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The Politics of Watching in the Narratives of Detection and Crime:
A Study of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The Erasers
-- Anindita Dey
The formal detective novel most often affirms the ways of knowing as a given, thereby investing the authority and power of watching solely to the detective/investigator. These narratives mediate political, moral and epistemological queries or truths through the surveillance and rationalistic interpretation of investigators. Narrative pleasure in these texts is produced and circulated through the detective’s action of keeping an omniscient watch over the guilty other to preserve the innocence and harmony of community life. Contrastively, in postmodern detective fiction, watching takes a new pattern or meaning as power derives a different ideological perspective. Watching in these texts is not centralized on the aesthetic and ideological mediation of discipline and social surveillance; rather it is represented as a negative hermeneutics of power. The divide between the detective and the criminal’s world is blurred by dissolving the knowledge of who is watching or pursuing whom. To this extent, narrative pleasure is circulated through the reversal of the usual order. Thus, the paper examines two narratives, Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s The Erasers, which analyze the autonomy and authority on watching and surveillance.
© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Dialectics of Perception: Europe as a Subtext
in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things
--Shruti Das
The narrative of Arundhati Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things, subtly allegorizes a Europe which is present as a subtext in this novel. Imperialism, communism, Cold War and Germany prevail as a leitmotif, especially, through multiple references to the American musical, The Sound of Music. Roy conveys the human experience communicated to her and incorporates it into the body of her narrative. This paper posits that the politics of the novel is encoded in the subtext of the narrative, where Roy uses her imagination of Europe, in and after the Cold War, as a vehicle of postcolonial resistance. This paper attempts to unravel the dialectics of Roy’s perception in imagining a Europe in the postcolonial Indian scenario, exposing the mockery of social systems and human values.
© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
The Hysteric as a Chronicler in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
--Nilanjana Ghosal and Srirupa Chatterjee
Survival, a signature theme in Margaret Atwood’s works, is once again celebrated in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) wherein the narrator protagonist transforms herself into a chronicler and using her narrative sustains herself in a fictionalized dystopic world—Gilead. The present paper claims that the protagonist, Offred, in negotiating her agency as a chronicler in a totalitarian phallogocentric world, adopts the role of a ‘hysteric’. This argument is premised on Juliet Mitchell’s psychoanalytic concept of the hysteric which claims that for a woman to produce her narrative in a phallogocentric world, she has to be a hysteric. Furthering this thesis, Offred’s past and present in the novel are compared to the Lacanian Imaginary and the Symbolic, thereby demonstrating that the narrator protagonist’s life is never free from the dictates of phallogocentric law. In order to survive such oppression, Offred, in The Handmaid’s Tale, becomes a hysteric chronicler whose narrative simultaneously becomes the symbol of her resistance and her means to survive.
© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Arthur Miller’s All My Sons in the Light of Aristotle’s Poetics
--Raj Kumar Mishra
Arthur Miller has been concerned in most of his plays with the socioeconomic effects of ‘Great Depression’ of American civilization. The disintegration of American dream was close to Miller’s sensibility. All My Sons, Miller’s first successful play, gave him professional recognition and an identity as a promising playwright. In All My Sons, Miller has depicted the dark side of American dream by exposing immoral activities in the life of his protagonist Joe Keller. In All My Sons, Miller deals with the themes of materialism, wartime profiteering, and man’s relationship with and obligation to society above and beyond the concerns of his own family circle. The present paper attempts to look at Miller’s play All My Sons from the perspective of Aristotle’s Poetics, ignoring his concept of tragic hero.
© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Masculinity and Nationalism in Aurobindo’s Perseus the Deliverer
--Uttam Jadhav and Tripti Karekatti
Masculinity often gets attached to nationalism when nationalism is linked with the struggle for freedom. Nationalist leaders of most of the countries in the world equate manhood or masculinity with warriorhood to persuade masses to fight against the colonizers. Sri Aurobindo, a staunch follower of nationalism, advocates militant nationalism in the works produced during the early phase of his life. In Perseus the Deliverer, Aurobindo connects masculinity with nationalism to revive the lost spirit of the countrymen. He strongly connects ‘India’ with ‘mother’ and appeals to the sons of the country to deliver their ‘motherland’ from the shackles of the colonizers. Aurobindo intertwined religion with nationalism and regarded it as a divine act. In pre-colonial social ordering of India, ‘kshatriyahood’ or militant masculinity had a limited space. Under the impact of the British (and Victorian masculinity), Aurobindo, like other nationalists (M M Dutt and Bankimchandra Chatterjee), preferred hyper-masculine ‘Kshatriyahood’ to ‘Brahminhood’. This change in the colonial ordering of Indian social system is recorded in this play. Traditional Brahminical hegemonic masculinity is shown under crisis under the impact of the new order of the day in which Kshatriyahood was gaining increasing importance.
© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Analyzing Modern Woman’s Quest and Suffering:
A Psychological Exploration of Muriel Spark’s Novels
--Kirti Rajhans
Muriel Spark, an eminent novelist of postwar English fiction, specializes in the portrayal of women in her novels. She portrays the complexities, passions and dilemmas of a modern woman in a very subtle style. Spark’s depiction of the inner thoughts of a woman’s psyche reveals women’s sufferings and their lives in a very distinctive way. When we try to undertake a psychological exploration of female protagonists of Spark’s novels, we find that the experiences of these characters are complex and many times perplexed owing to the burden of their social responsibilities. The predominant aspect of their portrayal is their quest for identity and selfhood. She presents different shades of modern women in the postwar period who have to face a psychological battle. They suffer being unable to get a strong foothold in the world and perplexed by the enigmatic nature of human relationships and their own desires to seek happiness. The author, through the inner reflections of her heroines, reveals their continuous efforts to seek power and a quest to find their unique identity in this world, which would give meaning to their existence. The present paper attempts in detail a psychological exploration of four such female protagonists of Muriel Spark’s novels.
© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Sita in Valmiki Ramayana: A Feminist Archetype!
--GRK Murty
In the Ramayana, Valmiki, perhaps with a feminist heart, chiseled Sita’s character as a harmonious embodiment of beauty, tenderness of heart, abundance of compassion, fidelity, wisdom of the truest type, courage of heart, and endurance, that served her well in constantly asserting herself for her rights—rights as defined by her value-system. But Indian feminists have often criticized Sita “as an overly-submissive wife who committed suicide for an ultimately untrusting husband” (Hirst and Lynn, 2004). It is also alleged that the ideal qualities of Sita as presented in the Ramayana are of her unquestioning subordination to the demands of her husband (Goldman and Sutherland, 2004). Against this backdrop, an attempt is made in this paper to trace evidence from the epic that argues contrary to these beliefs and presents ’s Sita as the feminist archetype.
© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Feminist Reading of Indian Epics:
Exploring Sita and Draupadi Through the Current Perception
--Hetal M Doshi
Recent debate on the situation of women in Indian society has roused wrath among the elite of the nation. It is disheartening to know that women are molested, raped and abused even in the 21st century. Equality, right, liberty and freedom are words unknown to nearly half the population of women. In this turbulent time, it is imperative for a layman to know the history and modern discernment of feminism in India. This paper is an attempt to portray the feminist history in India from a common man’s perspective. Women are expected to cherish values like obedience, self-denial, exterminate the ego, prioritize the family and live life with a sole aim of looking after the children. Unlike Western females, Indian women do not emphasize independence and autonomy. Despite such acquiescence and submission, instances of oppression and exploitation of women are increasing day by day. The paper attempts to evaluate the cause of women’s sufferings since the mythological era. The paper endeavors to discuss that male domination was not always the root cause for the plight of females. Equality can only be achieved by broadening the psychosomatic horizons of both the genders.
© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
‘I Want You Together, Mummy and Papa’: Detrimental Effect of Divorce
on Children – A Study of Aapka Bunti
--Anupama Shekhawat
The modern trauma that the children of divorced parents undergo is very painful. With cases of divorce on a sudden rise, divorce has become a major issue in our society. Mannu Bhandari (1931) is a prominent Indian author, popularly known for her two Hindi novels, Aapka Bunti and Mahabhoj. She has played a great role in portraying the society and bringing out its loam to the surface with her effective plot and skillful diction in her novel Aapka Bunti (1971). She sketches the existing world around her so wonderfully that the theme impacts powerfully on the readers. This novel forces us to think that before the parents become impatient and take a decision thinking that only one way out is divorce, they should ponder twice keeping in view the emotions and sentiments of their children. Probably then, they will be able to decide better and live happily. The theme is very popular but never presented with such intense fervor. The novel ends with an unstated message that a child requires love, care and bonding; he does not want to live with a single mother or single father, but wants both his parents to live together to nurture him and protect him. The present paper makes a thematic study of the poignant novel.
© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
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