`From the Paralysis of Fear to the Response of Solidarity': Mapping the Literary AIDS in America

-- Sathyaraj Venkatesan and Gokulnath A

AIDS remains a socially pressing problem in America as in the rest of the world. According to a survey by the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), published in 2009, an estimated 1.1 million people are living with HIV in the US. This paper attempts to establish a specific literary trajectory of AIDS as constituted through genres such as essays, novels, memoirs, short stories, and poems, among others. Further the paper seeks to elaborate how these artistic statements are related, how they articulate an alternative vision about AIDS, and finally, how these texts depict the trials and tribulations of People with AIDS (PWAs). Keeping this as the backdrop, the present paper provides an overview of the following texts: Paul Reed's Facing It: A Novel of AIDS (1984), Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart (1985), Samuel R Delany's The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals (1985), Susan Sontag's experimental short story "The Way We Live Now" (1986), Paul Monette's Borrowed Time (1988), Tony Kushner's Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika (1993), Steven Corbin's A Hundred Days from Now (1994), Charlotte Watson Sherman's Touch (1995), Edmund White's The Married Man (2000), and Marvelyn Brown's The Naked Truth: Young Beautiful, and (HIV) Positive (2008), among others.

© 2010 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Anaïs Nin's House of Incest: The Brother as Lover

-- Hoshang Merchant

House of Incest is Anaïs Nin's first published book. It is her ur-text. In it, she lays out her life theme, namely, neurosis caused by family, which the woman cures by becoming an artist. In her search, she uses Zen, Sufism, Christianity, Oriental Dance, and Surrealism. This paper uses Barthes' thesis of Texts of Pleasure vs. Texts of Bliss to show that all art is really only a text of bliss, that is, a submitting to Death.

© 2010 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Democracy and Dilemma: Richard Wright's Native Son

-- Nibir K Ghosh

Richard Wright's Native Son marked an important watershed in the history of Black Literature and amply demonstrated how race had become a trope of ultimate, irreducible difference between cultures, linguistic groups, or adherents of specific belief systems with fundamentally opposed economic interests. The novel exploded on the conscience of America by demonstrating, in Wright's words, how "[i]njustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life." In a searching analysis of the novel, the paper relocates the paradigms of class, race, ideology, and media in the context of the `American Dilemma.' Against the vantage point of the current scenario, with the first black president Barack Obama firmly ensconced in the White House, the attitude and approach of the protagonist of Wright's novel may seem an anachronism, in terms of racial dilemma, in the world's most powerful democracy. But the fact cannot be ignored that even today, with statistics confirming that there are more black men in jails than in schools in America, Richard Wright's pain and anguish have not lost their relevance.

© 2010 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Woman in Introspection: Maya Angelou, the Phenomenal Woman

-- M H Mohamed Rafiq

Maya Angelou, the prolific African-American author, is best known for her serial autobiography and her several volumes of poetry, which have generated great interest and critical acclaim because they embody her tenacity in overcoming social obstacles and her struggle for self-acceptance. Maya Angelou's life experience proved to be a repudiation of Euro-American cultural assumptions and an affirmation of African-American cultural norms. She explores the discrepancy between the idealization of marriage, femininity, family, and motherhood in the larger American culture and her actual experience as a black woman. Her serial autobiography, no doubt, recaptures that confrontation, but portrays, at the same time, the extraordinary life of a black woman who has survived and triumphed. This paper probes the nature of challenges that Maya Angelou faced and the quality of her response which made her an extraordinary woman.

© 2010 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Lionel Trilling and Cultural Criticism: A Discourse Against Dogma

-- Shakuntala Kunwar

Cultural criticism, being one of the major offshoots of historical criticism, finds considerable voice in Lionel Trilling's criticism. Trilling, in his concept of history and historical criticism, seems to be sharpest and most trenchant in obvious though implied responses to the poignant and fundamental questions emerging from contemporary cultural experiences. His understanding of the fact, as expressed in The Opposing Self (1955), that the `self' gains knowledge of its own being by first learning of the force continually suppressing it—an awareness of the relationship between the self and its oppressor, the surrounding culture—places him amongst the critics who have paved the way for modern critical thinking. His is an incessant search for interesting and vital ways in which the relationship can be negotiated in criticism. In the course of the evaluation of those ways, a `moral awareness' also develops, eventually resulting in the growth of aesthetic sensitivity. For Trilling, a work of art is neither an object nor a subject; it rather moves dialectically in relation to the stuff of life, out of which it has come. This paper makes an assessment of Trilling's criticism in this sphere and the relevance of the same at present when new historicism and other related domains have made their advent.

© 2010 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Arthur Miller as a Critic of Contemporary Social Values

-- Pawan Kumar Sharma and A S Rao

Arthur Miller (1915-2005) is one of the greatest American dramatists and social critics of twentieth century. His main focus is on contemporary values and themes. His plays reflect his concern for the common man. Miller's play The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944) depicts a character who anticipates his doom. All My Sons (1947) investigates some of the assumptions of a capitalist society. His masterpiece, Death of a Salesman (1949), is about the struggles of a common man against the society. The Crucible (1953) was written when anti-communist hysteria was at its peak in America. A View from the Bridge (1955), set on the Brooklyn waterfront, formed a common moral focus on the lust of man. As soon as Miller was through with his `desk drawer plays,' he began to evince interest in ideas and rational thinking. In Miller's opinion, the serious playwright must write social drama. The major dramas of Miller are tragedies, and they represent a socio-political criticism of contemporary culture. He uses concrete symbols for the social realities of his time. Miller's protagonists and their surroundings are in close interaction with each other. His style is penetrative: each paragraph, each sentence presents his thoughts lucidly. In his essay, "On Social Plays," Miller argues that the complex nature of man and drama cannot be sacrificed to depict a man only as a psychological or social entity on the stage, but as a balanced concept between the two. This paper discusses how Miller's depiction of society in his plays reveals his social concerns.

© 2010 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

The Story of Jerry and the Dog: A Study of Edward Albee's\ The Zoo Story

-- Uma Neela

The Zoo Story (1961), by Edward Albee, is a play with two characters, Jerry and Peter, the names of two of his friends. The play, with its black humor, has an air of abandon about it. For his material, Albee drew upon his own poverty and his experiences while working as a Western Union delivery boy. This paper discusses how in the play, Albee created the menacing, world-weary, but highly articulate Jerry, to give unfettered expression to his sharply critical view of the conventional, bourgeois world, embodied by Peter. Albee gives us a peep into the inner life of Jerry and Peter and how their sensibilities respond to the existential choices that have to be made. In the play, the searchlight is on the fundamental human values. Albee uses Jerry to voice his own anger, just as John Osborne used Jimmy Porter to attack the social, political, economic, and religious notions prevalent during his time. Jerry's language, like Jimmy's, is quite acerbic and aggressive, something that the American audiences were not used to. Despite its brevity, The Zoo Story established itself as emblematic of the age that produced it. A parable of alienation and spiritual dislocation, the play dramatizes the way people exist, afraid of aloneness, yet equally wary of making contact. Thus, by juxtaposing the opposites, the play is able to generate much of its tension.

© 2010 IUP. All Rights Reserved.