|
Simulacra of Identity Interstices:
The Select Fiction of Chitra Banerjee and Jhumpa Lahiri
--K Narasimha Rao
This paper studies the select fiction of Chitralekha Banerjee Divakaruni and Jhumpa Lahiri and the ineluctable gaps that far speak of the divergent concerns of the postmodern and postcolonial times to evolve into meta-narratives. These writers who settled in the adopted nations charged up the myriad voices through centering the eloquent subaltern in their texts that crossed the fluid geographies and stern cultures. Their cultural worlds open up numerous possibilities of exploration which at best can be done through fictive narratives conveying the bespeaking realities through the powerful art of personalization. Both Divakaruni and Lahiri weave their stories with a realistic base—stories that speak so eloquently of the poignant self. This equipoise and the elegant literary transport of these writers make us revisit Homi Bhabha who turns to Levinasian ethics to evaluate, “the ‘art-magic’ of the contemporary novel lies in its way of ‘seeing inwardness from the outside.’”
© 2015 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
A Comparative Study of the Works of Anita Nair and Vikram Seth
--Jayashree Hazarika and Maya Vinai
Indian English literature has been steadily rising in eminence and two writers from this literature who have been recognized worldwide are Anita Nair and Vikram Seth. This paper presents a comparative study of these two writers. Both the writers are known to dabble with different genres with equal ease. Comparison is done on the aspect of travel that both Seth and Nair explores. Also, the paper emphasizes on the aspect of diaspora that seems to creep into their works, be it internal or external diaspora. The paper also examines how the motif of music and performing art are handled by both these writers.
© 2015 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Articulation of ‘Selfhood’ with the Intervention of Postmodernism
in Monica Ali’s In the Kitchen
--Abhisarika Prajapati
Monica Ali is known as a celebrated novelist of fiction in English. She is a Bangladesh-born writer and generally considered as an expatriate writer. Her first work of fiction Brick Lane presents a hot discussion on the emotional confusion of migrants and their world. Her third novel is far from these issues of diasporic sensibility but it presents an authentic picture of postmodern man who struggles to articulate his selfhood in the age of extremes and uncertainties. Monica Ali in this work has tried to examine man’s existential tension and conflicts related to his self and surrounding. The postmodern age is a time of incessant choosing and world-communication with an irony of lack of any definite communication. Amid the confused parody, the postmodernist sails often getting lost and coming to grief. This paper is a sincere attempt to make a survey of the characters of In the Kitchen for articulation of selfhood with the intervention of postmodernism in this paradoxical world.
© 2015 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Walking with Shadows and the Critique of the Evolutionary Character
of Nigerian Narratives
--Ignatius Chukwumah
The emergence of full-blown representation of same-sex sexual relationship in the Nigerian literary tradition, courtesy of Walking with Shadows (2005), demonstrates a unique expression of the universal human will hitherto unknown in the Nigerian literary tradition. In analyzing Walking with Shadows, this paper argues that the Darwinist tendency, the evolutionary character embodied in conventional Nigerian narratives, is undermined in a number of respects. Since no same-sex sexual partners are primed by evolution for reproduction of humankind, this sexual phenomenon as demonstrated by the central character of this work is thus not only monumentally anti-evolutionary, but also immensely anti-continuation of the human occupation of the earth through biological reproduction. The above tendency partly accounts for why the major same-sex character’s kin and society cannot understand him. Walking with Shadows would be read against some conventional works in the tradition in order to show how the vital indices of identity and marked kinship lubricants indigenous to Africa, and hence Darwinian, are upstaged, as it also adds an interesting literary dimension to Nigerian literature by varying the usual.
© 2015 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Not a Literature of Lament: An Analysis of Emerging Themes
and Trends in Tamil Dalit Literature
--K A Geetha
The emergence of Tamil Dalit literature in the 1990s has led to a corpus of novels, short stories, poems and autobiographies. The general impetus in these writings is to expose the agonized and marginalized existence of Dalits. Are Tamil Dalit literary works merely “narratives of suffering”? This paper argues that Tamil Dalit literature is not merely a literature of lament and frustration, though pain and loss continues to be one of its major themes. The various contexts and heterogeneous experiences of Dalit communities make it a rich source of Dalit culture, tradition and language. This paper discusses the diverse themes and trends prevalent in Tamil Dalit literature and emphasizes the importance of translating these works into English.
© 2015 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
‘Invocation to Memory Enveloped by Fog’: An Introduction to Missing Person,
the 2014 Nobel Laureate Modiano’s Nouveau Roman
--P Suneetha
Robert Modiano, a well-known novelist in France but not highly known anywhere else, won the most prestigious French prize the Prix Goncourt in 1978 for his novel Missing Person. The Nobel Academy awarded him the 111th Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014. His novel Missing Person, an unconventional detective, is about Guy Roland (Jimmy Pedro Stern/Pedro McEvoy), the protagonist and a victim to amnesia, who loses his memory and ventures to know about himself. As a pragmatic practitioner of ‘meditation on identity,’ he turns to solving his own mystery. Like a seeker, he makes full use of former Detective Agency’s files including directories, yearbooks, photographs, police files, vague testimonies and newspaper clippings of all kinds going back half a century and making a rigorous search by discontinuity and turbulence, of knowing about himself and his past. In the end, he realizes that the person he is seeking will never be found, his identity as ephemeral as “the sand holds the traces of our footsteps but a few moments.” This elegant novel runs like a typical Nouveau Roman as many issues remain mostly unresolved and unanswered. With its intricacies and subtleties and its colloidal and unadorned prose style, “la petite musique”, as the French say, the novel like Marcel Proust’s: À larecherche du temps perdu conveniently releases the creative energies of past experience from the hidden store of the unconscious.
© 2015 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Tess of the D’Urbervilles: An Eco-Critical Reading
--Ram Narayan Panda
Thomas Hardy’s epoch-making novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles had triggered controversies of different kinds with regard to religion and sexuality. But in the wake of the rise of interest in ecology and its concomitant bearing on hermeneutics, Tess of the D’Urbervilles warrants re-explication of the text in the light of the twin notions of anthropocentrism and non-anthropocentrism. This paper puts together observations oriented to demonstrating how the twin notions operate interpenetrated.
© 2015 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Harsha’s Nāgānanda: An Appraisal in the Light of the Rasa Siddhānta
--GRK Murty
Vakyam rasatmakam kavyam’—Rasa is the soul of poetry, says Acarya Viswanatha in his Sahityadarpana. Indeed, Rasa was accepted as the fundamental element of poetry much before even Bharatamuni, the author of Natyasastra. Taittiriyopanisad says: “raso vai sah, rasam hyevayam labdhavanandi bhavati”1—supreme is the essence of rasa and therefore wherever humans find rasa, they become immersed in it, experiencing bliss. And thus there is no wonder if Bharatamuni said, “nahi rasadrte kascidarthah pravartate”2— nothing in drama is pravrtta—attained without rasa. Bharatamuni has also explained the process of accomplishment of rasa: “yatha hi nana vyañjanausadhidravyasanyogad rasanispattih / … /tatha nanabhavopagata api sthayino bhava rasatvamapnuvanti”3—just as spices and herbs together enhance the taste of food, likewise Bhavas (emotions) and Rasa embellish each other. Against this backdrop, an attempt is made here to examine how Harsha accomplished rasanispatti in his play, Nagananda.
© 2015 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
|
