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Negotiating Transnational Identities:
A Study of Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup
--Kusha Tiwari
This paper examines Nadine Gordimer’s post-apartheid novel The Pickup in the light of an all-inclusive social, political, and economic restructuring and reforms in South Africa after the demise of apartheid. South African democracy, in the new millennium, negotiates the process of globalization and its transnational responses that create new models of lopsided developments and opportunities in the civil society. It is not just globalization that has given rise to this asymmetrical access to economic resources; since the demise of apartheid, South Africa is faced with great influx of illegal immigrants and refugees from the neighboring states which further puts an excess load on the fledgling South African economy. In The Pickup, Gordimer explores these issues that are beyond the nation and its political imaginary. In the novel, she gives up her exclusive focus on South Africa and its national specificity and moves beyond to explore the idea of the nation less as a unified concept, more as an open society, in which freedom abounds beyond the abstract ideal. The paper analyzes how The Pickup presents a post-apartheid scenario of global and shifting identities wherein Gordimer rejects the idea of linear local trajectories of individual sensibilities and investigates the intersecting boundaries of varied local/global subjectivities and the continually evolving transnational identities in the contemporary globalized world.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Esiaba Irobi’s Youth Heroes and the Legitimization of Violent Militancy
--Chinenye Amonyeze
Esiaba Irobi recycles the mythic, ideological, and ritual properties of his Ngwa-Igbo society to enact new legends, myths, and heroic plots. In recent times, young Nigerian artists have been contributing to the creative consciousness of the youth in Nigeria through a style of writing fueled by seething anger, a call to social action that prescribes violent rebellion. Irobi is convinced that government leadership is evil, morally irresponsible, and deserving resistance by conscientious citizens. His plays generally display an overt desire to reallocate power to marginalized youth and embellish the repressive acts of the antagonistic forces against them to reflect the true situation of the Nigerian society. Through the act of rebellion or revolution, which is a major theme in Irobi’s oeuvre, these young Nigerian militants seek to redeem their self-esteem which has been abused by the establishment. A close reading of Irobi’s plays reveals a tendency to sanitize violence as an instrument for conflict resolution and social advancement. Irobi pushes the reader to analyze his young heroes’ actions beyond the physical and consider them as structural responses to institutionalized aggression.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
What the [Female] Body Remembers:
A Feminist Study of Shauna Singh Baldwin’s Narration of the Partition
--Maninder Kapoor and Seema Singh
Feminist narratology posits that gender must and does impact the course of a narrative and, in a sense, accounts for the difference and specificity of women’s writing. Women’s writing is “different” in that it gives voice to not only the whine and the whimper, but also the growl of the underdog. The growl defines women’s protest and vindicates the feminist narratological contention of “difference.” Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers serves as appropriate raw material in support of feminist narratological “difference.” This is because a woman’s narration and prioritization of events informs and inspires the telling of not only a personal story, but also the epic tale of the partition of India. The novel projects a vision of social and political history from the point of view of “the other” twice removed—first because it presents the view of woman in general, and second because it focuses on the view of the Sikh woman in particular, and thus is in a sense doubly marginalized. Also, what further brands it as exclusive womanspeak is its deliberate and self-conscious perpetuation and re-inscription of female body memory as also its unique selection of image and metaphor.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire:
A Study in Sexual/Textual Politics
--Ram Narayan Panda
Tennessee Williams’ famous play A Streetcar Named Desire uses a discourse that warrants explication in terms of certain popular parameters of feminist reading. The author’s attitude with regard to phallocentric orientation is rather complicated with the discourse used in the play falling into two distinct categories, that is, the dialogues attributed to characters and the stage directions. In fact, just as deconstructing the binary oppositions helps establish a dimension of sexist orientation in the play, defeating attempts at entitization/totalization in respect of ideas and characterization, the author too develops fractured dimensions in the light of the notion of trace or self-difference.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
The Kite Runner: A New Historicist Reading
--Suraj Gunwant and Rashmi Gaur
Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, even a decade after its publication, continues to remain a hit among readers worldwide. While the novel has been looked at from different theoretical prisms, the objective of this paper is to read the text from the New Historicism angle. The New Historicist study of The Kite Runner, informed as it is from the reading of influential works of Elizabethan critics such as Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose, intends to see how the struggles of varied ideological discourses—in this case, the oppressive Orientalist and the liberatory Postcolonialist narratives of the postmodern world that the text has as its context—that make up the world of ideas, of which the writer and the text are products themselves, become a site of struggle and interplay of antagonistic standpoints. Also, the reading includes looking at how the text, seemingly innocuous and ideologically insulated, becomes a neo-Orientalist discourse perpetuating dominant discourses around the text’s origin, that is, the social, political, and cultural state of Afghanistan, and shapes and in many ways aligns the readers’ perception of Afghanistan with prevailing ideas, and also implicitly, subconsciously contests and subverts it.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
“Buffalo Bill’s” by e e cummings: A Stylistic Approach
--D Gnanasekaran
This paper examines e e cummings’ poem “Buffalo Bill’s” against the backdrop of modern stylistics. The analysis begins with a brief outline of stylistics and the various types of stylistics, and then goes on to explore the linguistic nuances the poet has stylistically created in the said poem. The type of stylistics employed here combines the critical insights tempered by modern and postmodern critical approaches and the linguistic evidences discovered in the text, in order to enhance the appreciation of the poem, more with an eye on the special uses of the language by the poet, subtly embedded in the poem. It shows how the graphological, phonological, and syntactic foregroundings reflect the very nature and character of the American legendary personality Buffalo Bill. This poem is a creative artifact embodying his thrilling adventures through the different phases of his life and career. The linguistic manipulator, cummings, has consciously worked such devices into the poem so that the poem is structurally the story of a complete life, the life of Bill.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
The Evocation of Sringāra Rasa Through the Interplay of Karuna Rasa
and Vipralambhasringāra Rasa in Dinnaga’s Kundamāla
--G R K Murty
True to Anandavardhana’s dictum, “the significance of the ancient theme and emotional content should never be disturbed,” Dinnaga, the author of the play Kundamala, taking the episode of Sita’s banishment to the forest from Valmiki’s Ramayana, and tweaking it a little bit—crafting exquisite and delicate scenes in Acts 2-4 that are totally his own creation, all ultimately leading to the union of Sita with Rama—has produced a very aesthetically consummate work of lasting literary and dramatic merit. In this six-act play, we come across characters that are more human and realistic, uttering simple dialogues and verses that are forceful and rich in thought-content depicting the rapidity of thought and action. This paper examines how the interplay of karuna rasa and the intense vipralambhasringara rasa (love in separation), as though they were vying (spardha) with each other, strikingly evokes sringara rasa in sahrudayas—the prepared hearts.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Young, Talented, and Meritorious: A Study of Padmapriya’s Poetry
--V V B Rama Rao
Indian English Poetry has gained fresh momentum with women taking enthusiastic and jubilant part in the field of creative imagination writing poetry. Many women poets are feminist and many more are forging ahead towards femininity. Padmapriya is young, talented, and meritorious. She started writing poetry very early at the age of seven and was encouraged by her mother. Her first collection came out in 2003, the second in 2005, and the third in 2011. Maturation is seen in the collections one after another. She has displayed her mettle and her strong moral sense and devoutness. Simple writing and high level of teaching appear to be her mottos. Sage-like visualization is her forte. Her symbols and tropes are captivating. Creativity in poetry comes first and the patterning or spacing comes later. She has written poems on fundamentals, creation, earth, sea, trees, birds, great minds, mountains, caves, sound, and light—displaying God’s plenty. No wonder she has been called the Peter Pan of modern Indo-Anglian poetry by a very senior academic and impressed reviewer. Her innate, absolute faith and sincerity of feeling are divine gifts. Femininity is the hallmark of her thinking and poetry.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
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