Trivial but Crucial: Images of Waste in Don DeLillo’s Underworld

-- Reetinder Joshi and Gurpreet kaur

Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1998) focuses on the postmodern popular culture, depicting the accumulation of heaps of waste due to mass consumption. It locates the events in the technologically-oriented environment. Underworld depicts the latter half of the twentieth century American life. Apart from this, the novel highlights the production and dumping of waste. For the purpose, DeLillo uses Bobby Thompson’s home run, throws light on the commercial waste, looks at food from a new perspective, and studies nuclear waste, it being the most durable and long-lasting form of waste. This paper uses Underworld as a lens to explore how DeLillo dramatizes the events in his fiction with its insistence on waste, junk, and rubbish in the material and immaterial world. The focus is on how he discusses the trivial but crucial nature of waste.

© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Things Fall Apart: Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, a World in Transition

-- Sharmita Lahiri

The space of the living dead, the zone of paralysis of the mind and spirit, is, in Sherwood Anderson’s vision, Winesburg, Ohio, the habitat of the grotesques. The small town Winesburg, Ohio emblematizes the deliquescence of a world in a state of transition. Its ties with the past have been severed under the impact of the machine age, but newer possibilities that the death of the old allows are yet to be discovered. Anderson chronicles the sexual and social isolation, vocational failure, and unfulfilled longing of individuals whom the changed socioeconomic milieu has made conscious of the futility and absurdity of the human existence, but who have not explored the possibilities that the changed world has to offer. His view of small town America in a period of transition is one of unsettlement, stagnation, and estrangement. His men and women, like Albert Camus’s absurd hero Sisyphus, are conscious of the fragility and futility of life; but unlike Sisyphus, they fail to realize that the triumph of human life is in the zeal to struggle. They are thus failed grotesques, who, like T S Eliot’s Hollow Men, are beings of nothingness, “shape without form, shade without color / paralyzed force, gesture without motion.”

© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Assault of Radiance: Patriarchy as Looked upon by Sylvia Plath and Suchitra Panigrahi

-- Pradip Kumar Patra

Sylvia Plath is far from being exhausted. There is an incomplete task, by the scholars and critics, of linking her to the women poets all over the world. How the women poets put forth their experiences in various languages of the world is yet to be explored up to a satisfactory level. Suchitra Panigrahi, one of the leading contemporary women poets, articulates her experiences of gender-based sufferings in her Oriya poems. This paper brings to light the thematic concerns, tones, protest, adjustment, and images of both poets. Their poetry is not just a self-expression, but also a self-realization. The paper maps the interface between the two.

© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

From Self-Denigration to Self-Realization and Selfhood: A Study of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple

-- Simmi Gurwara

Women of African descent, who could afford to put their pen to paper, have challenged the status quo in the cultural, political, social, and spiritual realms of their community by using their craft to represent women who defy traditional roles and resist the strictures of oppression. They lend voice to women who have long been silenced and discriminated against, women who have the status of a mule, to say the least. Black women writers from around the globe have been relentlessly struggling against racism, exploitation, gender oppression, and other human rights violations. The psychological and physiological ramifications of globalization have been a major part of the subject matter of the contemporary African writers. With regard to Africa and African culture, the international slave trade and colonialism compelled significant and growing contact with globalization in its nascent manifestations. What black women writers want is to have their say in global decisions concerning survival and the future of humanity. They need access to and participation in the advancement of globalization. This paper critically examines The Color Purple, the highly acclaimed work of Alice Malsenior Walker, and celebrates the unflagging spirit of womanhood.

© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

‘The Old Rules Aren’t Always Right’: Women on the Move in Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife

-- D Nagarani

Migrant writings have always formed an intrinsic part of World Literature, yielding several insights into the myriad problems of existence. Thus, they contribute to the enhancement of the corpus of World Literature. Yet, migrant writings often tend to get misinterpreted and classified under the subgenre ‘Diasporic writings.’ However, migrant writings are more complex in nature as well as in their treatment of issues, and deserve much more serious attention. The writings of Chinese American women, with their divergent output, are a case in point. Among this corpus, Amy Tan occupies a special literary space with her unique representation of the suppression of women by patriarchy as well as the forces of customs and tradition. This paper attempts to contextualize Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife and also locate how certain ancient Chinese customs have become an obstacle to the progress of Chinese women. The paper also explores how the Chinese women have broken out of certain conventional constraints and emerged as independent individuals in their own right.

© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.