwood, a rich man from the south, has rented Thrushcross Grange in the north of England for peace and recuperation. Soon after arrival, he visits his landlord, Mr Heathcliff, who lives in the remote moorland farmhouse called "Wuthering Heights". He finds the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights to be a strange group: Mr. Heath cliff appears a gentleman but his manners and speech suggest otherwise; the mistress of the house is in her mid teens, an attractive but reserved, even rude woman; and there is a young man who appears to be one of the family although he dresses and talks like a servant.
Being snowed in, he has to stay the night and is shown to an unused chamber where he finds books and graffiti from a former inhabitant of the farmhouse called "Catherine". When he falls asleep, his dreams are prompted by this person and he has a nightmare where he sees her as a ghost trying to get in through the window. He wakes and is unable to return to sleep so, as soon as the sun rises, he is escorted back to Thrushcross Grange by Heathcliff. There he asks his housekeeper, Ellen Dean, to tell him the story of the family from the Heights.

The Childhood of Heathcliff (chapters 4 to 17) The story begins thirty years before when the Earnshaw family lived at Wuthering Heights consisting of, as well as the mother and father, Hindley, a boy of fourteen, and six-year-old Catherine, the same person that Lockwood had dreamt about and the mother of the present mistress. In that year, Mr Earnshaw travels to Liverpool where he finds a homeless, gypsy boy of about seven whom he decides to adopt as his son. He names him "Heathcliff". Hindley, who finds himself excluded from his father's affections by this newcomer, quickly learns to hate him but Catherine grows very attached to him. Soon Heathcliff and Catherine are like twins, spending hours on the moors together and hating every moment apart.
Because of this discord, Hindley is eventually sent to college but he returns, three years later, when Mr Earnshaw dies. With a new wife, Frances, he becomes master of Wuthering Heights and forces Heathcliff to become a servant instead of a member of the family.
Heathcliff and Cathy continue to run wild and, in November, a few months after Hindley's return, they make their way to Thrushcross Grange to spy on the inhabitants. As they watch the childish behaviour of Edgar and Isabella Linton, the children of the Grange, they are spotted and try to escape. Catherine, having been caught by a dog, is brought inside and helped while Heathcliff is sent home.
Five weeks later, Catherine returns to Wuthering Heights but she has now changed, looking and acting as a lady. She laughs at Heathcliff's unkempt appearance and, the next day when the Lintons visit, he dresses up to impress her. It fails when Edgar makes fun of him and they argue. Heathcliff is locked in the attic where, in the evening, Catherine climbs over the roof to comfort him. He vows to get his revenge on Hindley.
In the summer of the next year, Frances gives birth to a child, Hareton, but she dies before the year is out. This leads Hindley to descend into a life of drunkenness and waste. Two years on and Catherine has become close friends with Edgar, growing more distant from Heathcliff. One day in August, while Hindley is absent, Edgar comes to visit Catherine . She has an argument with Ellen which then spreads to Edgar who tries to leave. Catherine stops him and, before long, they declare themselves lovers.
Later, Catherine talks with Ellen, explaining that Edgar had asked her to marry him and she had accepted. She says that she does not really love Edgar but Heathcliff. Unfortunately she could never marry the latter because of his lack of status and education. She therefore plans to marry Edgar and use that position to help raise Heathcliff's standing. Unfortunately Heathcliff had overheard the first part about not being able to marry him and flees from the farmhouse. He disappears without trace and, after three years, Edgar and Catherine are married.
Six months after the marriage, Heathcliff returns as a gentleman, having grown stronger and richer during his absence. Catherine is delighted to see him although Edgar is not so keen. Isabella, now eighteen, falls madly in love with Heathcliff, seeing him as a romantic hero. He despises her but encourages the infatuation, seeing it as a chance for revenge on Edgar. When he embraces Isabella one day at the Grange, there is an argument with Edgar which causes Catherine to lock herself in her room and fall ill.
Heathcliff has been staying at the Heights, gambling with Hindley and teaching Hareton bad habits. Hindley is gradually losing his wealth, mortgaging the farmhouse to Heathcliff to repay his debts.
While Catherine is ill, Heathcliff elopes with Isabella, causing Edgar to disown his sister. The fugitives marry and return two months later to Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff hears that Catherine is ill and arranges with Ellen to visit her in secret. In the early hours of the day after their meeting, Catherine gives birth to her daughter, Cathy, and then dies.
The day after Catherine's funeral, Isabella flees Heathcliff and escapes to the south of England where she eventually gives birth to Linton, Heathcliff's son. Hindley dies six months after his sister and Heathcliff finds himself the master of Wuthering Heights and the guardian of Hareton.

The Maturity of Heathcliff (chapters 18 to 31) Twelve years on, Cathy has grown into a beautiful, high-spirited girl who has rarely passed outside the borders of the Grange. Edgar hears that Isabella is dying and leaves to pick up her son with the intention of adopting him. While he is gone, Cathy meets Hareton on the moors and learns of her cousin and Wuthering Heights' existence.
Edgar returns with Linton who is a weak and sickly boy. Although Cathy is attracted to him, Heathcliff wants his son with him and insists on having him taken to the Heights.
Three years later, Ellen and Cathy are on the moors when they meet Heathcliff who takes them to Wuthering Heights to see Linton and Hareton. His plans are for Linton and Cathy to marry so that he would inherit Thrushcross Grange. Cathy and Linton begin a secret and interrupted friendship.
In August of the next year, while Edgar is very ill, Ellen and Cathy visit Wuthering Heights and are held captive by Heathcliff who wants to marry his son to Cathy and, at the same time, prevent her from returning to her father before he dies. After five days, Ellen is released and Cathy escapes with Linton's help just in time to see her father before he dies.
With Heathcliff now the master of both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, Cathy has no choice but to leave Ellen and to go and live with Heathcliff and Hareton. Linton dies soon afterwards and, although Hareton tries to be kind to her, she retreats into herself. This is the point of the story at which Lockwood arrives.
After being ill with a cold for some time, Lockwood decides that he has had enough of the moors and travels to Wuthering Heights to inform Heathcliff that he is returning to the south.
Epilogue (chapters 32 to 34) In September, eight months after leaving, Lockwood finds himself back in the area and decides to stay at Thrushcross Grange (since his tenancy is still valid until October). He finds that Ellen is now living at Wuthering Heights. He makes his way there and she fills in the rest of the story.
Ellen had moved to the Heights soon after Lockwood had left to replace the housekeeper who had departed. In March, Hareton had had an accident and been confined to the farmhouse. During this time, a friendship had developed between Cathy and Hareton. This continues into April when Heathcliff begins to act very strangely, seeing visions of Catherine. After not eating for four days, he is found dead in his room. He is buried next to Catherine. Lockwood visits their graves.
Lockwood departs but, before he leaves, he hears that Hareton and Cathy plan to marry on New Year's Day.
Characters
 Heathcliff: Found, and presumably orphaned, on the streets of Liverpool, he is taken to Wuthering Heights by Mr. Earnshaw and reluctantly cared for by the rest of the family. He and Catherine later grow close, and their love becomes the central theme of the first volume; his revenge and its consequences are the main theme of the second volume. Heathcliff is typically considered a Byronic hero, but critics have found his character, with a capacity for self-invention, to be profoundly difficult to assess. His position in society, without status (Heathcliff serves as both his given name and surname), is often the subject of Marxist criticism[4]
 Catherine Earnshaw: First introduced in Lockwood's discovery of her diary and etchings, Catherine's life is almost entirely detailed in the first volume. She seemingly suffers from a crisis of identity, unable to choose between nature and culture (and, by extension, Heathcliff and Edgar). Her decision to marry Edgar Linton over Heathcliff has been seen as a surrender to culture, and has implications for all the characters of Wuthering Heights. The character of Catherine has been analysed by many forms of literary criticism, including:psychoanalytic and feminist.[5]
 Edgar Linton: Introduced as a child of the Linton family, who reside at Thrushcross Grange, Edgar's life and mannerisms are immediately contrasted with those of Heathcliff and Catherine, and indeed the former dislikes him. Yet, owing much to his status, Catherine marries him and not Heathcliff. This decision, and the differences between Edgar and Heathcliff, have been read into by feminist criticisms.
 Nelly Dean: The second and primary narrator of the novel, Nelly has been a servant of each generation of both the Earnshaw and Linton families. She is presented as a character who straddles the idea of a 'culture versus nature' divide in the novel: she is a local of the area and a servant, and has experienced life at Wuthering Heights. However, she is also an educated woman and has lived at Thrushcross Grange. This idea is represented in her having two names, Ellen—her given name and used to show respect, and Nelly—used by her familiars. Whether Nelly is an unbiased narrator and how far her actions, as an apparent bystander, affect the other characters are two points of her character discussed by critics.[6]
 Isabella Linton: Introduced as part of the Linton family, Isabella is only ever shown in relation to other characters. She views Heathcliff as a romantic hero, despite Catherine's warning her against such a view, and becomes an unwitting participant in his plot for revenge. After being married to Heathcliff and abused at Wuthering Heights, she escapes to London and gives birth to Linton. Such abusive treatment has led many, especially feminist critics, to consider Isabella the true/conventional 'tragic romantic' figure of Wuthering Heights.
 Hindley Earnshaw: Catherine's brother who marries Frances, an unknown woman to the family, and only reveals this when Mr. Earnshaw dies. He spirals into destructive behaviour after her death and ruins the Earnshaw family with his drinking and gambling.
 Hareton Earnshaw: The son of Hindley and Frances, initially raised by Nelly but passed over to in effect Joseph and Heathcliff. The former works to instill a sense of pride in Earnshaw heritage, even though Hareton has no right to the property associated with it. The latter strives to teach him all sorts of vulgarities as a way of avenging himself on Hareton's father, Hindley. Hareton speaks with a similar accent to Joseph and works as a servant in Wuthering Heights, unaware of his true rights. His appearance regularly reminds Heathcliff of Catherine.
 Catherine Linton: The daughter of Catherine Earnshaw and Edgar Linton, she is a spirited girl, though unaware of her parents' history. Edgar is very protective of her and as a result she is constantly looking beyond the confines of the Grange.
 Linton Heathcliff: The son of Heathcliff and Isabella, he is a very weak child and his character resembles Heathcliff's, though without its only redeeming feature: love. He marries Catherine, but only under the direction of his father, whom he discovers only as he enters his teens.
 Joseph: A servant at Wuthering Heights who is a devout Christian. He speaks with a very thick Yorkshire accent. Bronte has been often commended on her very accurate transcription of it.
 Lockwood: The narrator of the book, he comes to rent Thrushcross Grange from Heathcliff to escape society but finally decides he prefers company rather than end up as Heathcliff.
 Frances: A generally amiable character, her marriage to Hindley is unrevealed until Mr Earnshaw dies.
 Kenneth: A doctor in the nearby village of Gimmerton.
 Zillah: A servant to Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights in the time after Catherine's death.

Key:
 black line: son or daughter of; if dotted it means adoption
 red line: wedding; if double it means second wedding
 pink line: love
 blue line: affection
 green line: hate
 light yellow area: active heroes
 violet area: external observers
Timeline
1500: The stone above the front door of Wuthering Heights, bearing the name of Mr Earnshaw, is inscribed, possibly to mark the completion of the house.
1757: Hindley Earnshaw born (summer); Nelly Dean born
1762: Edgar Linton born
1765: Catherine Earnshaw born (summer); Isabella Linton born (late 1765)
1771: Heathcliff brought to Wuthering Heights by Mr Earnshaw (late summer)
1773: Mrs Earnshaw dies (spring)
1774: Hindley sent off to college
1777: Hindley marries Frances; Mr Earnshaw dies and Hindley comes back (October); Heathcliff and Catherine visit Thrushcross Grange for the first time; Catherine remains behind (November), and then returns to Wuthering Heights (Christmas Eve)

1778: Hareton born (June); Frances dies
1780: Heathcliff runs away from Wuthering Heights; Mr and Mrs Linton both die
1783: Catherine has married Edgar (March); Heathcliff comes back (September)
1784: Heathcliff marries Isabella (February); Catherine dies and Cathy born (20 March); Hindley dies; Linton born (September)
1797: Isabella dies; Cathy visits Wuthering Heights and meets Hareton; Linton brought to Thrushcross Grange and then taken to Wuthering Heights
1800: Cathy meets Heathcliff and sees Linton again (20 March)
1801: Cathy and Linton are married (August); Edgar dies (August); Linton dies (September); Mr Lockwood goes to Thrushcross Grange and visits Wuthering Heights, beginning his narrative
1802: Mr Lockwood goes back to London (January); Heathcliff dies (April); Mr Lockwood comes back to Thrushcross Grange (September)
1803: Cathy plans to marry Hareton (1 January)
Development history
There are several theories as to which building was the inspiration for Wuthering Heights. One is Top Withens, a ruined farmhouse, that is located in a isolated area near the Haworth Parsonage. Yet, its structure does not match that of the farmhouse described in the novel, and is therefore considered less likely to be the model.[7] Top Withens was first suggested as the model for the fictitious farmhouse by Ellen Nussey, a friend of Charlotte Brontë's, to Edward Morison Wimperis, a commissioned artist for the Brontë sisters' novels in 1872.[8]
The second option is the now demolished High Sunderland Hall, near Halifax, West Yorkshire.[7] This Gothic edifice is located near Law Hill, and was where Emily worked briefly as a governess in 1838. While very grand for the farmhouse of Wuthering Heights, the hall had grotesque embellishments of griffins and misshapen nude men similar to those described by Lockwood of Wuthering Heights in chapter one of the novel:
"Before passing the threshold, I paused to admire a quantity of grotesque carving lavished over the front, and especially about the principal door, above which, among a wilderness of crumbling griffins and shameless little boys, I detected the date '1500'".
The inspiration for Thrushcross Grange has been traditionally connected to Ponden Hall, near Haworth, although very small. More likely is Shibden Hall, near Halifax.[9][10]
Critical response
Early reviews
Early reviews of Wuthering Heights were mixed in their assessment. Whilst most critics recognised the power and imagination of the novel, many found the story unlikeable and ambiguous.[note 1] Released in 1847, at a time when the background of the author was deemed to have an important impact on the story itself, many critics were also intrigued by the authorship of the novels.[note 2] H. F. Chorley of the Athenaeum said that it was a "disagreeable story" and that the 'Bells' (Brontës) "seem to affect painful and exceptional subjects". TheAtlas review called it a "strange, inartistic story", but commented that every chapter seems to contain a "sort of rugged power". It supported the second point made in the Athenaeum, suggesting that the general effect of the novel was "inexpressibly painful", but adding that all of its subjects were either "utterly hateful or thoroughly contemptible".
The Douglas Jerrold's Weekly Newspaper critique was more positive, emphasizing the "great power" of the novel and its provocative qualities; it said that it was a "strange sort of book—baffling all regular criticism" and that "[it is] impossible to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about it". Although the Examiner agreed on the strangeness, it saw the book as "wild, confused; disjointed and improbable". The Britannia review mirrored those comments made on the unpleasant characters, arguing that it would have been a "far better romance" if the characters were not "nearly as violent and destructive as [Heathcliff]". The unidentified review was less critical, considering it a "work of great ability" and that "it is not every day that so good a novel makes its appearance".
Main article: List of Wuthering Heights adaptations
The earliest known film adaptation of Wuthering Heights was filmed in England and directed by A. V. Bramble. It is unknown if any prints still exist.[11] The most famous was 1939'sWuthering Heights, starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon and directed by William Wyler. This adaptation, like many others, eliminated the second generation's story (young Cathy, Linton and Hareton). It won the 1939 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Film and was nominated for the 1939 Academy Award for Best Picture.
The 1970 film with Timothy Dalton as Heathcliff is notable for emphasizing that Heathcliff may be Cathy's illegitimate half-brother. This is the first colour version of the novel, and gained acceptance over the years though it was initially poorly received. The character of Hindley is portrayed much more sympathetically, and his story-arc is altered.

The 1992 film Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche is notable for including the oft-omitted second generation story of the children of Cathy, Hindley , and Heathcliff.
Adaptations which reset the story in a new setting include the 1954 adaptation by Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel set in Catholic Mexico, with Heathcliff and Cathy renamed Alejandro and Catalina, and Yoshishige Yoshida's 1988 adaptation which set the story in Tokugawa period Japan. In 2003, MTV produced a poorly reviewed version set in a modern California with the characters as high school students.
The novel has been popular in opera and theatre, including operas written by Bernard Herrmann, Carlisle Floyd and Frédéric Chaslin (most of which like many films cover only the first half of the book) and a musical by Bernard J. Taylor.
In autumn of 2008, Mark Ryan launched a dramatic musical adaptation of the novel, narrated by Beowulf and Sexy Beast star Ray Winstone. He composed, sang and produced the tracks with Robb Vallier who also worked on Spamalot. He also directed the video for the song "Women" filmed especially for the website and featuring Jennifer Korbee, Jessica Keenan Wynn and Katie Boeck.
In August 2009 ITV aired a two part drama series starring Tom Hardy, Charlotte Riley, Sarah Lancashire, and Andrew Lincoln.[12]
In November 2010, director Andrea Arnold concluded principal photography of a new film adaptation, Wuthering Heights, starring Kaya Scodelario and James Howson.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuthering_Heights

Wuthering Heights-Character List -Rajarata University Internal Degree- Year- 2 Semester-1

Catherine (or Cathy) Earnshaw

Catherine (or Cathy) Earnshawis Mr. Earnshaw's daughter and Hindley's sister. She is also Heathcliff's foster sister and beloved. She marries Edgar Linton and has a daughter, also named Catherine. Catherine is beautiful and charming, but she is never as civilized as she pretends to be. In her heart she is always a wild girl playing on the moors with Heathcliff. She regards it as her right to be loved by all, and has an unruly temper. Heathcliff usually calls her Cathy; Edgar usually calls her Catherine.
Catherine (or Cathy) Linton
(who marries Linton Heathcliff to become Catherine Heathcliff, and then marries Hareton to be Catherine Earnshaw) is the daughter of the older Catherine and Edgar Linton. She has all her mother's charm without her wildness, although she is by no means submissive and spiritless. Edgar calls her Cathy.

Mr. Earnshaw

Mr. Earnshawis the father of Catherine and Hindley, a plain, fairly well-off farmer with few pretensions but a kind heart. He is a stern sort of father. He takes in Heathcliff despite his family's protests.

Edgar Linton

Edgar Linton is Isabella's older brother, who marries Catherine Earnshaw and fathers Catherine Linton. In contrast to Heathcliff, he is a gently bred, refined man, a patient husband and a loving father. His faults are a certain effeminacy, and a tendency to be cold and unforgiving when his dignity is hurt.

Ellen (or Nelly) Dean

Ellen (or Nelly) Dean is one of the main narrators. She has been a servant with the Earnshaws and the Lintons for all her life, and knows them better than anyone else. She is independently minded and high spirited, and retains an objective viewpoint on those she serves. She is called Nelly by those who are on the most egalitarian terms with her: Mr. Earnshaw, the older Catherine, Heathcliff.

Frances Earnshaw

Frances Earnshaw is Hindley's wife, a young woman of unknown background. She seems rather flighty and giddy to Ellen, and displays an irrational fear of death, which is explained when she dies of tuberculosis.

Hareton Earnshaw

Hareton Earnshaw is the son of Hindley and Frances; he marries the younger Catherine. For most of the novel, he is rough and rustic and uncultured, having been carefully kept from all civilizing influences by Heathcliff. He grows up to be superficially like Heathcliff, but is really much more sweet-tempered and forgiving. He never blames Heathcliff for having disinherited him, for example, and remains his oppressor's staunchest ally.

Hindley Earnshaw

Hindley Earnshaw is the only son of Mr. and Mrs. Earnshaw, and Catherine's older brother. He is a bullying, discontented boy who grows up to be a violent alcoholic when his beloved wife, Frances, dies. He hates Heathcliff because he felt supplanted in his father's affections by the other boy, and Heathcliff hates him even more in return.

Heathcliff

Heathcliff is a foundling taken in by Mr. Earnshaw and raised with his children. Of unknown descent, he seems to represent wild and natural forces which often seem amoral and dangerous for society. His almost inhuman devotion to Catherine is the moving force in his life, seconded by his vindictive hatred for all those who stand between him and his beloved. He is cruel but magnificent in his consistency, and the reader can never forget that at the heart of the grown man lies the abandoned, hungry child of the streets of Liverpool.

Isabella Linton

Isabella Linton is Edgar's younger sister, and marries Heathcliff to become Isabella Heathcliff; her son is named Linton Heathcliff. Before she marries Heathcliff, she is a rather shallow-minded young lady, pretty and quick-witted but a little foolish (as can be seen by her choice of husbands). Her unhappy marriage brings out an element of cruelty in her character: when her husband treats her brutally, she rapidly grows to hate him with all her heart.

Joseph

Joseph is an old fanatic, a household servant at Wuthering Heights who outlives all his masters. His brand of religion is unforgiving for others and self-serving for himself. His heavy Yorkshire accent gives flavor to the novel.

Dr. Kenneth

Dr. Kenneth is a minor character, the local doctor who appears when people are sick or dying. He is a sympathetic and intelligent man, whose main concern is the health of his patients.

Mr. and Mrs. Linton

Mr. and Mrs. Linton are Edgar and Isabella's parents, minor characters. They spoil their children and turn the older Catherine into a little lady, being above all concerned about good manners and behavior. They are unsympathetic to Heathcliff when he is a child.

Linton Heathcliff

Linton Heathcliff is the son of Heathcliff and Isabella. He combines the worst characteristics of both parents, and is effeminate, weakly, and cruel. He uses his status as an invalid to manipulate the tender-hearted younger Catherine. His father despises him. Linton marries Catherine and dies soon after.

Lockwood

Lockwood is the narrator of the novel. He is a gentleman from London, in distinct contrast to the other rural characters. He is not particularly sympathetic and tends to patronize his subjects.

Zillah

Zillah is the housekeeper at Wuthering Heights after Hindley's death and before Heathcliff's. She doesn't particularly understand the people she lives with, and stands in marked contrast to Ellen, who is deeply invested in them. She is an
impatient but capable woman.

Wuthering Heights Setting Symbolism Internal Degree Rajarata University-23.02.2011ee

Wuthering Heights Setting Symbolism

In Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte uses the setting of the English Moors, a setting she is familiar with, to place two manors, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. The first symbolizes man’s dark side while the latter symbolizes an artificial utopia. This 19th century setting allows the reader to see the destructive nature of love when one loves the wrong person.

The manor Wuthering Heights is described as dark and demonic. In the English moors, winter lasted three times as long as summer and the Heights and the land adjacent to it can be compared to winter, while Thrushcross Grange can be described as the summer. Bronte describes the Heights as a “misanthropist’s Heaven.” Its gate is always chained from the outside and its inhabitants on the inside are as unappealing as the house itself. Wuthering Heights produces Heathcliff, the protagonist of the story, and his “siblings”, Catherine and Hindley. These three children, brought together in unusual circumstances, have to survive the obstacles of their environment. This reality is harsh, but it explains their later behavior. Because life at the Heights often demonstrates man’s cruelty, the children can not appreciate the utopia that is Thrushcross Grange. When Heathcliff is a boy and returns from the Grange he describes his adventure;
“...We laughed outright at the petted things; we did despise them! ... or find us by ourselves, seeking entertainment in yelling, and sobbing, and rolling on the ground divided by the whole room? I’d not exchange, for a thousand lives, my condition here, for Edgar Linton’s at Thrushcross Grange...” (p.52)
Wuthering Heights is a dark manor that expects the worst in man, and to its inhabitants it is the only reality they know. When Catherine marries Edgar Linton and moves over to the Grange, she is at first contented to be pampered and spoiled. Her every need is taken care of. Later, when she is confronted by Heathcliff, she is reminded of Wuthering Heights and begins to miss the place she once was so eager to leave. Catherine begins to see the Grange as superficial and confining, and at first she is only annoyed by this, but eventually the suffocating enclosure causes Catherine to lash out at her husband and all the Grange represents. Catherine, aware of her incestuous attraction to Heathcliff, believes the Grange is destroying her, and because of her disgust of the Grange and her sense of guilt, it does. In the process, Edgar too must suffer Catherine’s pain because of his love for her.
While Wuthering Heights was a symbol of darkness and winter, Thrushcross Grange could only be described as its opposite. Thrushcross Grange can be seen as a happy place that is light and summery. Its inhabitants are blissful and naive. They did not worry or have to fend for themselves because there is always money and servants to wait on them. The inhabitants of the house are ignorant of the cruelties and injustices of the outside world. When Isabella, Edgar’s sister, marries Heathcliff and is taken to the Heights, she too learns these realities and is destroyed by them. She is imprisoned in the Heights by her husband. Isabella writes Nelly and describes her depression;
“You’ll not be surprised Ellen, at my feeling particularly cheerless, seated in worse than solitude on that inhospitable hearth, and remembering that four miles distant lay my delightful home, containing the only people that I loved on earth; and there might as well be the Atlantic to part us, instead of those four miles; I could not overpass them!” (p. 137)
When Isabella moves from the Grange to the Heights, her total way of life is changed. She has no one to serve her, no one to talk to, and there is nothing to be cheerful about. It is similar to a rich man who has everything, and loses it all. She learns the meaning of evil, and Isabella is destroyed much quicker by this evil than Catherine was destroyed by the artificial atmosphere of the Grange. In time, Isabella finds the strength to run away from Wuthering Heights and Heathcliff, but her sprit is broken and she is forever changed by the truth of evil she has seen. The Grange had been a wonderful place to live, but the “fairy tale” of her existence there is broken and the tool that breaks it lies on the other side of the moors.
The land encompassing these two estates is a part of English moors. Catherine and Heathcliff play in the moors between the two estates when they are children. This is the only time when they are truly happy. Heathcliff talks of them “running in the moors... creeping through the broken hedges, and losing shoes in the bogs of the moors...” The moors are where, in the end, their ghosts return and are free to roam.
In Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte is able to use the setting of the English moors to show two different aspects of the world and symbolically, the destructive nature of love. At one end there is Wuthering Heights and the evil that results in the cruelty that its inhabitants force upon each other, while the other end is Thrushcross Grange and the naivety and ignorance that results from its “utopia-like” atmosphere . For Heathcliff and Catherine, who will destroy anyone for the other, the only peace that can be reached is in the middle of the two estates where they can live by their own rules. The irony of the story is that Catherine and Heathcliff’s obsessive love not only leads to their destruction, but to the destruction of the others who loved them.
Sources:www.bookrags.com/essay/Wuthering_Heights - United States-22.02.2011

Hemingway -Literary works- Rajarata Universityof Sri Lanka -Year-3 Semester-1

The Torrents of Spring (1925)
The Sun Also Rises (1926)
A Farewell to Arms (1929)
To Have and Have Not(1937)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
Across the River and Into the Trees (1950)
The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
Adventures of a Young Man (1962)
Islands in the Stream (1970)
The Garden of Eden (1986)
Nonfiction
Death in the Afternoon (1932)
Green Hills of Africa (1935)
The Dangerous Summer (1960)
A Moveable Feast (1964)
Short Story Collections
Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923)
In Our Time (1925)
Men Without Women (1927)
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1932)
Winner Take Nothing (1933)
The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938)
The Essential Hemingway (1947)
The Hemingway Reader (1953)
The Nick Adams Stories (1972)
Related Articles
Ernest Hemingway Quotes
Hemingway Quotes
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea
'For Whom the Bell Tolls' Quotes

Sources:lassiclit.about.com › ... › Hemingway, Ernest-23.02.2011
Dn> Aloysius-23.02.2011

Hemingway -Biography Rajarata Universityof Sri Lanka -Year-3 Semester-1

One of the most famous American novelist, short-story writer and essayist, whose deceptively simple prose style have influenced wide range of writers. Hemingway was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature. He was unable to attend the award ceremony in Stockholm, because he was recuperating from injuries sustained in an airplane crash while hunting in Uganda.

"Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter. You will meet them doing various things with resolve, but their interest rarely holds because after the other thing ordinary life is as flat as the taste of wine when the taste buds have been burned off your tongue." (from 'On the Blue Water' in Esquire, April 1936)
Ernest Hemingway was born inn Oak Park, Illinois. His mother Grace Hall, whom he never forgave for dressing him as a little girl in his youth, had an operatic career before marrying Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hemingway; he taught his son to love out-door life. Hemingway's father took his own life in 1928 after losing his healt to diabetes and his money in the Florida real-estate bubble. Hemingway attended the public schools in Oak Park and published his earliest stories and poems in his high school newspaper. Upon his graduation in 1917, Hemingway worked six months as a reporter for The Kansas City Star. He then joined a volunteer ambulance unit in Italy during World War I. In 1918 he suffered a severe leg wound. For his service, Hemingway was twice decorated by the Italian government.

Hemingway's affair with an American nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, during his hospital recuperation gave basis for the novel A FAREWELL TO ARMS (1929). The tragic love story was filmed first time in 1932, starring Gary Cooper, Helen Hayes, and Adolphe Menjou. In the second version from 1957, written by Ben Hecht and directed by Charles Vidor, Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones were in the leading roles. Its failure caused David O. Selznick to produce no more films.

After the war Hemingway worked for a short time as a journalist in Chicago. He moved in 1921 to Paris, where wrote articles for the Toronto Star. "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then whenever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." (from A Moveable Feast, 1964) In Europe, the center of modernist movement, Hemingway associated with such writers as Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who edited some of his texts and acted as his agent. Later Hemingway portrayed Fitzgerald in A MOVEABLE FEAST (1964), but less sympathetically. Fitzgerald, however, regretted their lost friendship. Of Gertrude Stein Hemingway wrote to Maxwell Perkins, his editor: "She lost all sense of taste when she had the menopause. Was really an extraordinary business. Suddenly she couldn't tell a good picture from a bad one, a good writer from a bad one, it all went phtt." (from The Only Thing That Counts, 1996) When he was not writing for the newspaper or for himself, Hemingway toured with his wife, the former Elisabeth Hadley Richardson, France, Switzerland, and Italy. In 1922 he went to Greece and Turkey to report on the war between those countries. In 1923 Hemingway made two trips to Spain, on the second to see bullfights at Pamplona's annual festival.

Hemingway's first books, THREE STORIES AND TEN POEMS (1923), of which he received no advance at all, and IN OUR TIME (1924), were published in Paris. THE TORRENTS OF SPRING (1926) was a parody of Sherwood Anderson's style. Hemingway's first serious novel was THE SUN ALSO RISES (1926). The story, narrated by an American journalist, deals with a group of expatriates in France and Spain, members of the disillusioned post-World War I Lost Generation. Main characters are Lady Brett Ashley and Jake Barnes. Lady Brett loves Jake, who has been wounded in war and can't answer her needs. Although Hemingway never explicitly detailed Jake's injury, is seem that he has lost his testicles but not his penis. Jake and Brett and their odd group of friends have various adventures around Europe, in Madrid, Paris, and Pampalona. In attempt to cope with their despair they turn to alcohol, violence, and sex. As Jake, Hemingway was wounded in WW I; they share also interest in bullfighting. The story ends bitter-sweet: "Oh, Jake, Brett said, "we could have had such a damned good time together." Hemingway wrote and rewrote the novel in various parts of Spain and France between 1924 and 1926. It became his first great success. Although the Hemingway's language is simple, he used understatement and omission which make the text multilayered and rich in allusions.

After the publication of MEN WITHOUT WOMEN (1927), Hemingway returned to the United States, settling in Key West, Florida. Hemingway and Hadley divorced in 1927. On the same year Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer, a wealthy fashion editor. In Florida he wrote A Farewell to Arms, which was published in 1929. Its scene is the Italian front in World War I, where two lovers find a brief happiness. The novel gained enormous critical and commercial success.

In 1930s Hemingway wrote such major works as DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON (1932), a nonfiction account of Spanish bullfighting, and THE GREEN HILL OF AFRICA (1935), a story of a hunting safari in East Africa. "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn," is perhaps the most quoted line from the story. TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (1937) was made into a film by the director Howard Hawks. They had became friends in the late 1930s. Hawks also liked to hunt, fish, and drink, and the author got along with Hawk's wife Slim, who later said: "There was an immediate and instant attraction between us, unstated but very, very strong." According to a story, Hawks had told Hemingway that he can make "a movie out of the worst thing you ever wrote." The author has asked, "What's the worst thing I ever wrote?" and Haws said, "That piece of junk called To Have and Have Not." "I needed the money," Hemingway said. The screenplay of the film was written by Jules Furthman and William Faulkner.

"And then it just occurred to him that he was going to die. It came with a rush, not as a rush of water nor of wind; but of a sudden evil-smelling emptiness, and the odd thing was that the hyena slipped lightly along the edge of it." (from 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro')
Wallace Stevens once termed Hemingway "the most significant of living poets, so far as the subject of extraordinary reality is concerned." By "poet" Stevens referred to the author's stylistic achievements in his short fiction. Like Gertrude Stein, Hemingway applied techniques from modernist poetry to his writing, such as the artful use of repetition, although in lesser extent than Stein. Hemingway's much quoted "ice-berg theory" was that "If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader . . . will have a feeling of those things as though the writer had stated them."

One of Hemingway's most frequently anthologized short stories is 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro,' first published in Esquire in August 1936. It begins with an epitaph telling that the western summit of the mountain is called the House of God, and close to it was found the carcass of a leopard. Down on the savanna the failed writer Harry is dying of gangrene in an hunting camp. "He had loved too much, demanded too much, and he wrote it all out." Just before the end, Harry has a vision, that he is taken up the see the top of Kilimanjaro on a rescue plane-"great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun." In the film version of the story, directed by Henry King, Harry does not die. Nick Adams, Hemingway's autobiographical pre-World War II character, featured in three collections, In Our Time, Men Without Women, and WINNER TAKE NOTHING (1933).

In 1937 Hemingway observed the Spanish Civil war firsthand. As many writers, he supported the cause of the Loyalist. In Madrid he met Martha Gellhorn, a writer and war correspondent, who became his third wife in 1940. The first years of his marriage were happy, but he soon realized that Gellhorn was not a housewife, but an ambitious journalist. Gellhorn called Hemingway her "Unwilling Companion". She was eager to travel and "take the pulse of the nation" or the world.

With TO WHOM THE BELLS TOLL (1940) Hemingway returned again in Spain. He dedicated to book to Gellhorn-Maria in the story was partly modelled after her. "Her hair was the golden brow of a grain field," Hemingway wrote of his heroine. The story covered only a few days and concerned the blowing up of a bridge by a small group of partisans. When the heroine in A Farewell to Arms dies at the end of the story, after giving birth to a stillborn child, now it is time for the hero, Robert Jordan, to sacricife his life. The theme of the coming of death also was central in the novel ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES (1950).

In addition to hunting expeditions in Africa and Wyoming, Hemingway developed a passion for deep-sea fishing in the waters off Key West, the Bahamas, and Cuba. He also armed his fishing boat, the Pilar, and monitored with his crew Nazi activities and their submarines in that area during World War II. In 1940 Hemingway bought Finca Vigia, a house outside Havana, Cuba. Its surroundings were a paradise for his undisciplined bunch of cats.

In early 1941 Gellhorn made with Hemingway a long, 30,000 mile journey to China. Just before the Invasion of Normandy in 1944, Hemingway managed to get to London, where he settled at the Dorchester Hotel. Before it, he had taken Gellhorn's position as Collier's leading correspondent. She arrived two weeks later, and settled in a separate room. Hemingway observed the D-Day landing below the Normandy cliffs; Gellhorn went ashore with the troops. Back in Paris after many years, Hemingway spent much time at the Ritz Hotel. Hemingways's divorce from Gellhorn in 1945 was bitter. Later Gellhorn said that having "lived with a mythomaniac, I know they believe everything they say, they are not conscious liars, they invent to increase everything about themselves and their lives and believe it." In 1946 Hemingway returned to Cuba. After Gellhorn had left him, he married Mary Welsh, a correspondent for Time magazine, whom he had met in a London restaurant in 1944.

Hemingway's drinking had started already when he was a reporter, and could tolerate large amounts of alcohol. For a long time, drinking did not affect the quality of his writing. In the late 1940s he started to hear voices in his head, he was overweight, the blood pressure was high, and he had clear signs of cirrhosis of the liver. His ignorance of the dangers of liquor Hemingway revealed when he taught his 12-year-old son Patrick to drink. The same happened with his brothers. Patrick had later in life problems with alcohol. Gregory, who was a transvestite, used drugs-he died at the age of 69 in a women's prison in Florida.

Across the River and Into the Trees, Hemingway's first novel in a decade, was poorly received, but the allegorical 27,000 word story THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, published first in Life magazine in 1952, restored again his fame. The proragonist is an old Cuban fisherman named Santiago, who finally catches a giant marlin after weeks of disappointments. As he returns to the harbor, the sharks eat the fish, lashed to his boat. The model for Santiago was a Cuban fisherman, Gregorio Fuentes, who died in January 2002, at the age of 104. Fuentes had served as the captain of Hemingway's boat Pilar in the late 1930s and was occasionally his tapster. Hemingway also made a fishing trip to Peru in part to shoot footage for a film version of the Old Man and the Sea.

In 1959 Hemingway visited Spain, where her met the famous bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominquín at a hospital. Abull had caught Dominquín in the groin. "Why the hell do the good and brave have to die before everyone else?" he said. However, Dominquín did not die. Hemingway planned to wrote another book of bullfighting but published instead A Moveable Feast, a memoir of the 1920s in Paris.

Much of his time Hemingway spent in Cuba until Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution. He supported Castro but when the living became too difficult, he moved to the United States. While visiting Africa in 1954, Hemingway was in two flying accidents and was taken to a hospital. In the same year he started to write TRUE AT FIRST LIGHT, which was his last full-length book. Part of it appeared in Sports Illustrated in 1972 under the title African Journal.

In 1960 Hemingway was hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, for treatment of depression, and released in 1961. During this time he was given electric shock therapy for two months. On July 2 Hemingway committed suicide with his favorite shotgun at his home in Ketchum, Idaho. Several of Hemingway's novels have been published posthumously. True at First Light, depiction of a safari in Kenya, appeared in July 1999. It is one of the worst books published by a Nobel writer.

Sources: www.kirjasto.sci.fi/hemingwa.htm-23.02.2011
D.N.Aloysius-23.02.2011

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), born in Oak Park, Illinois, started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals. After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek Revolution.

During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Equally successful was A Farewell to Arms (1929), the study of an American ambulance officer's disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fisherman's journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.

Hemingway - himself a great sportsman - liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters - tough, at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and faith. His straightforward prose, his spare dialogue, and his predilection for understatement are particularly effective in his short stories, some of which are collected in Men Without Women (1927) and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Hemingway died in Idaho in 1961.

Sources:nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/.../hemingway-bio.htm-23.02.2011
D.N. Aloysius-23.02.2011

The Old Man at the Bridge by Hemingway- Rajarata University of Sri Lanka- Internal Degree Program-Year -3 Semester-1 23.02.2011 : Notes

Ernest Hemingway's economical short story "Old Man at the Bridge" first appeared in Ken Magazine (Volume 1, Number 4, May 19, 1938) prior to its later publication in the book The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories, also published in 1938. The Fifth Column is Hemingway's only full-length play and also includes all of his previously published short stories.

At just two pages in length, "The Old Man at the Bridge" is one of Hemingway's shortest tales. It is based upon an Easter Sunday stopover at the Ebro River during his coverage of the Spanish Civil War in April 1938. Although employed by the North American Newspaper Association (NANA), Hemingway apparently decided to submit it to Ken Magazine as a short story instead of using it as a news article.

As Hemingway observes the movement of vehicles and civilians fleeing across the pontoon bridge from an anticipated enemy attack, he notices a solitary old man sitting at the edge of the structure. Upon questioning him, Hemingway determines that the old man has just walked the twelve kilometers from his home village of San Carlos, but fatigue forces him to halt at the bridge, for he can go no further. The last man to leave the village, the old man's duty is to take care of the animals left behind. It is obvious that he takes his obligation seriously, for he worries more about the cat, two goats, and eight pigeons that were under his care than for his own safety. Sadly, he explains, he was forced to leave them behind. The cat will be able to take care of itself, he adds, but the goats and pigeons will have to fend for themselves. The correspondent suggests that the displaced man cross the bridge to the next crossroads, where he can catch a truck toward Barcelona, but the man explains that "I know no one in that direction." Although the correspondent is curious, he is not particularly helpful, and when the old man is unable to proceed, the journalist decides that "there was nothing to do about him." The enemy would cross the bridge soon, and death appears imminent for the old man.

The irony of the situation is not lost upon the correspondent, who realizes that the animals for which the old man is so concerned have a greater chance of survival than their caretaker during the next crucial twenty-four hours. Unable to walk and barely able to stand, the old man's luck has run out, and he, too, seems resigned to his fate at the bridge.
Sources: www.enotes.com/old-man-at-the-bridge-23.02.2011
D.N. Aloysius

The Old Man at the Bridge by Hemingway- Rajarata University of Sri Lanka- Internal Degree Program-Year -3 Semester-1 23.02.2011

A soldier (who is also the narrator) sees an old man resting on the side of a road near a pontoon bridge. Other civilians are crossing this bridge, but the old man is too tired to proceed any further. The old man tells the soldier that he is a native of San Carlos where he worked as a caretaker of animals. The old man seems more concerned for the safety of his animals than for his own safety. He has some relief in knowing that the cat will be able to fend for itself, and that since he has unlocked the cage, the birds can fly away, but the fate of the other animals is uncertain and the man is distraught by this. The soldier tries to encourage the old man to move a little farther along, for he knows the bridge is likely to be bombed. The old man, however, is simply too exhausted to proceed. The soldier then reflects on the overcast sky, which might prevent the planes from bombing the bridge. In this sense, the soldier seems to be engaging in the same type of wishful thinking as the old ... more

Sources: www.experts123.com/.../what-is-the-main-plot-of-old-man-at-the-bridge.html
D.N. Aloysius-23.02.2011

The Old Man at the Bridge by Hemingway- Rajarata University of Sri Lanka- Internal Degree Program-Year -3 Semester-1 23.02.2011 : Notes

The short story “Old man at the Brigde” written by Ernest Hemingway, published 1938, is about a conversation between a soldier and an old man who had to leave his hometown during the Spanish Civil War. The story conveys the subsequent problems for helpless victims, especially old people.
The action takes places at a pontoon brigde near the Ebro Delta on Easter Sunday during the civil war. The day is described as “a gray overcast day with low ceilling”(line 66) and all the refugees of that area are crossing the bridge.
The story is written in the first person and narrated by a nameless soldier whose duty it is to observe the advancing of the enemy. As Ernest Hemingway was in Spain during the civil war as well, it is quite possible that he assimilated his experiences of this horrible time in this story.
After the soldier has explored the region, he sees an old man and starts a conversation with the trivial question “Where do you come from?”(11). At the beginning he seems uninterested in the old man and answers with simple statements like “Oh.”(16), but this changes in the course of the conservation.
The seventy-six-year old man, who wears “steel rimmed spectacles”(1) and “black dusty clothes”(19), comes from San Carlos and you feel that this is very important to him because when he talks about his hometown “it gave him pleasure to mention it”(14). The most crucial part of the old man’s life are his animals. He owns two goats, a cat and some pigeons which he had to leave behind because of the artillery. The repetition of the sentence “I was (just) taking care of animals”(15,17,63,64) underlines the importance of this duty. He is without politics and has no family, so his whole life circles around only his animals and his hometown. Now he has had to leave all this and it does not surprise as he says “I can go no farther”(48), after he walked about 12 kilometres. The old man just has no vitality left, he is described as “blank”(45) and “tired”(45) and his meaning of life has been taken away from him by the civil war and the flight. Even after the soldier advises him to flee as long as it is possible, the old man does not move. The reader notices that he is very grateful the soldier talks to him “But thank you very much. Thank you again very much”(43/44). Perhaps it is the first contact and conversation to another person for a long time and he is happy that someone is interested in him and his worries. First the soldier does not really want to know the old man’s story, but after he heard it he begins to feel pity “There was nothig to do about him.”(65).
In this short story Ernest Hemingway uses a lot of metaphors and symbols. One of the symbols is the bridge, which represents uncertainty and dangers. Those are the feelings most of the people have during wartime. In contrast to this stands the fact that the story takes place on Easter Sunday, a holiday that stands for hope and and the faith in God. The feelings of the refugees probably stand in the same contrast. On the one hand they feel very frightened and worried, but on the other hand they do not want to lose hope. The animals also stand for different qualities. The pigeons, for example, represent peace and harmony and the fact that they fly away, away from the war, maybe is a reference to the refugees who flee from the war to a safer place. The cat being a symbol of independence, does not need anybody to survive, but the goat is often used as a sacrificial animal and this probably represents the old man and his situation. Like a goat which is sacrificed, the old man’s fate is sealed.
I really like this short story, because Ernest Hemingway manages to touch the reader’s heart by telling a sad and moving story, despite its extreme shortness. (J.W., 11c, Dec. 2008)



The whole story is about death

Ernest Hemingway´s story “The old man at the bridge“ is about death and war. It takes place during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. The story is told by a soldier who is a scout. He has to watch the bridge where refugees flee from the advance of the Fascist army. Then he sees an old man at the bridge. He starts a talk with the man. At the beginning the solider is not really interested in the things the man tells him. The old man came from San Carlos and was the last one who left the town because of his animals. Although the solider asks some superficial and inconsequential questions he is more interested in watching the other side of the bridge and thinks about how long it would be until they were able to see the ememy. After a while the solider begins to feel pity for the old man, who was a caretaker of animals and is more concerned for the safety of his animals than for his own safety. The man has already walked twelve kilometers and now, he tells the soldier, he is too tired to go on. He just wants to sit there. The solider does not understand the worries of the seventy-six-year-old about his animals, but then when he says that he has no family or relatives and his animals mean everything to him he seems to become more interested in the things the man says.
The animals are two goats, a cat and a few doves. These animals are used as symbols. The man tells the soldier that he is not worried about the cat, because it can care for itself. After the soldier asks if he left the cage of the doves unlocked the man is sure that the doves will fly away. But he mentions again and again that it would be better not to think about the others. “The others“ are the two goats. Cats are very independent animals. So the cat represents the free will and freedom of thought. The chance for the cat of the old man is to run away. That shows the reader that nobody can control your thoughts even if you are forced to do something, your thoughts are free. And you have a free will. For example, the old man in the story was driven out of his hometown, but he has got still a free will and he is able to go where he wants to.The doves represent peace. It is clear that the story takes place during a war, because the chance of the doves to stay alive is to fly away. The meaning of the two goats is not so easy to see. The goat represents unreasonableness and aggressiveness but also adaptability and that is the really important meaning. It is not mentioned what happened or what maybe would happen to the two goals, and if they are able to care for themselves or have to die. This means that the people have no possibility to stop the war and they have to accept it. They have to live with this, and also with the problems which appear in the war and so the people have to try to make the best of it. Another symbol in the story is the bridge on which the two men meet. It shows that some big things change but that there is still a connection between these two things. In this case it is the old life of the man that lies now behind him and the new life where many things will change because of the war.

The old man says that he is too tired to go on. He stands in front of the bridge, thus still clinging to his old life with his animals that he does not want to leave behind. But in fact he will have to. And at the end of the story it seems to be clear that the old man does not intend to cross the bridge and to go on. So you can see that the whole story is about death. And in the end it is also clear for the narrator – the soldier – and the old man that death is imminent. (K.S., 11c, Dec. 2008)



Hemingway´s narrative skills have a great impact

In the short story "Old Man at the Bridge" by Ernest Hemingway the author narrates a fictional situation taking place during the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway (1899 - 1961) was a famous American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. In 1937 he travelled to Spain in order to report about the Spanish Civil War for some American newspapers. One year before parts of the Spanish army had attempted a revolution against the government. They were supported by the German and Italian fascist regimes. The war was between Catholics and atheists, between army, communists and anarchists, between landowners and peasants, between nationalists and republicans and separated family members from each other, friends and neighbours. The war was performed with unknown cruelty and witnessed by an unknown simultaneousness of the mass media. Hemingway was on the side of the republicans, reported from their point of view and was inspired by what he experienced to write forty-nine short stories. After almost three years the rebels succeeded. 500.000 people were killed. The dictatorship by General Francisco Franco began.

The short story "Old Man at the Bridge" is one of "The First Forty-Nine Stories”, written in 1938. Through his narrative skills Hemingway manages to give the reader the impression that he himself is part of the scene or the encounter might have really happened like in the story. The situation is that Spanish people flee from Fascist artillery over a bridge across the river Ebro. Men, women, children are crossing the bridge, but the old man sits beside it. Hemingway describes it with simple, realistic details which incorporate the reader into the scene immediately. The narrator involves the old man in a conversation and asks where he comes from. The old man tells him that he was taking care of animals in his native town, but is worried now whether they might survive the artillery attack. The old man wears steel rimmed spectacles, which do not fit to a shepherd or herdsman. The man is seventy-six years old, he cannot walk any further, he is too weak and does not stop worrying about the animals he left behind. The narrator asks him about the animals and finds out that the man has left a cat, four pairs of pigeons and two goats. He comforts the old man by mentioning that the cat and the birds will be fine and will take care of themselves.

Even if the story is full of dialogues, attempts to comfort, offerings of help, it is a sad story. The old man might have had a life of intellectual interests, might have been a teacher or a union activist. At the end of his life, he is neither worried about his dreams or goals or any political opinions nor about his life or health, but about a few animals for which he felt responsible. He must leave behind the pigeons, the symbol of peace and hope, and the cat, symbol of seven lives. Only the goats, like the old man himself, are lost. Life shrinks to one point of sorrow, which is endured with composure. There are no unnecessary or sentimental words. The first person narrator helps the reader to identify with the scene of threat and hopelessness. The plot is without climax or inner development. In my opinion Hemingway was very successful to touch the reader´s heart with just a few words. (L.J., 11c, Dec. 2008)



The old man symbolizes the victims of war

The short story “Old Man at the Bridge” takes place during the Spanish Civil War. It displays Hemingway’s own experience in war. The story deals with a soldier who comes in contact with an old man at a bridge where people are crossing to flee from the Spanish Civil War. The scout discovers the old man and in the end he realizes the old man cannot move anymore and will probably die at the bridge.
The first person narrator, who is not described in detail, tells the story. That gives the impression that you are involved in this situation. The narrator carefully describes the situation with commentaries, so that a clear picture of the old man is developed.
The main character of the story is a 76-year-old man. The narrator realizes that the refugee is a man without politics. At the beginning he thinks that the man just wants to rest, but later he realizes the old man is not able to move on and is going to die at the bridge. He was forced to leave his farm where he had lived and to leave his animals behind. The man repeats “I was taking care of animals, I was only taking care of animals” a few times. This makes clear that he symbolizes the men, women and children who had to leave their home and their normal life as victims of a war with which they have nothing to do.
The old man also talks about the animals he has. He has a cat which can probably flee. She is a symbol of the survivor because she has nine lives. He has pigeons which can fly away, so they can also flee. They are a symbol of peace. But the old man is neither like the cat nor the pigeons because he cannot flee like them. He is like the third animal he owns, the goat. He cannot escape and is a victim of the war like the goat. The narrator apprehends that “there is nothing to do about him”, the situation of this old man is hopeless. So he is going to die on Easter Sunday, which is very ironic, because that is the day of the celebration of Jesus’s resurrection. (A.W., Dec. 2008)

Sources: www.gs.cidsnet.de/.../hemingway_oldmanatthebridge.htm-23.02.2011
D.N. ALOYSIUS -23.02.2011

The Old Man at the Bridge by Hemingway- Rajarata University of Sri Lanka- Internal Degree Program-Year -3 Semester-1 23.02.2011

An old man with steel rimmed spectacles and very dusty clothes sat by the side of the road. There was a pontoon bridge across the river and carts, trucks, and men, women and children were crossing it. The mule-drawn carts staggered up the steep bank from the bridge with soldiers helping push against the spokes of the wheels. The trucks ground up and away heading out of it all and the peasants plodded along in the ankle deep dust. But the old man sat there without moving. He was too tired to go any farther.
It was my business to cross the bridge, explore the bridgehead beyond and find out to what point the enemy had advanced. I did this and returned over the bridge. There were not so many carts now and very few people on foot, but the old man was still there.
"Where do you come from?" I asked him.
"From San Carlos," he said, and smiled.
That was his native town and so it gave him pleasure to mention it and he smiled.
"I was taking care of animals," he explained. "Oh," I said, not quite understanding.
"Yes," he said, "I stayed, you see, taking care of animals. I was the last one to leave the town of San Carlos."
He did not look like a shepherd nor a herdsman and I looked at his black dusty clothes and his gray dusty face and his steel rimmed spectacles and said, "What animals were they?"
"Various animals," he said, and shook his head. "I had to leave them."
I was watching the bridge and the African looking country of the Ebro Delta and wondering how long now it would be before we would see the enemy, and listening all the while for the first noises that would signal that ever mysterious event called contact, and the old man still sat there.
"What animals were they?" I asked.
"There were three animals altogether," he explained. "There were two goats and a cat and then there were four pairs of pigeons."
"And you had to leave them?" I asked.
"Yes. Because of the artillery. The captain told me to go because of the artillery."
"And you have no family?" I asked, watching the far end of the bridge where a few last carts were hurrying down the slope of the bank.
"No," he said, "only the animals I stated. The cat, of course, will be all right. A cat can look out for itself, but I cannot think what will become of the others."
"What politics have you?" I asked.
"I am without politics," he said. "I am seventy-six years old. I have come twelve kilometers now and I think now I can go no further." "This is not a good place to stop," I said. "If you can make it, there are trucks up the road where it forks for Tortosa."
"I will wait a while," he said, "and then I will go. Where do the trucks go?"
"Towards Barcelona," I told him.
"I know no one in that direction," he said, "but thank you very much. Thank you again very much."
He looked at me very blankly and tiredly, then said, having to share his worry with some one, "The cat will be all right, I am sure. There is no need to be unquiet about the cat. But the others. Now what do you think about the others?"
"Why they'll probably come through it all right." "You think so?"
"Why not," I said, watching the far bank where now there were no carts.
"But what will they do under the artillery when I was told to leave because of the artillery?"
"Did you leave the dove cage unlocked?" I asked. "Yes."
"Then they'll fly."
"Yes, certainly they'll fly. But the others. It's better not to think about the others," he said.
"If you are rested I would go," I urged. "Get up and try to walk now."
"Thank you," he said and got to his feet, swayed from side to side and then sat down backwards in the dust.
"I was taking care of animals," he said dully, but no longer to me. "I was only taking care of animals."
There was nothing to do about him. It was Easter Sunday and the Fascists were advancing toward the Ebro. It was a gray overcast day with a low ceiling so their planes were not up. That and the fact that cats know how to look after themselves was all the good luck that old man would ever have.

Sources:soundandsense.blog.co.uk/.../the-old-man-at-the-bridge-5394917/22.02.2011
D.N. Aloysius-23.02.2011

How Poverty leads women conquering for survival in this world? -Subajana Jayaseelan- Lecturer In English -Vavuniya Campus-21.02.2011

How Poverty leads women conquering for survival in this world?
In general, there is an assumption that women are the delicate creation of God; from the ancient stonage to present scientific world this is the story, though, women have proved their talents in many ways. However, women are considered as the secondary or inferior ones to men at the social status, even the rate of literacy at the skyrocket level. Of course, women are soft and fragile in physical appearance, but they have enough willpower, potency and confidence to face the challenges for a successful life.
The time has changed vastly; even the nations are governed by women now. Even then, there are thousands and thousands of women have been tied with the hands of poverty, still then and there, suffering very badly. They have been bullied and ill-treated by men. This scenario can be found in every nook and corner. It’s (It is) really regrettable and heart rending bitter incidents and experiences.
The primary cause behind this is, no doubt, men who are irresponsible to look after their families, lazy to work, illiterate, arrogance, malpractices such as addicted to alcohol, drugs and smoking and so on. They waste money in vain. It’s a well known fact, that men from those rural areas generally drink and laze around while the wives go abroad and slave away and suffer abuse etc.
As a result, women are forced to take the whole responsibilities and burdens on their both shoulders. This compels them, to face innumerable problems and hardships in their lives. To get rid of impoverished agonies and aggressive situation, they look for the greener pastures because no option for this pitiable women; so this ends up in taking them to Middle East, where they bear indescribable nightmares and nostalgias.
Day in and out, we read in newspapers and hear from the other Medias, many bitter and blood freezing incidents are taken place in Middle East. Recently, a few months back ,there was a burning issue in all modes of Medias about a woman, who went to the Middle East as a house maid, was driven with twenty -four nails in her body as a punishment by her Saudi Arabian employer as she was complaining of her heavy workload. She was traumatized with beatings and physical abuses. This clearly signifies how meanly the women are treated by cruel men. According to human rights report, many foreign housemaids, in oil-rich gulf, sometimes work twenty –one hour a day without medical care, enough food, no right to go home and they also face violence and harassments.
The treatment of Sri Lankan woman is most despicable. These countries should try to create jobs for its people rather than export them into Arab barbaric heartless slavery. I wonder why most people are not showing any rage for this case, and other similar cases. I believe there are thousands of similar cases happened in Saudi and other Gulf countries, every few weeks I read such story in a local newspaper. Hence, the hardships of migrant workers become a social issue; Hence, every citizen of the country, government and relevant authorities should have the bounden duty to get a permanent solution for this issue.

The main reason is poverty; to free them from paucity only women go there, leaving their loving children and husbands. In this gap, many unexpected twists and turns took place place besides, hopes and dreams of the women get shattered once they reach the Middle East and return to the mother country, Sri Lanka, not only without money, but also losing all their moral values. By the time the mother lands in the country, she can see the disaster and the destruction of the whole family such as husband is married again to somebody or having illegal relationship, children are ill treated by their step mother or the relatives and left out in an eye -folded situation. The root cause for such happenings is irresponsibleness of men.
So, the innocent children, newly sprout buds and tomorrow’s blooming flowers, are withered and lost the fragrance and stained. The children, who are the heroes of tomorrow, lost (lose) their beautiful future and they are left in the desert. This dilapidated condition aggravates the situation of the developing countries like Sri Lanka more and more; this may drag the country behind in the global rank of prosperity.
The hard earned wages of domestic workers form a significant part of the billions of dollars in remittances are being sent home for developing countries every year. Hence, unions, activists and human rights campaigners voiced that the migrant workers need greater protection, but governments of Arab are failing to include them in laws or their rights are limited.
Nevertheless, for the betterment of women’s bright future the Sri Lankan government has the immense accountability by enforcing immediate action to save our mothers, sisters and daughters. Hence, poverty should be eradicated from the country like Sri Lanka and other developing countries such as Vietnam, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. All in all, protecting and giving due respect to women is the duty of every man of the country.

Source
http://www.google.lk/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-20.02.2011US%3Aofficial&channel=s&hl=en&source=hp&q=island+article+woman+nailed+in+midle+east&meta=&btnG=Google+Search
The Island; 20.032011


D.N. Aloysius
21.02.2011

Friendship by Subajana Jayaseelan Lecturer in English Vavuniya Campus 20.02.2011

Friendship
Friendship seemed to be ordinary
Until I met you!
Because
In this world people show
Fake love and affection!!
No genuineness
Talk with mere sugar coated tongue
With some expectations…
To fulfill their own benefits..
But you!!!
Without expectation showed only
Immaculate affection..
Frankness and intimacy
Above all your altruistic nature..
Easy going attitude well refined mannerism
Such sterling qualities enticed me a lot
Indeed made me astound!!
These not flattering words
Came from the bottom of my heart
Dear my friend!!
Languages. or .Distances
Races..or Religions
Even changes in the age
Can never decide a true friendship
I realized everything after meeting you!!

Healthy balance in scheduling our duties and responsibilities Subajana Jeyaseelan, Lecturer, ELTU

“Our costliest expenditure is time…” – Theophrastus

Introduction

In this fast moving busy world, each and everyone struggles to maintain good/better time management. We all are tightened and programmed with so many duties and responsibilities to do one after the other like a chain. So, how can we lead a happy life without keeping ourselves away from among such busy schedules? Has anyone thought of it? We, Sri Lankans do have poor time management practice, it is a general truth. We, Sri Lankans do not bother of wasting time on hanging on roads, gossiping, talking rubbish and giving no priority for promoting productive things, doing nothing practically and so on. Sri Lankans do not think or pre-plan what they do really want to do- whether it is important and urgent or important and not urgent. However, the general practice of our people is doing not important and not urgent; as a result, they fail to achieve important and urgent things to be done. This mentality of people leads the country to lag behind in the ranks of world progress.
However, all of us have only 24 hours a day which is quite valuable and manageable if it is intelligently planned. By having planned our schedules and duties with the proper time management, there would not be any clash between work life and home life. People, who have the practice of poor time management end in messing up; this habit leads them to embrace the failure in every step of their attempts. Even in our day to day life, we can observe thousands and thousands of people saying ‘I have no time to do this and that.’ This type of statements reveals their poor ability in managing the time. Such people would face difficulty in maintaining a healthy balance between their time in the office and at home. Ultimately, this causes to create problems in families as well as in offices.
Hence, this can be solved with a simple time management plan. In fact, it is not the problem with time, but with lacking knowledge in planning and organizing skill. To progress in life, one should learn to use time more shrewdly. Once, we get to know how to manage our time, we surely gain control.
Many a people in our country, pose them, showing that they are always busy and engaged with many tasks and innumerable busy schedules for getting the image as a big shot in the community. Even students, fail to keep up timing and maintain punctuality. Therefore, we should concentrate on results, not on being busy. Effective time management helps us to choose what to work on and when.
For this reason, people, who use these techniques routinely, are the highest achievers in all walks of life, from education to business and from sport to public service. If we use these skills well, then we will be able to function effectively, even under intense pressure. Many people spend their days in a frenzy of activity, but achieve very little or nothing because they are not concentrating on the right things at right time.
In our normal routine, typically, we all spend eight hours a day in the office, plus an additional couple of hours for the daily commute. This leaves a very small amount of time for the family. If you want to spend more hours at home, all we need to do is make a few modifications to our work schedule, and make an objective assessment of our goals in life.

The 80:20 Rule or Pareto’s Principle
Those who are in the field of economics might have heard of Pareto’s Principle; others may or may not. Then, what is 80:20 rule? Why is it named as Pareto’s principle?
Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian, who formed a mathematical formula to describe the unequal distribution of wealth in his nation, observing that the twenty percent of the people owned eighty percent of the wealth in 1906. Many of them observed the similar phenomenon in their own areas of expertise. Later on in 1940, Quality Management pioneer, Dr. Joseph M. Juran named this 80/20 Rule to Pareto’s Principle or Law which is an effective tool to help everyone to manage effectively.
This rule tells that typically 80% of unfocussed effort generates only 20% of results. The remaining 80% of results are achieved with only 20% of the effort. The 80/20 Rule means that in anything a few (20 percent) are vital and many (80 percent) are trivial. The ratio is not always 80:20, but it is considered as a norm in many areas. Twenty percent of something always is responsible for 80 percent of the results, known as Pareto's Principle or the 80/20 Rule.
Also one should optimize his or her effort to ensure that he or she who concentrate as much of his or her time and energy as possible on the high payoff tasks. So, managing the time encourages everyone to achieve their greatest targets.
This Rule can be applied to almost anything, from the science of management to the physical world. However, the theory is also flawed; it overlooks the fact that 80 percent of your time should be spent doing what is really important. The Rule should serve as a daily reminder to focus 80 percent of your time and energy on the 20 percent of you work that is really important.
The Basic factors of Time Management
Many of us have spent years and years without proper time management, so immediately putting this into practice is not that an easier task. So it cannot be a “quick fix’’ or an overnight solution. This needs enough patience to put ourselves on track. This is a step- by-step, powerful process that will change our working life better. Here are some of the important targeted points to be considered for effective time management:
Goal Setting
To start managing time effectively, we need to set goals. When a person travels, he /she should know the destination; then only he/she can get down at the correct place. Likewise when we plan only, we can figure out what exactly needs to be done, in what order. Without proper goal setting, we'll fritter or waste our time on a confusion of conflicting priorities.
In our normal life people tend to neglect goal setting and planning because it requires time and effort. They are not serious enough and what they fail to consider is that a little time and effort put in now saves an enormous amount of time, effort or frustration in the future. There is a proverb saying Stitch in time saves nine.

Prioritization:
To handle the proper time management, we should develop the habit of prioritizing our needs. Without it, though we may work very hard, we will not be achieving the results we desire because what we are working on is not of strategic importance.
Most people have a "to-do" list of some sort but the problem is that many of these lists are just a collection of things. There is no system or order in the list and, as a result, the work they do is just as unstructured. So how do you work on To Do List tasks – top down or bottom up? the easiest to the hardest?
So if they have the properly organized ‘’to-do ‘’ list, once they complete their work, they can mark it off on their schedule of tasks. It gives them a peace of mind and the encouragement to continue on with the day. To work efficiently, we need to work on the most important, highest value tasks. Use a long-term calendar to record test dates, important due dates, things that we need to plan ahead for. We do not wait for the eleventh hour to finish the things.

Motivation:
Managing our time will give us more free time. This way we would not get caught scrambling to get something critical done as the deadline approaches. One of the most difficult parts of time management is motivating us to follow our scheduled plan. So reward yourself for accomplishing your goals. Often times, people get stuck in their jobs and are unable to get out even when they are not truly happy. For this reason, it is essential that you pause from time to time and re-evaluate. This will ensure the maintenance of a healthy balance between your career and family.
Managing Interruptions:
Budgeting our time in advance is very indispensable. Having a plan and knowing how to prioritize it is one thing. The next issue is, knowing what to do to minimize the interruptions we face during our day. It is widely recognized that managers and hierarchically top level officers get very little uninterrupted time to work on their priority tasks. There are phone calls, information requests, questions from employees, and a whole host of events that crop up unexpectedly. Some do need to be dealt with immediately, but others need to be managed. However, some jobs need you to be available for people when they need help – interruption is a natural and necessary part of life. Though such interruptions cannot be indelible, shrewdly managing such interruptions sticking the time management is the clandestine of success of a person as well as an institution.


Procrastination
We Srilankans are well known for procrastinating things because our schedules get struck and things get accumulated. Procrastination is a thief of progress; it is a proverb which says not to put-off the things for tomorrow, instead, do it today. "I'll do it later" has led to the downfall of many a good employee. After too many "laters", the work piles up so high that any task seems insurmountable. Procrastination is as tempting as it is deadly.

For instance, when the students were given assignments and the deadlines for the submissions, most of our students, except a few, wait for the eleventh hour though they were given even a month of time. This clearly shows their poor time management, lacking knowledge in prioritizing things, poor motivation and the negligence of the validity of time.
Learn to Say ‘No’
Mostly people put unnecessary burdens over their head in projects and other commitments simply because they do not have the heart to say no to a client or a friend in need. However, if you are so lenient, you will no longer be able to perform to the best of your abilities and this will damage the quality of your results.
Before accepting any task or making any commitment, you first need to assess whether you are actually still capable of fulfilling your responsibilities. If your schedule is already jam-packed, all you have to do is say no.
Conclusion
Time management is an essential skill that helps us keep our work under control, at the same time that it helps keep us stress free. We would all love to have an extra couple of hours every day. Since they practically seems to be impossible, we need to work smarter on things that have the highest priority, and then creating a schedule that reflects our work and personal priorities
With this in place, we can work in a focused and effective way, and really start achieving those goals, dreams and ambitions we care so much about .So time management helps you to be a better performing person. We always expect the unexpected and must be flexible but still accomplish what needs to be done. Definitely, we can succeed in our lives. Students, you are the heroes of tomorrow so effective time management is very essential for your successful life.
References:
Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com.
www.SuperSonicSuccess.com.
http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newHTE_00.htm
http://www.google.lk/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&channel=s&hl=en&source=hp&q=quotes+related+with+time+manageme
ttp://www.simplejoe.com/books-time-management.htm
https://www.mindtools.com/cgi-bin/sgx2/shop.cgi?page=MakeTimeForSuccess-PTD.htm
http://www.articledashboard.com/Article/Why-Do-You-Need-To-Be-Learning-Time-Management-Skills-/729930
http://www.steelmusichall.com/keeping-a-healthy-balance-between-work-and-family/
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http://management.about.com/cs/generalmanagement/a/Pareto081202.htm
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Adair, J. (1988) Effective time management: How to save time and spend it wisely, London: Pan Books.

D.N. Aloysius/Lecturer
18.02.2011