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New Indian English Poetry: Anand Kumar’s Phantasmal Pulsation
--V V B Rama Rao
A distinguished new artefact has been emerging as new poetry written by our poets in English. Current poets of the category of Anand Kumar have been enlarging the horizons of imaginative thinking and scintillatingly brief expression. Anand Kumar is a medical scientist of repute, thinking and expressing along fresh lines of creativity. He came up with a theory of his own practice. His uniqueness lies, among several things (which are shown in the paper), in the declaration he makes in earnest in his ‘poet’s note’. With a deep understanding of our native ethos (his poetic work has a strong strain of Nativism). Fancy, fantasy, dream condition, eeriness and holiness are all seen and, more importantly, felt in his creativity. He has a deep understanding of ancient foreign lore, literature, painting and music which he displays with deftness. He declares that there are dreams, silences and screams, noises of varied effects, inspirations whipped with vigor and crafted emotions. The reader appreciates this intellectualization of the energies preceding mind and speech.
© 2015 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Cut-Up Voices in Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World
--Tania Mary Vivera
Culture is an ensemble of narratives held together by collective memories and habitualized forms of storytelling. Cultural narratology explores the ways in which the formal properties of novels manifest the covert mental assumptions and cultural practices and form cultural identities of a given period. But the medley of voices burrowing for a cultural space is no longer remediated just linguistically but is represented in its veritable form as a cacophony of multimodal signifiers such as space, typography, layout, color, visual images, non-sequential reading pathways, tactility, etc. Woman’s World, a collage novel by British artist, Graham Rawle, has been created entirely from fragments of text clipped from the 1960s women’s magazines and invokes the narrator Norma’s obsession with these magazines and traverses the psyche of the narrator in search of a stable identity. It is also a cultural archive of the fashion and life style obsessed. Norma’s transgendered narrative voice emerges out of the collaged shards of text through a mosaic of prescriptive high society magazine directives on who a woman is and what a woman should be. This paper analyzes the feminine voices warped by the peppy wisdom and inane optimism of the 1960s women’s magazines and the distorted voice of transvestite Roy cross-dressing as Norma wedged in the gendered fetters of modern society. Cultural narratology interspersed with gender studies is used to study the cut-out text and visual artifacts for the cultural and stylistic innuendoes of the magazinespeak and the clustered identity of the narrator reappropriated through the collage novel.
© 2015 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Death as the ‘Datum’ in Alcestis and Svapnavāsavadattam:
A Comparative Analysis
--GRK Murty
Euripides (485 BC-406 BC) was the youngest of the great triad of Greek tragic poets. It is said that Euripides wrote the play, Alcestis as the fourth play in a tetralogy and Alfred Schone considers it “a parody, and finds it very funny.” But according to Gilbert Norwood, the play dealing “poignantly with the most solemn interests of humanity” and “imitating actual life more closely, belongs to the sphere of tragedy” though “presenting comic features.” Bhasa, who must have lived in the second half of the 4th century BC, is often referred to as the “Father of the Indian drama.” He is an accomplished Sanskrit poet of a very high order. He is known for his dramatic style and his plays are marked by profound psychological insight, striking figures of speech, brilliant epigrams and have all the navarasas—humor, heroism, surprise, anger, pity, terror, serenity, devotion and love. He wrote the play, Svapnavasavadattam, by borrowing a theme from Gunadhya’s Brihatkatha. In both these plays that poignantly deal with the most solemn interests of humanity, the plot revolves around ‘death’—real or faked. This paper attempts to analyze and comparatively evaluate the grace with which the playwrights handle the conflict with death and the challenges—unequal relationship of man to woman, death versus character, sacrifice versus self-interest and object versus subject, etc.,—emerging therefore.
© 2015 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Developing the Interpersonal Communication Skills of College Students
Through Poetry: A Classroom Study
--S Ramaraju and S P Dhanavel
Developing the Interpersonal Communication Skills (IPCS) of students at college level is emphasized by the academia and industry to bridge the gap between academic skills and employability skills. Among the qualities sought by the employers from their employees, IPCS are considered the most important. This paper highlights the importance of developing the IPCS, presents the need for academic interventions, and explores the use of poetry in English Language Teaching (ELT), Communication Skills and IPCS development. Poetry is basically a rich source of emotional and interactional diversity. Therefore, this paper argues that a variety of emotions embodied in poetry in English from various countries can be a valuable resource in developing the IPCS of students. It explains the task design, activities, and observations and presents the findings through the response from students. It also presents the limitations of the study undertaken and scope for further research.
© 2015 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Team Teaching Strategy for Conducive Classroom Learning
--J Sundarsingh
The style of imparting specific language skills at the tertiary level is influenced positively by collaborative team teaching strategies. The teachers benefit more as they interact with each other frequently for designing and implementing tasks. The paper discusses the methods of involving three teachers for teaching in a classroom of 66 students through mutual accommodation. The creation of team teaching strategy was to facilitate undistracted learning environment as it had been difficult for guiding mentally-distracted L2 learners through the learning process to acquire language skills in a larger classroom. The study showed that the suggested strategy enabled teachers of different teaching skills to collaborate, help and support one another and supervise the process of learning more closely. The classroom environment was made suitable to learning through instruction, lecturing and pre-designed activities and enabled the learners of the same grade to learn language skills comfortably. Three faculty members (T1, T2, T3) were involved in training in language production, both in written and spoken forms and created a ‘conducive classroom’ situation. There was a gradual increase of student participation by the end of the study. The restricted flexible strategy also enabled the teachers to improve their teaching skills and correct the pedagogical imbalance by sharing their expertise with each other. The tasks were designed in such a way that the teaching expertise of each teacher involved in team teaching was used to the fullest possible extent. Team teaching also facilitated teachers to improve their teaching skills, though it had its own negative impact on the approach.
© 2015 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
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