Scholar's life and Vocation

Scholar's life and Vocation 

Time is short, Scholar have the lifelong company of books; and what is more, we have good human companionship. Scholar's and Critic are engaged in a common pursuit, so that the findings of one are indispensable to the work of the other. Some students of literature prefer to regard themselves primarily as critics, some as scholars; but the dichotomy between the two is far more apparent than real, and every good students of literature is constantly combining the two roles, often without knowing it.

The main difference is that The critic's business is primarily with the literary work itself - with its structure, style, and content of ideas. Scholars, on the other side are more concerned with the facts attending its genesis and subsequent history.  Scholar values historical fact. Neither criticism nor scholarship occupies an exclusive territory; the center of interest as well as the raison for both is the literary work itself.

According to George Whalley :

"No true scholar can lack critical acumen; and the scholar's eye is  rather like the poet's - not , to be sure, "in a fine frenzy rolling".

Without scholarship the criticism of a poem may easily become a free fantasia on a non-existent  theme. Scholar has the quest for finding truth in place outside the literary work. Research is the product of an individual human being's imagination and intellect. The fact remains that behind the each book is  man or woman whose character and experience cannot be overlooked in any effort to establish what the book really says. No one is able to write in a vacuum. Whatever work it is, it has some personal influences  which is the product of time and place , their mental set fatefully determined by the  social and cultural environment. Scholar has to remember that that particular work was not written for its author's private self alone but for a specific contemporary audience .

Book has both antecedents and a history of its own. As T. S. Eliot wrote in his seminal essay on Tradition and Individual Talent, "has his complete meaning alone". His significance, his appreciation  is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. The concept of the 'Author is dead' is there.

Let's discuss scholar's life :

Ideal research Scholar  must love literature for its own sake, that is to say, as an art. They must be insatiable readers. According to Vendler ,

"As scholar, we .....love, beyond philology and composition and  literature, the worth of scholarship, by which we mean accurate evidence on literary matters."

To live scholar's life is not easy task and it is not everybody cup of tea. Literary scholars are living as members of  teaching faculties in colleges and universities throughout the world so it is inflexible for them to be ceased  being scholar. They have different responsibilities quite remote from the pursuit of knowledge. It clearly seems that their talents and energies as teachers, administrators, academic committee members , and their private roles as parents and spouses and participants in community activities and other good works, scholars cannot suppress, even if they wished to do so, that portion of their consciousness that insists on asking questions about literary matters and seeking answers. Their literary awareness keeps twenty-four-hour days.  

Scholar may not earn as much or enjoy as much social status as do their contemporaries in other lines of work, but they have the sharper satisfaction of having a vocation that enables them to do what they most want to do it life. Love of books and consuming interest in the intellectual and esthetic  questions they pose unite persons with amazingly different backgrounds and tastes. We live in  the truest democracy of all, the democracy of the intellect.

The scope of English studies now also includes writing theory and pedagogy. The study of literature remains at base an intensely private pursuit. In research, there are numerous prerequisites: the constant company of books, the pleasure of travel, the unlooked for adventure, the frequent encounter with delightful and helpful people. Literary researchers  are working  together for the benefit of society, not for private aggrandizement. Scientists and inventors have their patents, but in humane learning all knowledge is in the public domain. They are actively working towards publication. This plea is not as altruistic as it might seem. Researcher happily share what they have with whoever needs it. Scholar must have to keep in mind this two principles

1. Let others know what you are working on.

2. Keep up with what other people are doing. Not only in your field but in others as well.

The necessary process of debate and correction can, and should, be conducted with dignity and courtesy. Controversial points can be made, effectively and adequately, without betraying the ancient association of scholarship with civility. Thus, Like all professions, this  has its own code of manners and ethical standard.

We sometime are discouraged and may share the belief so prevalent in the world outside, that our achievements have an unreal quality, or if they are real , at least they are futile: that they add nothing to the sum of human wisdom or happiness. Yet  if we are unappreciated and undervalued, the fault is partly ours. We gladly learn, but outside the classroom many of us are curiously uninterested  in teaching.

"Learning without wisdom is a load of books on an ass's back." One can be researcher , full of knowledge , without also being a scholar. Research is the means scholarship the end; research is an occupation , scholarship is a habit of  the mind and way of life. Scholars are more than researchers, for while they may be gifted in the discovery and assessment of facts, they are besides, persons of broad and luminous learning."

Many critics and scholars have developed the habit of talking only to each other, avoiding the broader audience of educated people or laymen. It is scholar's responsibility to seize each opportunity to communicate with the lay audience with the help of articles, books, popular press . Scholar has responsibility to share their thoughts worldwide. Scholar has task to educate students at all levels to read, write, and think, developing in them the intellectuality curious habit of mind. To lead students by extensive reading and critical analysis of recognised writers and thinkers, and ancient and contemporary , inside and outside.  As Matthew Arnold's said that ..

"The best that is known and thought in the world" for the purpose of creating in their own lives a "current of new and fresh ideas" appropriate in this, our time.

Literary research  then is devoted, for one thing to the enlightenment of criticism - which may or not take advantage  of the proffered information.  Literary history constitutes one of the strands of which the history of civilization itself is woven. Literature  is an eloquent artistic document, infinitely varied, of mankind's journey : the autobiography of the race's soul.  Research is the reconstruction and interpretation  of our literary past has its own dignity.

Scholarly Research Work gives immeasurable but real personal satisfaction that literary affords men and women of a certain temperament: the sheer joy of finding out things that have previously been unknown and thus of increasing, if but by few grains, the aggregate of human knowledge. Having literary interest give more scope of the degree of imagination, originality of approach,  solidity of learning, and the wish and the will to see works of literary art and their creators from new perspectives. Most of literary research has been done by academic people but unfortunately the notorious cliché "Publish or perish" is there. What is in truth , a complicated relationship between published scholarship and purpose of higher education.

Any external force to write scholarly  books and articles is pernicious not only because it may well diverts a career from its natural course, thus causing a good deal of personal unhappiness, but because scholarship performed under duress is seldom very good scholarship. To do research in any other disciplines is comparatively easy to the literary work because it is very hard to convey in humanities. As Morris Bishop said....

"....I am not against research. I practice it, I honour it, I love it. But taste for literary research is something special, It is not the same thing as delight in reading, or delight in introducing others to the pleasure of reading or pleasure of writing. We do well to encourage literary research.  We do ill to impose it as a requirement for promotion and status in the teaching profession. Literary  research is privilege, deserving of no reward except the writer's joy in his article, his book, his public utterance of his precious thought."

Both professions, : Law and Journalism must be observed by Scholar. This both occupation  moreover require organizational skill, the ability to put facts together in a pattern that is clear and if controversy is involved, persuasive.  The practice of law requires a thorough command of the principles of evidence a knowledge of how to make one's efficient way through the accumulated "literature" on a subject, and a devotion both to accuracy and to detail. Journalism , more specifically the work of the investigative reporter, also call for resourcefulness - knowing where to go for one's information and how to obtain it in pursuit of the facts.

As Dr. Johnson held, "no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money"; if so, the history of literary scholarship at its best is populated with amiable blockheads. Of course, not all scholars are on academic payrolls, very few businessmen and professional men do literary research in their spare time but the best possible evidence of the pleasure scholarship affords people who have nothing else to gain from it.

Researchers must have a vivid sense of history; the ability to cast themselves back into another age. They must be able to adjust their intellectual sights. Literary scholars need to be as rigorous in their method as scientists. A background in science is almost as good  preparation  for literary research as is one in law or newspaper work, because some of the same qualities are required : intellectual curiosity , shrewdness, precision, imagination - the lively inventiveness that constantly suggest new hypotheses , new strategies, new sources of information, and when all the data are in, makes possible their accurate interpretation and evaluation. Scholarship involves a great amount of detail work in which no margin of error is allowed  and over which the analytic intellect must constantly preside. It is no occupation for the impatient or the careless nor is it one for the easily fatigued.

"Is the love of the drudgery it involves." The researcher pays for every exultant discovery with a hundred hours of monotonous, eye-searching labour. Weariness of the flesh and congestion of the brain are inescapable occupational diseases. Collecting all qualities together ,imparting  coherence and meaning to the facts collected, must be a creative imagination.  Without it the scholar is "lost" , as Wordsworth put it, "in a gloom of uninspired research."

                                                               - Logan Pearsall Smith

Wisdom and the knowledge that enable them put facts in their place in two senses. Interpretation - the interpretation , in the light of all that our researchers can reveal, of the literature which is our professional concern. Through the interpretation scholar gives new creation (recreation) of the text which gives immense pleasure in the life.