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The IUP Journal of American Literature

Aug-Nov '09
Focus

Sigmund Freud's seemingly innocuous question, "What does a woman want?" has generated, since it was first asked, much impassioned debate and dissonance.

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Terrible Fish in Sylvia Plath's `Mirror': Perception and Relevance of Mirror Imagery
Cultural Feminism: The Reality of the Self and the Body in Adrienne Rich's Poetry
Rewriting the Canon: Gloria Naylor's Mama Day as the Revision of The Tempest
Some Fragile Member of the Human Absurdity with Erectile Dysfunction: Faulkner's Existentialist View in Sanctuary
The Visual Turn: Affect, Autobiography, History, and the Graphic Narrative
The Dismal Tide: Shoring Up the Fragments in Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men
Human Quandary in Ernest Hemingway's Works
Failure of the Individual in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie
Influence of The Bhagavad-Gita on T S Eliot's Four Quartets
The Old Man and the Sea, as a Parable of Human Endurance
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Terrible Fish in Sylvia Plath's `Mirror': Perception and Relevance of Mirror Imagery

-- Rajani Sharma

This paper concentrates on the significance and relevance of a recurrent pattern of mirror images used by Sylvia Plath in her major poems to lay bare the troubled female self (especially woman artist) in search of an identity beyond the realm of traditional femininity, struggling to assert her true self as a terrible fish. At the initial stage, the mirror reflects the stereotypical images of woman, but gradually this solid four-cornered mirror turns out to be a lake—a semblance of her unconscious into which she takes a deep plunge and emerges out as a terrible fish (true woman artist) to threaten the traditional symbolic realm so that she may establish a new and innovative order of semiotic as an autonomous female self. The deep plunge is an interior journey, exploring her experiences by risking everyday sanity in search of healing truth that lies behind the accepted structure of belief. The interior journey includes three stages in the process of self-affirmation: the departure, the initiation, and the return. They involve struggle to free herself from the pressures exerted by patriarchy, the consequential alienation, and perhaps manic-depressive psychosis, insecurities, and tensions, culminating in a wholly credible and earned recognition akin to spiritual illumination. Now, she supersedes her earlier images as a passive and tortured victim as she kills the phantom of the angel—a self-linked taboo. This paper, thus, analyzes Plath's exploitation of reflective images that imply the process of arriving at a liberated and realistic definition of female self.

Article Price : Rs.50

Cultural Feminism: The Reality of the Self and the Body in Adrienne Rich's Poetry

-- Rajasekhar Vemula

Adrienne Rich is a renowned American feminist poet and an articulate advocate of women's rights. She occupies a prominent place among the contemporary American poets by virtue of her long struggle for women's emancipation through her powerful poetry. Poem after poem, she censures the patriarchal polarization—man as progenitor and breadwinner, and woman as homemaker and child-bearer, who in addition is expected to be acquiescent, docile, and abjectly dependent on men. To overcome this sex discrimination, Rich promotes female culture and values as special qualities and ways different from those of the male. This paper attempts to study Rich's portrayal of the female culture in some of her poems. It also investigates her subversion of the patriarchal values, which have traditionally formed the basis of the discrimination and social disabilities women have suffered.

Article Price : Rs.50

Rewriting the Canon: Gloria Naylor's Mama Day as the Revision of The Tempest

-- Nagendra Kumar and Anurag Kumar

Postcolonial writers have consistently challenged the authority and superiority of the so-called `Grand Narratives' of the canon. This has resulted in a spurt of writings that focus on re-visioning and re-living the themes once paramount among the writers of the canon. This paper highlights one such approach adopted by Gloria Naylor, a very pronounced name in the contemporary African-American Literature, in her novel Mama Day. By revising the story of Shakespeare's The Tempest and replacing the male-centered approach of Shakespeare, Naylor has given a different orientation to the whole story. Rather than celebrating the male and white superiority with Prospero at the center, she aligns herself with the marginalized, the underprivileged, and the underdogs. Naylor's Mama Day, who is female, black, and culturally marginalized, is at the center and reinterprets the mainstream American ways. The mainland American folks, represented by George, are unable to see the cultural and spiritual aspects of the island. Miranda tries to define the cultural practices, which George consistently refuses to accept, as he is a cultural orphan. He is deaf to the cultural calls of his own blood. He comes to understand them only at the end when he has already lost Cocoa, his wife. Thus, Naylor's Mama Day questions Shakespeare's The Tempest on several counts by proving that the island inhabited by blacks has a culture and a way of life of its own, which is quite contrary to the interpretation of island by Prospero.

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Some Fragile Member of the Human Absurdity with Erectile Dysfunction: Faulkner's Existentialist View in Sanctuary

-- Richard E Baker

This paper explores the influence that William Faulkner's novel Sanctuary (1931) had on Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, notably with reference to their novels and philosophical works in the later years. In brief, some of the literature of Sartre and Camus serve as analogous texts to Sanctuary, and certain existential motifs emerge as a result: Sartre's hole theory, evil, bad faith, the look, and nausea, not to mention Camus's notion of the absurd. These motifs would later be apparent in Sartre's Nausea (1938), Being and Nothingness (1943), No Exit (1944), and Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (1952), as well as Camus's The Stranger (1942) and The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). Ultimately, Horace Benbow, the main character in Sanctuary who suffers from erectile dysfunction, would be revealed as an existentialist hero because he lives in good faith and confronts the forces of evil, as he tries to help Ruby Lamar (a former prostitute), Lee Goodwin (a man falsely accused of rape and murder), and their sickly child. From this experience, Horace would return home to renew his relationship with his wife and stepdaughter whom he had earlier left to fend for themselves in this absurd world that we all share.

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The Visual Turn: Affect, Autobiography, History, and the Graphic Narrative

-- Pramod K Nayar

This paper deals with a new medium of narrating history: the graphic narrative. Using Art Spiegelman's cult text, Maus, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, and Joe Sacco's Safe Area Goražde and Palestine, it studies the strategies through which the graphic narrative delivers historical trauma, such as genocide, war, and oppression, in what it calls a `hypervisible history.' It proposes that the graphic narrative is a constituent of the visual culture of affect that helps render visible what has been censored or hidden. It combines official history with the personal autobiographical mode and subverts the primacy and authority of the former. Finally, through a strategy of self-portraiture and hypostasis, the graphic narrative, as subjective documentary, generates a `graphic history.' The essay argues a case for the graphic narrative as a medium for the transmission of inexpressible trauma.

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The Dismal Tide: Shoring Up the Fragments in Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men

-- Matthew Carter

This paper focuses on Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men (2007), relating the film to the concerns of frontier mythology and connecting it to the sociopolitical issues affecting the 21st century USA. The paper addresses the role of myth in history and its impact on the Western genre and draws specifically on the historian Harold Rosenberg's 1959 essay, "The Resurrected Romans." Rosenberg takes a cultural approach to history through a detailed analysis of Karl Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). "The question of myth in history," asserts Rosenberg, "is the question of the hero. And the question of the hero is the question of resurrection" (1959, p. 141). However, just as myth seeks to eradicate the historicity of things, as Roland Barthes would suggest, so too does the historical element become lost on the hero, whose awareness is only of `eternal forms' (p. 142). In applying these issues to No Country for Old Men, we find the hero, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) facing a quandary: Is his approach to current problems of law enforcement defined through these `eternal forms'? Or, can he learn from the past to become an agent in history rather than merely an effect of it?

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Human Quandary in Ernest Hemingway's Works

-- Vikrant Sehgal

Ernest Hemingway's works are broadly preoccupied with themes of violence, darkness, and death. By rendering a realistic portrayal of the modern man's predicament during the World War period, Hemingway has presented his continual concern for values in a corrupt and indifferent world. His protagonists are mainly depicted as alienated individuals fighting a battle against the odds of life with remarkable endurance and courage. In sharp contrast to his young heroes such as Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, Frederick Henry in A Farewell to Arms, and Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls, some elderly heroes in his short stories and major novels exemplify the undaunted wise men who gracefully achieve dignity of existence in defiance of the biological, social, and environmental barriers of the world. The study explores the perceptions and attitudes of the old heroes of Hemingway's short fiction towards life and death in the light of Freud's theories of instincts. The old characters examined in the paper include Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, Frederick Henry in A Farewell to Arms, and Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls. To present a whole picture of Hemingway's treatment of the aging heroes in pursuit of their noble dignity of existence, the paper probes into Hemingway's own attitudes toward dilemma in terms of his past experiences, and the elderly heroes' individual confrontations of death, the attitudes they hold, and the actions they take in response to the unfeeling nature and world.

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Failure of the Individual in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie

-- P Asha

Theodore Dreiser in the novel, Sister Carrie, presents a moving pageant of one of the most stirring epochs of American history: the transformation of American society from a slumbering countryside into the most dynamic industrial civilization that man has produced on the Earth. True realism alone can cope with and give expression to such epochs. Realism, in this sense, involves the creation of prototypal characters in prototypal situations. Sister Carrie, one of the most controversial novels of its time, offers a vast panoramic view of America and its expanding industrial civilization at the turn of the century. The novel concerns itself with a close study of the individual. It takes several protagonists from varied economic strata of American life and shows how they are harmed and corrupted by the fraudulent claims of a spurious American dream. The remarkably realistic characters and contentious situations created by Theodore Dreiser illustrate the double standards within the growing American society at the turn of the 20th century. David W Noble (1965) has analyzed Sister Carrie on the social level as a study of individuals "caught up, in a society that had lost its capacity to believe in the values that give it order and continuity."

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Influence of The Bhagavad-Gita on T S Eliot's Four Quartets

-- Dasarathi Behera

T S Eliot had an acute interest in faith and divinity. Like many artists and writers, he expressed the mysteries of faith in a beautiful and lucid way through his poems. Four Quartets, one of his masterpieces, presents the best of Eliot in both form and content. This paper traces the influence of the Indian scriptural and philosophical treatise The Bhagavad-Gita on Eliot's Four Quartets. While it is a known fact that Eliot himself had acknowledged that he had been greatly influenced by Indian philosophy and mysticism in general and The Bhagavad-Gita in particular, this paper attempts to illustrate how far that influence had shaped his thought process in his celebrated work Four Quartets.

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The Old Man and the Sea, as a Parable of Human Endurance

-- Arpita Seth Roychowdhury

The famed novella of Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952) recounts the epic battle between an old, experienced fisherman and a giant marlin, said to be the largest catch of his life. It opens by explaining that the fisherman, who is named Santiago, has gone eighty four days without catching any fish at all. He is apparently so unlucky that his young apprentice, Manolin, has been forbidden by his parents to sail with the old man and ordered to fish with more successful fishermen. Still dedicated to the old man, however, the boy visits Santiago's shack each night, hauling back his fishing gear, feeding him, and discussing American baseball—most notably Santiago's idol, Joe DiMaggio. Santiago tells Manolin that the next day he will venture far out into the Gulf to fish, confident that his unlucky streak is near its end. This paper highlights how the novella can be read as a parable that enunciates Hemingway's code for personal salvation.

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