"Necessity Freed Spinoza and Imprisoned Yakov": The Presence of Spinoza's Ethics in Malamud's The Fixer

-- Gustavo Sánchez Canales

In the works of Bernard Malamud, the issue of imprisonment is fundamental not only as a symbol of the acceptance of human being's limitations in life but also as a way to evidence his/her subjection to superior forces such as Nature's laws. Ironically, in Malamud, imprisonment is a key element in the protagonist's freedom. In this paper, I will focus on the presence of Spinoza's concepts of God, Freedom and Historical Necessity, and State in Malamud's The Fixer. It will be shown that reflecting on these concepts in the light of Spinoza's Ethics will eventually help us understand Yakov Bok and his role and position in the world.

© 2008 IUP . All Rights Reserved.

That the People Might Live: Strategies of Survival in Contemporary Native American Fiction

-- Brajesh Sawhney

The range of Native American literature encompasses a history of twenty thousand years and a geographic area extending from the Arctic Circle to the tip of South America. It rises from a rich and tragic context. While on the one hand, Native American writers celebrate their rich cultural and spiritual past, while on the other hand, they share the historical experience of colonization. Though the discovery of America has been described as `conquest' or `manifest destiny,' Native American writers have countered it by regarding it as an `invasion' that is still continuing. Most of the contemporary Native American writers, N Scott Momaday, James Welch, Louise Erdrich, Wendy Rose, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, Sherman Alexie and Joy Harjo, relate in their writings how the process of colonization has debilitated their cultures, religions, traditions and identities. There is an awareness in their work that they once had a sense of belonging to their land, their tribe, their tradition, their religion, much of which they have now lost. They now have an agonizing sense of unbelonging. Strategies of survival dominate contemporary American writing. The present paper will highlight the strategies of survival adopted by contemporary Native American writers, which include returning to their past as a repository of values, presenting alternative epistemological realities to counter the sweep of Euro-American culture, forging new historicity to challenge the metanarrative of Western history and breaking down the stereotypes associated with the Natives.

© 2008 IUP . All Rights Reserved.

A Critique of Immigrant Psyche: A Study of the Selected Works of Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri

-- A Rama Krishna Rao and R V Jayanth Kasyap

Writers of the Indian Diaspora, who were earlier called the expatriate writers, have carved for themselves a special niche in the arena of literature. Tapping their varied experiences and rich exposure to advantage, these writers wrote with a broad vision and perspective. In the modern world of flux, uncertainty and confusion, and constant erosion of identities, they explored major issues like cultural conflicts, immigrants' alienation, pysche and changing social values. Most of the writers endeavored to define the experience of migrancy. They made a substantial contribution to the expatriate sensibility, which is considered to be a phenomenon in commonwealth literature. Among the prominent writers who were sensitive to the subtleties of the lives of immigrants are Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri. Bharati Mukherjee gained considerable distinction as a novelist and short story writer. She has authored six novels, two short story collections and a few works of non-fiction. Jhumpa Lahiri received great acclaim with the publication of her short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies. She published her first novel The Namesake in 2003.This paper focuses on the role of psyche in the life of an immigrant. It attempts to diagnose the illness caused by frustrated psyches and tries to examine certain possible remedies. The basic problem that plays havoc with the psyche is the individual's inability to adjust. Mukherjee and Lahiri identify cross-cultural exposure as a further source of the predicament of the immigrants. An individual's potential to strike a balance would address this problem. All these factors ultimately launch an individual on a search for self. The paper looks at the creative configurations in which both the writers seek identity. Both present through their fictional works existential zeitgeist. Interestingly, they acknowledge that it is painful for an immigrant to put down his/her psychic roots, which establish one's identity. Herein lies the strength of mature art.

© 2008 IUP . All Rights Reserved.

Confronting Patriarchal Violence: A Comparative Reading of Mahasweta Devi's "Draupadi" and Ambai's "Black Horse Square"

-- Rekha and Anup Beniwal

By critically focusing on two stories, i.e., Mahasweta Devi's "Draupadi" and Ambai's "Black Horse Square", and reading them with and against each other, this paper tries to showcase how these writers offer two distinct, yet overlapping perspectives on the causes and consequences of the sociocultural violence against women. Both of them diagnose this violence as a function of the conflict between representation and self-presentation of woman. Through these stories, these authors destabilize the patriarchal representational-praxis in order to etch out a blueprint for agential and representational empowerment.

© 2008 IUP . All Rights Reserved.

The "Other": A Still Question of Postcoloniality

-- Vikrant Sehgal

The present paper derives from the premise that any criticism of colonial or post-colonial literature depends for its force on the recognition of its self-definition. During the last two decades, Literary Studies in the United States have been revitalized by an extension of "minority" writing beyond African-American literature into other national contexts. The influx of these specifically non-western texts into the American University curriculum and the emergence of Western critical discourse on the subject provide examples of effective challenges to the canon. The acceptance of these vast and diverse literatures, now studied under the somewhat generalized title "postcolonial texts", has been aided by exemplary work done by current theorists of marginalized literature such as Homi Bhabha, Henry Louis Gates, Abdul JanMohamed, David Lloyd, Joyce Cary, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak. This paper attempts to analyze the question of the grounds of postcolonial discourse and looks at the `Fanonian' tradition of postcolonial critique and its implications for contemporary cultural politics.

© 2008 IUP . All Rights Reserved.

Quest for Self: A Study of Angus Wilson's As If By Magic

-- Ramesh K Misra

Angus Wilson's As If By Magic has often been read as a self-conscious, parodic, picaresque narrative, ambitious in its global range and concerns. Its formal brilliance, parody and pastiche have also received much attention. However, the novel does not appear to have been seen in terms of the Campbellian paradigm of Separation, Initiation and Returnthe three stages of the mythological adventurewhich the hero ventures on from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder and encounters the fabulous forces to register his decisive victory. Finally, the hero comes back from his mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boon on his fellow men. The present paper seeks to examine Wilson's As If By Magic as a quest narrative, structured largely in the picaresque tradition. However, Wilson does not borrow literally from the Spanish predecessors, though he retains some of their major techniques, which account for the picaresque element at the structural level. In fact, in the process, to emphasize his humanistic concerns, Wilson transcends the traditional picaresque mode of fiction by subverting the pattern.

© 2008 IUP . All Rights Reserved.

Looking Through the Kaleidoscope: The Dickensian Heroine

-- Seema Murugan

Charles Dickens has created a wide variety of heroines are as various as the different novels in which they are depicted. In his novels, women are depicted as either beautiful and empty or significant and effective, or as self-sacrificing metaphors. Sometimes one feels that in his fiction the female characters contribute to the growth of the male protagonists only to be overshadowed by them. There is this strange nexus between void and womanhood, which is enacted in Dickens' fiction. In a sense, Dickens seems to be celebrating womanhood by confining his heroines within the labyrinthine passages of his novels. The present paper is an attempt to study the Dickensian heroine as if viewed through a kaleidoscope.

© 2008 IUP . All Rights Reserved.