An Inconvenient Truth: The Quandary of Dystopian Earth in Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running and Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green

-- Adrene Freeda D’cruz

Ecocide, the widespread annihilation of nature, constitutes the principal theme of Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (1972) and Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green (1973). Seeking recourse to one of the major film genres, namely, science fiction, these films emphatically disclose an inconvenient truth—the imminent extinction of the ecosystem. Set in a dystopian world, the films outline two futuristic probabilities: the sustenance of the last trace of bio-network only on spaceships in Silent Running and the overpopulated city haunted by the scarcity of natural resources in Soylent Green. In other words, while Silent Running strategically uncovers an already depleted biosphere, Soylent Green systematically examines the road to ecological perdition. Significantly, the cinematic space resorts to diverse techniques, including stills, close-up, voice-over, and music, to convey the petrifying reality that awaits humanity in the near future. Drawing the title from Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary on global warming, this paper, in analyzing the environmental apocalypse in Silent Running and Soylent Green, seeks to reveal how the cinematography weaves an ecocentric discourse to promote the inevitable truth that ecosphere is intrinsic to human survival.

© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Rethinking 1984: A Study of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland

-- Nibir K. Ghosh

Ecocide, the widespread annihilation of nature, constitutes the principal theme of Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (1972) and Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green (1973). Seeking recourse to one of the major film genres, namely, science fiction, these films emphatically disclose an inconvenient truth—the imminent extinction of the ecosystem. Set in a dystopian world, the films outline two futuristic probabilities: the sustenance of the last trace of bio-network only on spaceships in Silent Running and the overpopulated city haunted by the scarcity of natural resources in Soylent Green. In other words, while Silent Running strategically uncovers an already depleted biosphere, Soylent Green systematically examines the road to ecological perdition. Significantly, the cinematic space resorts to diverse techniques, including stills, close-up, voice-over, and music, to convey the petrifying reality that awaits humanity in the near future. Drawing the title from Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary on global warming, this paper, in analyzing the environmental apocalypse in Silent Running and Soylent Green, seeks to reveal how the cinematography weaves an ecocentric discourse to promote the inevitable truth that ecosphere is intrinsic to human survival.

© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Discovering Bakhtin’s Carnivalesque in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest: A Comparative Study

-- Alapati Rama Naga Hanuman

This paper analyzes Bakhtin’s carnivalesque in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of ‘carnivalesque’ refers to a source of ‘liberation, destruction, and renewal.’ The origin and meaning of the carnivalesque can be best understood by analyzing the concept of the carnival. In the carnival, social hierarchies of everyday life are profaned and overturned by suppressed voices and energies. Bakhtin likens the carnivalesque in literature to the type of activity that often takes place in the carnivals of the popular culture which sought a release, a freedom from all that is official, authoritarian, and serious. The setting of both the novels satisfies the criteria of the carnivalesque. While Golding’s novel highlights the intricacies of life through a group of English school children on a marooned island, Kesey’s novel revolves around the life in an Oregon mental asylum, reflecting the capitalistic and non-humanistic tendency of human life. Both the novels are rich in the carnivalesque, and concern the degradation of man in the world and the attempts made at the revival of the human spirit. The paper attempts to compare the two chosen novels in terms of the carnivalesque elements like inversion, degradation, food, madness, and games, thereby highlighting the carnivalesque nature of the novels.

© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Critiquing Narratives of Progress: Alternative History in Philip Roth’s The Plot against America

-- Ansu Louis

In his The Plot against America, Philip Roth develops a systematic critique of the totalizing narratives that envision history as the site of progressive unfolding or manifestation of a transcendent ideal or force. Depicting the ordeals of an American Jewish family in the alternative historical period of the anti-Semitic Lindbergh administration, Roth seeks to undermine the notion of historical necessity that is central to all versions of universal history. Further, the novel exposes the ideological implications of the grand narratives of historical progress that struggle for hegemony in the social field, including the liberal democratic version upon which the protagonist Philip’s family founds its American self-image and the fascist one that eventually comes to replace it as the dominant American historical outlook.

© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Post-Area Studies / Post-American Studies, Globalization, Contact Zones, Liminality, and Hybridity

--Vikrant Sehgal

Area Studies as a field of intellectual endeavor is under attack. And it is an attack framed from within what the discipline would usually define as its particularly distinctive strength—its commitment to an interdisciplinary approach. I will eventually explore the issue of just why. But before doing so, I think a few terminological definitions are required. This seems to be inevitable, given the way that “Area Studies” is still, quite frequently, an unrecognized term, and is perhaps a term now destined, ironically, never to catch on completely even as it is being ever more commonly used. I want to explore this imminent risk, but only in a while.

© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Earle Birney’s Poetry: A Study

-- T. Jeevan Kumar

In the history of Canadian poetry, one may see three distinct phases, namely, Confederation to the World War I, the 1920s to the World War II, and the late twentieth century to the early twenty-first century. The Canadian poets who appeared during the first phase were largely influenced by the English Romantics and the early Victorians, and looked for themes in their own natural landscape. The poets of the second phase, with the emergence of modernism, created an outlet for the new poetry and reflected their fascination with the sea and with the impersonal violence of nature. But it is only in the third phase, Canadian poetry has undergone radical change with the contribution of poets like Earle Birney and others. These poets exhibited a new social awareness and came out with experimental poetry characterized by cosmopolitanism, metaphysical strains, symbolism, and so on. An attempt is made in the present paper to examine Earle Birney’s three poems—“David,” “November Walk,” and “The Bear on the Delhi Road.” They are extracted from three of his representative anthologies David and Other Poems (1942), Near False Creek Mouth (1964), and Fall and Fury (1978) which show Birney’s encyclopedic knowledge on Canadian subjects and also virtually every part of the globe.

© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.