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Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient: An Intertextual Perspective
--Guru Charan Behera
The English Patient of Sri Lankan Canadian novelist Michael Ondaatje with its frequent internal references to texts
of various types and genresnovels, poems, paintings, history, religion, geography, archaeology, and scientific
and technical manualsis an intertextual construct. The purpose of this paper is to unravel these intertextual
underpinnings and study the way they have been deployed to produce a postmodern self-reflexive narrative and to represent
the postcolonial diasporic situation of the novelist.
© 2010 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Bedouin Romance in English Poetry: Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's
The Stealing of the Mare
--Aiman Sanad Al-Garrallah
This paper aims at examining how far Wilfrid Scawen
Blunt's The Stealing of the Mare represents what might,
broadly speaking, be called the local color of the Bedouins, and highlights the significance of the Oriental myth in that epic. It
solely examines the romance of Abu Zeyd Al-Hillali. The paper further decodes the customs, superstitions, heroism,
chivalry, sentiments, sensuality and social codes of the Bedouins, and explores various representations of the Bedouin harem and
the supernatural hero. In doing so, it considers Said's ideas of the eccentricity of the East. It can be concluded that
Blunt attempts to transfer Arabic cultural codes into the English culture. He repeatedly accentuates the fact that the Arabs
are people of many merits. Blunt's point is surely that Bedouin culture, which fosters a plenitude of honor-related
virtues, especially hospitality, chivalry and defending the weak, deserves more sympathetic investigation by the Westerners.
© 2010 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
The Concept of Self in the Creations
of Manju Kapur
--Swati Srivastava,
--Fatima Rizvi
The women in the novels of Manju Kapur seem to be the personification of new women who have been carrying
the burden of inhibition since ages and want to be free now. The writer clearly shows the dilemma of women who carry
the burden of being female as well as the added responsibility of being mothers to members of their own sex. In the
traditional social milieu of the novel where mothers and daughters exist, marriage is regarded as the ultimate goal and destiny
from which these women cannot escape. Manju Kapur succeeds in presenting the real picture of women in a
male-dominated society. Her female protagonists are mostly educated aspiring individuals caged within the confines of a
conservative society. Their education leads them to independent thinking, for which their family and society become intolerant
towards them. They struggle between tradition and modernity. It is their individual struggle with family and society through
which they plunge into a dedicated effort to carve an identity for themselves as qualified women with faultless
backgrounds. The novelist has portrayed her protagonists as women caught in the conflict between the passions of the flesh and the
yearning to be a part of the political and intellectual movements of the day. Manju Kapur says that writing in India tends to involve
the family and community to a far greater extent than in the West. Here, women are often defined in terms of their roles.
The tension between these notions of identity and the desire for personal fulfillment forms much of subcontinental
literature. This paper takes up for study the novels of Manju
KapurDifficult Daughters, A Married Woman
and Home.
© 2010 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Signification of Duality in Anita Desai's
Voices in the City
--Binod Mishra,
--Narinder K Sharma
Anita Desai's fictional world offers a wide range of duality-ridden structures open for strong psycho-semantic
renderings or interpretations. The major dualities woven in the fiction of Desai are of masculine versus feminine, tradition
versus modernity, illusion versus reality, body versus soul, self versus other, Oriental versus Occidental, spirit versus
flesh, rational versus irrational, emotion versus intellect, esoteric versus exoteric, lack versus desire, presence versus
absence, attachment versus detachment, and so on. These dualities become foregrounded with the use of the technique
of counter-pointing one issue with the other, connoting darker or brighter aspects of existence. The motif of the
dualities comprises recurrent metaphors, metonymic parallelisms, ironic reversals, frequent flashbacks, cultural codings,
stream-of-consciousness symbolizing dissection of the psyche, etc. Desai's women characters, though caught in the dynamics
of lack and desire, always strive and struggle to find the basic truth of life which can show them the union of
opposites manifesting a state of trance and tranquility. The patterns that she weaves are essentially dualistic in nature. The
present paper aims at exploring some of the dualistic patterns which, in turn, constitute the thematic conflict in the novel
Voices in the City (1965). The author herself admits that her world-view is innately subjective, which gives her ample scope to
lay bare the varied feminine nuances manifesting the dualistic dialectics which cause the core conflict in the novel.
© 2010 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Structural `Anatomy' in Shiv K Kumar's Select Short Fiction:
An Appraisal
--Suman Ray Malakar,
--Soumyashree Das
Indian English Literature, like any other literature, has had its share of both talented and eminent precursors and
successors. Of the latter, prominent among the better known ones is Shiv K Kumar, whose short stories can best be described
as being products of a genius raconteur. This paper attempts at exploringstructurally as well as technicallyselect
short stories from his second volume of short fiction titled,
To Nun with Love and Other Stories, which has not
witnessed significant research. The stories are chosen with a specific purposeto bewitch the readers with the uncanny harmony
of human anatomy, where every single organ comes to life in isolation. Rare and engaging descriptions reveal his passion
for the human psyche; mortal feelings of love, loss and betrayal; fantasies of ordinary men and women; and the
much-neglected genre of the short story. The mere titles of the storiesthose that have been discussed in this
paperattract the readers' immediate attention. This paper begins with a briefing on the development of the prose narrative,
and examines, through a close analysis of the various characteristics of the short fiction, how Kumar structures these
stories around the predefined notions of the genre and yet creates a uniqueness that is typical of him.
© 2010 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Teaching of the Passive Voice in India:
A Perspective
--Rohit Shriniwas Kawale
The passive voice is one of the common grammar topics in the teaching of English. It is often found that the
conversion of the active voice into the passive is taught as a mechanical exercise. The functions that the passive performs
are not explained to students. As a result, students may not know whether to retain the agent phrase in the passive
clause or not. But, as Svartvik (1966) and Kawale (2008) find, the agentless passive is the most common passive type in
British English (BrE) and Indian English (IE), respectively. No matter
whether the teachers want to teach BrE or standard IE
to Indian students, they must not lose sight of the centrality of the agentless passive in
their teaching. Students should also be made aware of the functions that the passive performs. Questions on the passive in question papers
should also be set with all this in mind.
Examination questions on the passive often expect students
to think of the active-passive conversion as a mechanical exercise. The nature of evaluation often influences the teaching of the
topic concerned. Therefore, the general features of the passive have important implications as far as the teaching
and evaluation of this topic is concerned.
© 2010 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Literary Text: An Effective Way
to Communicative Language Teaching
--Kavita Singh Rajput
This paper discusses the central importance of analyzing `texts' (written, spoken, visual and audio-visual) in
making connections to disciplines and viewpoints. It discusses the need to enhance the methodology of Communicative
Language Teaching (CLT) via literature, as literature holds the key to enrich and widen language teaching. The
study highlights the role of literature in providing the context of use and tries to arrive at some kind of balance between CLT
and literature. Texts and the ways they are interpreted do not merely reflect cultural perspectivesthey `constitute'
and `propagate' much of culture. Consequently, if we are serious about teaching culture and communicative language,
we have to consider how we approach getting students to engage with, and to learn to interpret,
a wide range of texts.
© 2010 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Necessity of Ecological Principles
for Enhanced Communication
--S Kumaran
This paper is an attempt at exploring the contribution of ecological principles to the enhancement of communication skills.
In this technocratic age, people find even the natural process of communication taxing and difficult. Most of the problems
that hinder communication skills arise out of humans' failure to understand the basic principles of ecology. They do not
realize the interrelatedness and interdependence of all
the lives that operate the activities of the universe and create
several problems in the communication process. Some of the problems
that people face during their communication with
others include fear, lack of trust, shyness, nervousness, ignorance, language difference, inferiority complex, and status
distinction. The lack of understanding of the concept of `interrelatedness' makes them lead compartmentalized lives. Their
acts of particularization and compartmentalization induce fear about others as they suspect others' intrusion
into their privacy. It is fear that proves to be the origin of all other communication barriers. The lack of understanding of the principle of
oneness creates a rift between humans and they also breed negative attitude, inferiority complex, and language and gender
differences. One can find an antidote to all these hurdles in the knowledge of ecological principles.
The basic principle of ecology ascertains: `Everything is connected to everything
else'. A basic understanding and belief in this principle holds scope
for the improvement of communication skills. Knowledge of `interrelatedness' allows humans to shed fear as they identify
their connection with each other and the strong bond that binds them.
© 2010 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
The Place of Place in Stevens
--Chetan Deshmane
Stevens's understanding that identity/personality/self is very largely structured through images assimilated from the
early childhood, and that images are the produce of the conflation of imagination (or, Lacan's `imaginary') and the
outside world/reality, led him to unravel the self by laying bare the images that constitute it. His purpose behind this was to
study and evolve what he calls the "mythology of self". The place one inhabits being an inseparable part of this
`mythology', his work reveals his concern with place as a substantive element of the `self-myth'. For studying the process of
the evolution of this `myth', the poet always seeks landscapes that are essentially unfamiliar, non-humanized,
unspectacular, even invidious, since only such a landscape offers a better chance for observing and studying the evolution of the
`self-myth'. The `North-South' dialectic in his poetry is a resultant vector of his meditations
on place. The South represents the humanized, familiar world/reality, whereas the North stands for the non-humanized, non-familiar world/reality.
© 2010 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Interview
An Angry Genius Called Sasthi Brata:
An Interview
--Amitendu Bhattacharya
In this rare interview, Sasthi Brata, the controversial author of books like
My God Died Young and Confessions of an Indian Women
Eater, candidly talks of his early influences, of his career as a writer in the 1960s and 70s, of his decision
to sever all ties with his native country, and explains why he has now been written off. The interview is as racy, dramatic
and colorful as the plot of any of his books; going through it, one would realize that Sasthi Brata, now in his seventies,
has not exhausted the powerful impulses that went into the making of his books. He is as angry and rebellious as before;
his wit has not lost its biting edge. At places, he gets deeply meditative and philosophical, only to come up with
equally scathing statements. He denies that he has depicted women as "slabs of meat on a couch" in his writing, and refuses
to be a part of the "tribal category" called Indian English writers. For those interested in pre-Rushdie Indian Writing
in English, it is an interview worth reading.
© 2010 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Book Review
In the Service of Telugu Writing
Reviewed by S S Prabhakara Rao
Verdant Voices
Reviewed by S S Prabhakara Rao
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