“…History and friendship are two frequent themes in Thumboo's poetry (Patke, :294). Both movements conclude by referring to a calculation of sorts.…”
Section: Triadmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…In the first movement, the calculation concerns ‘the march of history’; in the second movement, reference is made to a calculus for ‘fellowship of language’. Patke () writes: History, for Thumboo, bridges the gap between the personal and the communal, just as friendship is the communion of the personal with that which it shares outside the self.…”
Section: Triadmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…In the first movement, the calculation concerns 'the march of history'; in the second movement, reference is made to a calculus for 'fellowship of language' . Patke (2000) writes:…”
Section: Twin Themes Of History and Friendshipmentioning
Edwin Thumboo's poem Language as Power, written for Larry and Braj (L&B) provides the central theme for this paper written in remembrance of Larry. The poem is a composition in two movements, engaging readers aesthetically and spiritually. The poem's first movement is more like a hymn, celebrating the power of the Word. The second movement explores the impact of the phenomenon known as world Englishes. The paper concludes with two personal notes: the first explaining how the meaning‐making potential of language – what Halliday calls ‘grammatical energy’ – is employed by the poet to immortalize L & B; and the second, how our encounters with Larry's every good endeavor have enriched our lives and made us better human beings.
“…History and friendship are two frequent themes in Thumboo's poetry (Patke, :294). Both movements conclude by referring to a calculation of sorts.…”
Section: Triadmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…In the first movement, the calculation concerns ‘the march of history’; in the second movement, reference is made to a calculus for ‘fellowship of language’. Patke () writes: History, for Thumboo, bridges the gap between the personal and the communal, just as friendship is the communion of the personal with that which it shares outside the self.…”
Section: Triadmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…In the first movement, the calculation concerns 'the march of history'; in the second movement, reference is made to a calculus for 'fellowship of language' . Patke (2000) writes:…”
Section: Twin Themes Of History and Friendshipmentioning
Edwin Thumboo's poem Language as Power, written for Larry and Braj (L&B) provides the central theme for this paper written in remembrance of Larry. The poem is a composition in two movements, engaging readers aesthetically and spiritually. The poem's first movement is more like a hymn, celebrating the power of the Word. The second movement explores the impact of the phenomenon known as world Englishes. The paper concludes with two personal notes: the first explaining how the meaning‐making potential of language – what Halliday calls ‘grammatical energy’ – is employed by the poet to immortalize L & B; and the second, how our encounters with Larry's every good endeavor have enriched our lives and made us better human beings.
“…Rajeev Patke observes that Singapore "poets and nation have coincided in struggling with a project of self-definition, to a degree unusual even among nations that share a post-colonial legacy". 16 This phase -dealing with the construction of a unified nation out of the legacies of a colonial linguistic, educational and government structure, a plural society (of which Chinese and Indians of immigrant stock, and Malays descended from original settlers, constituted the main elements), and the multi-lingual, multi-cultural and multi-religious situation consequent on these -is also the phase in which arguably the main Anglophone literary achievement (and certainly the most public) is a poetry which is both private and public, simultaneously articulating the symbolism of a nascent social identity into which the individual reader could be inserted, while also grappling with explicitly national themes and concerns.…”
Anglophone poetry has played a central role not only in the development of a national literature in Singapore in the first few decades after independence, but also in the articulation of a kind of national consciousness, a rhetorical rehearsal for an emergent nationhood. Examining the works of poets Edwin Thumboo, Goh Poh Seng, Arthur Yap and Lee Tzu Pheng - the first four Anglophone winners of the Cultural Medallion for literature, the Singapore government’s highest cultural award - we see attempts to address nationhood not only in the thematic and stylistic projects of these poets, but also in the institutional support it receives from the government and the resonances between the poetic and official articulations of nationalism. Although this Anglophone and poetic nationalism (at some odds with the plebeian, carnivalesque and dialogical nationalism associated with novelistic narratives) clearly has its limits in a multilingual and multicultural new nation, it leaves an indelible impact on the early development of Anglophone literature and culture in Singapore.
“…But what is absent from the poetic scene in Malaysia and Singapore is also striking: long narrative poems and verse novels that are responses to historical traumas. There have been notable studies on poetry in English from the two countries using, for instance, a cultural historical lens (Patke 2000), a survey of individual poets through post-colonial and transnational viewpoints (Poon 2009) and even from a formal institutionalized viewpoint of "reconceptualizing literature's place in the contemporary Singapore's education system" (Holden 2000). But the hidden wounds in the psychethat is, traumas -marking the intertwining histories of Malaysia and Singapore, especially during World War II, have not been dealt with in long poetic forms.…”
Section: Introduction Building Blocks Of Memoriesmentioning
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