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Understanding the Migrant Experience Through Neil Bissoondath’s
On the Eve of Uncertain Tomorrows
--Urvashi Kaushal
Neil Bissoondath, an Indo-Caribbean-Canadian writer, who accepts his Canadian nationality and Caribbean link, is often reluctant in acknowledging his Indian lineage. His double displacement gives him the firsthand experience of migration and its consequence. Bissoondath’s writings often question the multiethnic Canadian society and project the predicament of immigrants in Canada. This paper studies the consequence of migrating to a new land, with special reference to Bissoondath’s short story collection On the Eve of Uncertain Tomorrows. The collection comprises ten short stories, each written with the aim to unravel a new emotion experienced by an immigrant.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Negotiating Identities in Tabish Khair’s The Bus Stopped
and M G Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song
--Vivek Kumar Dwivedi
The twentieth century witnessed large-scale migrations, especially from the so-called third world countries to the West, for sociopolitical and economic reasons. Globalization came as a catalyst, adding to the pace of resettlements and melting of borders. It resulted in various identities coming together along with their cultural differences and their being alien to the native ethos. As a consequence, many nations were confronted with a series of problems that seemed difficult to resolve. Not only cultural differences but also the identities, i.e., the fact that immigrants could not shed the sense of their belonging to the country they came from, gave way to diversity, conflicts of interests, divisiveness, ghettoization, and occasional display of hostility. Increasingly, it is becoming apparent that the myth of a nation with its homogenizing tendency is not enough to unify all the people living within a nation’s territorial boundaries, as the whole discourse of nation seems to ignore the diversity of those different groups it seeks to homogenize. However, nationalism and racial-ethnic discrimination are in a reciprocal relationship. The last two decades are witness to the fact that with globalization the world is learning to celebrate diversity and pluralism. It is also the logical result of the living together of different groups, interacting and socializing. This paper explores, with reference to Tabish Khair’s The Bus Stopped and M G Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song, how this issue influences a novelist’s creative urge and finds reflection in her/his portrayal of characters.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Intertextual Dystopia of A Scanner Darkly:
Philip K Dick’s Novel and Richard Linklater’s Movie Adaptation
--Azra Ghandeharion
A Scanner Darkly (1977), Philip K Dick’s dystopian science fiction, is a requiem for human identity. For Dick, the mutability of “identity” and “reality” equals the McDonaldization of society. In the post-9/11 era, Richard Linklater’s movie adaptation of Dick’s novel re-narrates the same paranoiac tension. The militant globalization augments the desire for solid identity; late capitalism fulfills this desire by manufacturing life-like simulacra. However, simulacrum means the death of identity and originality. Characters feel lost in the intertextual world where reality and identity turn experimental. Using the new media (i.e., film) and the tenets of intertextuality, this paper focuses on the uncertainty of identity and pomophobia (i.e., postmodern phobia) in Dick’s novel and Linklater’s adaptation.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Ethics and Education in To Kill a Mockingbird:
Rereading the Text Through the Prism of Slavoj Žižek’s Postulations
--Sakshi Dogra
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is spun around questions of racism, discrimination, justice, morality, and ethics. At the center of the text is the Finch family, the members of which espouse contrary values. Where Aunt Alexandra is portrayed as emblematic of “southern womanhood,” Atticus Finch is represented as the voice of reason and justice. However, how does one understand justice? Can justice be served by keeping within the moral demands of right and wrong? If no, then what does one make of the character of Atticus Finch? How far are his interventions relevant in shaping Maycomb? While on the one hand the paper raises suspicion on the seemingly philanthropic nature of Atticus Finch, it attempts to enrich the discussion by studying the character of Boo/Arthur Radley. Is Boo Radley’s intervention in the text more significant? Is Boo Radley able to serve justice even though he is guilty of stepping outside the perceived notions of right and wrong? How does this shape the mind of the eight-year-old narrator? The paper attempts to answer all these questions by reading the text in the light of Slavoj ˇi˛ek’s essay “The Real of Sexual Difference,” wherein he differentiates between Derrida’s radical politics and Lacan’s ethical act.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Pragmatic Failure Behind Shakespearean Catastrophe:
A Study in Othello
--M Chandrasena Rajeswaran and S Padmasani Kannan
Pragmatic failure occurs when a hearer fails to determine the operational meaning of an utterance. Cross-cultural mismatches initiate sociopragmatic failure. Shakespeare, the dramatist par excellence, manipulates such mismatching conditions in human relationship in multilingual and multi-ethnic contexts in Othello that the catastrophe inevitably emerges from the characters themselves. The key characters in Othello tend toward literal interpretation, taking utterances at face value rather than inferring what is meant from what is said and underusing context information. This paper delineates the lack of pragmatic comprehension on the part of different characters in Othello and its consequence. The basic concept of this paper is to analyze the dialogues and the conditions that govern them with relevance to the speech act theory of Austin (1962) and Searle (1969) and to the concept of domain of pragmatics as offered by Fraser (1983).
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Wole Soyinka’s The Road: The Drama of Existence
in a Wide Cultural Perspective and with Poetic Overtones
--G Vasishta Bhargavi
This paper highlights the current trends in postcolonial literature and the traditional ways, especially of African literature, with special reference to Wole Soyinka’s play The Road. Modern African Literature forms a part of the collective struggle of the African intellectuals in the second half of the twentieth century. They tried to restore the dignity of Africa and provide a new orientation for African and all people of African descent world over. Soyinka, whose works alone seem to be enough to establish Nigeria’s place in the Commonwealth Literature, is a veritable storehouse of different cultures and perspectives. Music, dance, and poetry have been associated with Nigerian drama since the earliest birth, marriage, and death cycle ceremonies and rituals. In The Road, Soyinka examines the complex as well as philosophical issues of life like death, self-realization, history or past, clash of cultures, and the crucial issues that prevail in the country and the continent.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
“No More Buried Lives”: Voicing Protest in Rita Dove’s
On the Bus with Rosa Parks: Poems
--Tanima Kumari and Rajni Singh
Rita Dove’s On the Bus with Rosa Parks: Poems focuses on the historical figure Rosa Parks, who raised her voice against the political injustice done to the blacks. The volume consists of different sections that give expression to young black women’s protest against the oppressive system during the Civil Rights era. This paper discusses the historical background and the importance of education for women. It also discusses the problem of “color line” and presents Dove’s expression of history and the African Americans’ role in the nation’s history by paying homage to all those who brought emancipation transcending race, color, and gender bias.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Exploring the Mental Lexicon and the Lexical Networks
of the Indian Learners of ESL at the Tertiary Level
--V Kavitha and S Padmasani Kannan
This study aims to explore the mental lexicon and lexical networks of the English as a Second Language (ESL) learners in India through two-word association tests. The research intends to extract patterns from the associational behavior of the learners and understand the syntactic properties of the associations that make the network. The participants of the study are 106 tertiary level learners of ESL, registered for various undergraduate degree programs in an Arts and Science College situated in the city Chennai, India. Test 1 is a Single Response word association task, the results of which were analyzed for patterns in the association of the words through a slightly modified response classification system. The words were then “taught” to the participants to minimize the form-based associations and non-words. Test 2 was conducted with the same set of words and the associations were analyzed for their lexico-syntactic properties. The responses were then checked for patterns emerging from the meaningful as well as erratic associations. Also, the associational behavior of the participants with regard to the lexico-syntactic properties and lexical class differences was studied. The patterns that have emerged carry suggestions for further probe into the ESL vocabulary teaching methods.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Alternative Assessment as Perceived by EFL Teachers
--Maimouna Al-Ruqeishi and Salma Al-Humaidi
This study is based on the responses of 224 EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teachers of grades 5-8 in the Omani Basic Education context to a survey about using alternative assessment tools. The results show that teachers perceive this type of assessment to be adequate in some aspects such as their direct linkage between instruction and assessment that develops teacher’s sense of reflection and fosters students’ awareness of their learning. In addition, teachers perceive the training and support they have received to be adequate. However, the findings reveal some problems that hinder the effectiveness of alternative assessment in the Omani context. Based on the findings of this study, implications and recommendations are suggested.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Media Language: A Study of Audio-Visual Advertisements
--Vaishali Jayaprakash Shinde
Language is considered as an exclusively human mode of communication. The communicative functions and the aims, which differ from situation to situation, determine the nature of language to be used. Media—comprising newspaper, magazine, radio, television, telephone, and internet—exhibits different features of language. The most significant language varieties used in media are the language of journalism and the language of advertising. Both these varieties can be studied as registers. This paper focuses on the language of advertising in the audio-visual media. It highlights the striking features of advertising language observed in Indian television commercials. It illustrates the features of television commercials at the phonological, lexical, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic levels. The paper also highlights the linguistic strategies peculiar to the audio-visual media through an analysis of a number of advertisements, and deals with the pedagogical implications of the advertising language in the context of linguistics, pragmatics, and communicative approach.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
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