Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March: A Variation on the Picaresque

-- Ramesh K Misra

Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March treats journey or exploration as a metaphor. Adopting a picaresque narrative, Bellow puts the story in the first person recollected style, wherein the protagonist narrates his own tale in his own idiom and from his personal experience in a tone of informal intimacy. Though Bellow does not literally borrow from the Spanish predecessors, he retains some of their major techniques. While the reliance of Bellow on the picaresque reflects his disenchantment with the current trend in the modern fiction which emphasizes the deracination of the individual in the mechanized society of our times, the narrative technique, largely episodic in nature, does provide him with the necessary tool to review the values and perspectives as an antidote against the current fear that our civilization has already reached a terminal point.

© 2008 IUP . All Rights Reserved.

Rediscovering Lost Horizons: A Reading of Toni Morrison's Jazz

-- Binod Mishra and Pashupati Jha

Man has, at all times, been lured by the avidity to disentangle the conundrum of life's perpetual peregrination. This has ignited poets and novelists to discover something substantial in describable terms. Toni Morrison is one of such novelists, who, because of their deep understanding of human pathos, born of split identity and wounded psyche, record these experiences through fiction. The foundation of her much acclaimed novel, Jazz (1992), consists of universal concerns of humanity, focusing on the relevance of human existence in an indifferent universe. Existential thinking, which is liberally scattered in her work, is all set to discover the daintiness of human sensitivity. The remarkable feat of putting her protagonists vis-à-vis the dreary reality makes them react spontaneously without hinging onto any garb. The laceration of soul by the inside as well as the outside forces turns out plausibly with exquisite focus on details. The calm and poised lifestyle is brutally smashed to embark them upon a sojourn to get a vestige of their relation to this bigger reality. Rest is denied unless they tread on. This paper endeavors to rediscover the lost horizons in Jazz. Morrison delineates the issues of the protagonists so lucidly that the question of survival becomes vital. If there are no discords and disagreements in life, the subtleties of living become humdrum. The way Morrison's characters solve the intricacies of life speak volumes about their potentialities. Human life, which is so full of forward motion, may at times come across pulls and pressures. The vitality of life may often get frittered away, yet the human will never gives in, since the musicality of it, like jazz, has enough scope for improvisation. This may be felt when the human beings strive to rediscover the lost horizons and try to keep their houses in order. Morrison has been successful in making her readers realize this fact.

© 2008 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Fourth World Literature: Representation and Contestation in Scott Momaday's The Ancient Child and Narendra Jadhav's Outcaste

-- Raja Sekhar Patteti

Geroge Manuel and M Poslun's The Fourth World: An Indian Reality and George Brotherston's Book of the Fourth World paved the way for the `Fourth World Literary Identity' with Native American, Native Canadian, Australian Aboriginal, Indian Dalit and Maori New Zealand literatures. Among the Native literatures, Native American literature with its extraordinary diversity of subjective positions of natives created a confluence of narratives and dismantled the conventionally recorded history. It is in the light of the explication of the objective conditions of Natives of America and Dalits of India that a comparative study of Native American and Dalit literature of India is understood. Scott Momaday's The Ancient Child represents the Native American society and literature, which is a proud proclamation of the lost identity in the light of Western assimilation. Narendra Jadhav's Outcaste represents the Indian Dalit literature and the social metamorphosis of Dalits in India. The thematic concerns of these two novels are analyzed from the perspective of postcolonialism, postmodernism, narratology and the politics of reading to establish relative comparison.

© 2008 IUP . All Rights Reserved.

Ethnicity and Identity: An Approach to Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake

-- Smita Jha

The question of identity is always a difficult one, especially for those who are culturally displaced—as immigrants are—and for those who grow up in two worlds simultaneously, as is the case with the second-generation immigrants. Jhumpa Lahiri highlights the problem of ethnicity and identity in her novel, The Namesake, in a poignant manner. Lahiri brings her touching style and acute observation about what it means to be a part of an immigrant family to the cross-cultural, multigenerational story of the Ganguli family. There is a feeling of alienation, a feeling of being lonely in the crowd all through the novel. For immigrants, the challenges of exile, the loneliness, the constant sense of alienation, and the knowledge of and longing for a lost world are more explicit and distressing than for their children. Lahiri, in the novel, does a wonderful job of exploring what every generation of immigrants goes through.

© 2008 IUP . All Rights Reserved.

Memory, Heroism and Identity: Jane Yolen's Holocaust Fiction for Children

-- Anna Kurian

This paper examines two fictional narratives for children by Jane Yolen, both of which deal with the Holocaust—Briar Rose and The Devil's Arithmetic.The need to remember the Holocaust and the effort it cost those who survived are the central motifs of these two novels. To put the horrors of the Holocaust behind one and create a life in America is what many Holocaust survivors did. Each of the novels deals with one such family and the ways in which the Holocaust and its memories had shaped the lives of the survivors and their families. The paper works with the notion that remembering and forgetting, especially in conjunction with an event of the scale of the Holocaust, is rarely a simple matter. Moreover, the ways in which one remembers such an event shape the consequent identity adopted by the individual. The paper examines the role of memory in the reshaping of identity: as Jews, as survivors, as heroes, as victims, and finally, as Jewish Americans.

© 2008 IUP . All Rights Reserved.

Edward Albee's The Sandbox: A Study of the Dysfunctional Family

-- B Uma Neela

Edward Albee's works rank among the finest in the contemporary American theater. A recurring theme in Albee's plays—such as The Zoo Story, The Sandbox, The American Dream, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—is the problem of human communication in a world that has become increasingly callous. These plays synthesize the elements of realism and the Theater of the Absurd—a term coined by Martin Esslin, to refer to a specific type of plays, which became popular duringthe 1950s and 1960sand which, in Esslin's view, gave artistic expression to French Philosopher Albert Camus's philosophy as expounded in his 1942 essay, "The Myth of Sisyphus." Though Albee belongs to the Theater of the Absurd, he does not follow all the codes/rules of this movement. This article attempts a critical analysis of Edward Albee's early one-act play, The Sandbox, which in many ways anticipates the dysfunctional families that surface in The American Dream, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And A Delicate Balance. The article also includes a brief comparative analysis of The Sandbox and The American Dream.

© 2008 IUP . All Rights Reserved.

A Reader sans Reading of Poe's `The Cask of Amontillado'

-- D Venkataramanan

Edgar Allan Poe's works have stood the test of time, weathering many a severe storm of criticism. In this corpus, Poe's short stories have created an enviable niche in the literary firmament in spite of much criticism. And what does not elude the readers but captures their attention is Poe's narrative strategy. This paper, analyzing Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado," reaffirms how his deft narration momentarily effaces the interpretative faculties of readers who merely tag along with the narration, lost in its intricacies. The process of interpretation begins only after the story ends on a bizarre note when the readers snap out of their reverie. While highlighting how Poe performs this mesmerizing act through several literary elements like irony, foreshadowing, grotesque humor and symbolism, this paper also reveals how the reader, in the process of reading, keeps role-playing all the possible characters, little realizing that he/she is a reader, endowed with the duty of not merely reading but also interpreting what has been played out by the author. The paper reiterates Poe's ingenuity in storytelling and showcases how reading "The Cask of Amontillado" is a unique experience, where there is an intense and involved reading, but there is no reader but only Poe and his story.

© 2008 IUP . All Rights Reserved.

Book Review

Understanding Language: A Basic Course in Linguistics

To describe the world around us, to negotiate our way through complex situations and relationships in our lives, to share our feelings and thoughts, we use language. Language is not only a tool for communication, but also an intrinsic aspect of our identity. Though language is quite significant in our lives, most of us are not aware of the incredible complexity of all the elements that make up our communication system. Against this backdrop, the book, Understanding Language: A Basic Course in Linguistics, by Elizabeth Grace Winker, focuses on exploring all the fascinating subsystems of language as well as how to make use of them.

--Author : Elizabeth Grace Winker,Reveiwed by Dasarathi Behera

© 2008 Elizabeth Grace Winker. All Rights Reserved. IUP holds the copyright for the review.