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Supervision Without Vision: Post-Foucauldian Surveillance
in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451
--Abdol Hossein Joodaki
Ray Bradbury, in his most significant and popular work, Fahrenheit 451, paints a futuristic, dystopian, and dysfunctional society in which possessing and reading books and any exercise of thought are illegal. Firemen, in the story, burn all books in order to prevent proliferation of independent thinking. Fahrenheit 451 uses the conventions of science fiction to illustrate the deception of government through censorship for suppressing thought. The novel’s general atmosphere of suppression, alienation, fear, anxiety, and mistrust is associated with a surveillance society. This study tries to shed light on both Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian theories of surveillance in the story. Private and public institutions in the story are monitored via disciplinary techniques. By becoming ‘docile’ bodies, citizens lose their individuality. However, the novel also depicts interference of electronic technology in subjugating individuals in digital, hyperreal world.
© 2015 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Narrative Negotiations: The Storyteller in Jeanette Winterson’s
The Powerbook and Lighthousekeeping
--Sonia Kotiah
Focusing on the novels The Powerbook and Lighthousekeeping by contemporary British writer, Jeanette Winterson, this paper discusses the figure of the storyteller in the context of postmodern narrative negotiations. The analysis charts the presence of an often active storyteller whose intense preoccupation with the creation of new worlds leads to innovative language. To this end, the paper argues that Winterson’s work is imbued with many characteristics associated with postmodernism, including intertextuality, parody, pastiche, selfreflexivity, fragmentation, the questioning of master narratives, the problematizing of closure, the valorization of instability, and the rejection of coherence. The postmodern stance of Winterson’s storyteller clearly aims to challenge the patriarchal and heterosexist discursive practices by encouraging an oppositional position. Particularly concerned with creating new spaces for articulating and celebrating marginalized identities and desires and clearly repudiating a ‘master’ narrative, Winterson’s strategy is to give voice to alternative narratives and to target the fixed, unitary narrative that depicts whole and coherent individuality.
© 2015 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Trauma and Collective Memory
in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and A Mercy
--C L Shilaja
This paper documents Toni Morrison’s approach to community as a source of enrichment and healing in the novels Beloved and A Mercy. Her writing attempts at constructing a communal identity for her readers and characters. She explains to Gilroy (1993) that she writes “with a specific aim in order to enlighten black people.” Morrison attempts to reconnect present-day African American readers to their historical and cultural past. The reclamation of history is made through the communal identity by bearing witness to their lives as slaves, which has remained untold or unremembered. The plots of her novels explore the various ways in which trauma is present and alive among the characters who represent aspects of African American history and community. It also emphasizes the creative processes through which her African American characters search, share, and recreate their own distinct cultural memories upon which to build an identity. The paper looks into Morrison’s two most notable novels, Beloved and A Mercy, for its retrieval of communal identity.
© 2015 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Intercultural Competence and the Teaching of Indian Fiction in English:
Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things
--Rajeshwar Mittapalli
The God of Small Things is certainly rooted in Indian culture, but its author Arundhati Roy’s exemplary intercultural competence renders it easy to teach in a variety of cultural contexts. This fact is amply testified by its forming part of required reading in a number of university courses across the world. Roy employs several thematic and linguistic devices to ensure the international reader’s easy access to the novel. Among these devices are the many western characters that populate the novel, Indian characters’ cross-cultural experience abroad, their professing Christianity, their subscription to the Communist ideology, linking India’s colonial past to its current history, intertextuality mainly by means of embedding literary classics and media texts in the novel, and even the multicultural trivia scattered around the novel. Apart from all this, and in linguistic terms, Roy clearly suggests that barring a few characters, all speak in English for most part of the novel. These devices help the readers overcome the cultural barriers posed by such Indian phenomena as caste and untouchability and render the novel highly amenable to teaching in any cultural context.
© 2015 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
New Trends in Postmodern Tiv Comedy and Comic Forms
in a Technologized Digiperformance
--Godwin Aondofa Ikyer
Traditional Tiv comedy and comic forms flaunt their cultural and artistic properties based on the spatial bursts of sociocultural energy, itself reliant on worldviews, interests, thoughts, and values qualitative and quantitative to traditional components of life and metaphysics. The dictates of time and development and the ascendency of western inspired character of technological and scientific dynamics of social, economic, and political orientation and postmodern existence have tended to change the pattern and character of traditional information and entertainment generation and dissemination from its oral formation and age-old tradition of handing down materials and experience through elders from generation to generation and knowledge and wisdom from elders to a digital form which co-habituates the old and the modern to a synergy, opens up traditional cultures, and links up extreme communities to a large global space. Much as the phenomenon is creating plural identities and all sorts of contrary alien values, it has forged unifying properties and produced endless possibilities and potentialities for the traditional oral art forms, most of which were threatened to extinction. The paper explores and illuminates Tiv comedy and comic forms as they hybridize in what the writer terms a technologized digiperformance. The paper examines the changing trend in Tiv comedy and comic forms in its manifestations in the digital technology, in its new artistic secondary production, commoditization and consumption, and in its new shape capable of achieving wider patronage, cultural and cross-cultural unity, preservation, academic discourse, and national and global development.
© 2015 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Mrichchhakatika, an Atypical Sanskrit Play
--G R K Murty
Mrichchhakatika (The Little Clay Cart) is quite different from all other Sanskrit plays. It is said to have been written by a king named Sudraka sometime in the first or second century BC. Unlike the many Sanskrit dramas that have borrowed their themes either from mythology or history, Mrichchhakatika, which in the canons of Sanskrit dramaturgy is known as Prakarana, ‘a play of invention,’ having drawn the plot from ‘real life,’ depicts classical Indian culture in its varied richness. It is an atypical Sanskrit play offering deeper insights into the sociocultural fabric of the contemporary society as defined by its politico-economic conditions. An attempt has been made in this paper to trace the atypical nature of the play in portraying its main characters—Carudatta and Vasantasena—and the different layers of the society that is a mix of good and bad interplaying all through, offering a profound understanding of the Age, besides reflecting the private fears and insecurities and the joys and hopes of the people.
© 2015 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Of Variety and Brevity, and Values and Wisdom:
A Study of V V B Rama Rao’s Poetry
--Duni Chand Chambial
V V B Rama Rao’s poems exhibit the poet’s adroitness in handling his themes with clinical precision and mastery of a literary critic. He nowhere falters: the ideas have been skillfully woven into the texture of the poems, leaving the readers more informed, more enlightened, and a bit more traversed voyager on the planes of imagination. The collection is full of word paintings, which one would like to gaze at, every time finding something new to invoke imagination and whet sensibility. This paper shows how the variety of Rama Rao’s themes evidences his capacity to make anything under the sun the subject of his poetry, how his experience and erudition are reflected in his literary allusions and examples and images drawn from his surroundings, and how his work speaks volumes about his Nativist sensibility and manifest fervor.
© 2015 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Book Review
--Cosmic Rhythm: Book of Life
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