FINDING PHD FOR POOR ASIAN STUDENT

Finding a PhD position for poor Asian student

Where possible I help worthy students in difficult or impoverished circumstances. Recently, I managed to acquire passage for young women out of Asia facing undesired arranged marriages into Europe where they are now seeking asylum, and continuing on their career pathways. Where individuals have ability but are prevented from reaching their full potential, why not?

Below is a plea to several top universities in UK for one young impverished man at present living in a village in India:

 UNIVERSITY

6/8/18                                                                                                  Tel: +351214247247

Dear Dr.........

Re. recent short discussion about Syed Ismyl Mahmood Rizvi, an impoverished Indian student I became acquainted with, who at present is determined to do and looking for a PhD course in English Literature.

As Syed's representative, I am writing this in an attempt to create awareness within ……….University of the high regard in which Syed is held. He is certainly considered by those who know him to have immense potential.

Syed has written a number of pieces containing promising ideas, which I am sure the University has been shown. For example, his understanding of Samuel Beckett's novels, plays and the ideas and reactions Beckett's writing′s appear to stimulate, are skilfully evoked in a number of Syed's pieces. I feel that in these matters he has much more to offer.

The fact that his marks in his MA have been deemed insufficient for studying a PhD at …….. University, says more about the limitations of conventional study than the potential of a poor Indian man of limited resources.

In 'Existential Abuse of the Reader in 'Malone Dies' he has considered the effects on the reader of Beckett's choice of words and themes, leading to an existential crisis for readers of Malone. His choice of words reflects the very crises he describes. Added to this, Syed provides examples of the actual effects of language beyond our commonplace familiarity with it. The impact of negative as against positive vocabulary. I have not seen this approach before, but can fully back it up as a methodology of literary criticism, most of which tends to be concerned with ideas, not the impact of words (lines, sentences, phrases, literary techniques) on approaches to text. Indeed, according to Syed, with much truth: ' Ultimately, the reader unconsciously permits Beckett’s neuro-thematic writing culture to instigate in him a primordial sense of “metaphysical destruction” of his “untrue self.”' It is these kind of insights that, for me, sets Syed's criticism apart. If that was all he offered fine, but he also fully demonstrates Beckett's complete connection to the intellectual culture of the world he inhabits, a multi-variant world of ideas on existence and self that he feels is capable of exploration through text.

Perceiving the reader as involved in a process of self-deconstruction, dealing thereby with problems of annihilation and reconstruction of the self (if that is possible) posits Beckett's writing into both modern Western and ancient Hindu philosophy that is rarely attempted. Literature is here thoroughly analysed as an experience, alongside more ordinary experiencing, that gives additional value to the reader. 

In his follow-up piece dealing with Beckett's 'Godot', 'In Search of Enlightenment By Reading Beckett's Waiting for Godot' Syed considers Beckett's Enlightenment (his search for and presentation of wisdom), employing skilfully a number of celebrated commentators from Hume to Manquel to explore the nature of Beckett's supposed insights.

He early establishes how readers engage with the characters within a conflictual relationship with the text, absorbing and rejecting Beckett's words and proceeding through this device to deconstruct Beckett's pursuit of Enlightenment, an intellectual and visceral process that he wishes the reader to engage with and absorb. The reader is subsumed in a conflict with Beckett's Enlightenment as well as with his words.

Syed pinpoints the full range of philosophers that Beckett appears to have read and which, he believes, through the processes of absorption, have contributed to Godot. In doing so he has identified the stresses that a reader, through directly experiencing the text, brings to the text. In addition, Syed's analysis draws out the symbolism of the play, noting in the tree, which occupies the stage, a device of meaning and of nothingness, functioning in the same manner as the text by drawing the reader into the essence of Beckett's annihilation of ideas.

It is, according to Syed, the meaning within the text that each reader imbibes, dealing independently with the text by giving propriety to the vocabulary of nothingness through conventional processes of catharsis. He demonstrates with remarkable success, the reader's role in the text, not the writers, and how the reader recreates understanding (Enlightenment) and self through the text. Here, Syed has produced a valuable view of the role of the reader, consciously and unconsciously, in constructing through experience the 'wisdom' of the text, gleaning thereby not despair but hope. 

I felt I need to go into the originality of Syed's work, to make bare its contribution to literary criticism.

With all regard