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Anti-Mimeticism, Autonomy of the World of Literary Discourse
--Roghayeh Farsi and Vida Dehnad
The central discussion of this paper proceeds as a counterargument to Johansen’s (2002) discursal view of literature. Our premise is that literature can be appraised rather as an autonomous composite of discourses not reducible to the idea of mimetic representation of a reality. In line with such a postulation, we duly present four main perspectives to counter granularity, mimeticity, linearity, and institutionalization of literature as advocated by Johansen. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) notion of the virtual, we further take the world of literature as a virtual macrocosm setting up a paradoxical relation with the actual world. This feature leads us to approach literature not as a discourse but as a metadiscourse. The discussion on the metadiscursivity of literature features it with interdiscursivity and intertextuality. The paper concludes that far from analogizing the actual world, the virtual metadiscourse of literature runs parallel to the real world in an attempt to otherwise it.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Approaching Ethics Through Literature
--Sharada Allamneni
In May 2014, at Stanford University’s McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, a panel of educators, composed of faculty from the university’s business school, law school, and philosophy department, addressed a series of questions about teaching ethics: “Can something as personal as ethics be taught in a classroom?” “Can classes in ethics make students more virtuous individuals?” (Monin, Schapiro, and Fried 2014). An answer to these questions can be sought in the postcolonial critic Spivak’s (2012) work where she argues for the social urgency of the humanities and expresses faith that “the literary can still do something.” Great writers from Mathew Arnold to Rabindranath Tagore aver that the study of great literary works in a modern-day classroom will train the students on anti-elitism and egalitarianism, prompting them toward what Spivak calls an “uncoercive rearrangement of desires.” Kant (1991) once said that it is through aesthetics that judgment is taught. The study of world literature and philosophy provides young readers with a subjective dimension while training them for participating in democracy. By stimulating a healthy discourse among the members of a community, it fosters among them an environment of trust. It encourages different cultures to start conversing with each other while endeavoring toward a cosmopolitan ideal of the world. It fosters a relationship of respect and affinity among the heterogeneous members of a community, to make them fellow citizens with a shared responsibility for the wellbeing of the society and the world.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
The Theme of Alienation in Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming
--Zeeshan Ali
Harold Pinter’s plays present a dissatisfied, cruel, and cold portrait of the world. His plays are about incomprehensibility. As Pinter (quoted in Gabbard 1976, 155) puts it, “There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. The thing is not necessarily either true or false: it can be both true and false.” This creates an atmosphere of suspicion, fear, and alienation. An atmosphere of dread and alienation is simply evoked by the stage protagonists engaged in conversational repetitiveness and seeming irrationality, served up as objects of interest in and by themselves. Ruth’s description of her home in America as “all rock and sand” is not long in actual word count, but the pauses between her statements make America sound even more barren than her description of it would indicate. This paper critically looks at alienation as an unavoidable cohort of life as long as our world is differently manipulated and thus left impoverished.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Revolt Against Subjugation:
Self-Revelation in Andrea Levy’s Small Island
--Swarnita Sharma, Jaya Dwivedi and Sheela Tiwari
Black women of the postcolonial era Britain are vocal in giving a voice to their collective experiences of subjugation, as they are aware of their status and are always on guard against subjugation owing to their experiences of racist and sexist persecution. Andrea Levy is a notable name among them. She came of age in a British society marked by racial tensions and the rise of multiculturalism. Hence, her works, directly and indirectly, reflect the hopes and anxieties associated with this period of transition. Levy builds her novel on a series of metaphors. She explores how black Jamaican immigrants, representing the Caribbean postcolonial diaspora, experience social oppression and xenophobia, and thereby identity crisis, and presents it as a revolt against oppression. Levy, a descendent of original Jamaican immigrants, was born in Britain and considers herself a British author with a dual cultural background. However, during her childhood, she did not have any models to look up to. This was one of the reasons why she started writing about her Caribbean background. This paper focuses on her novel Small Island, which examines the dimensions of space as a crucial basis for constituting one’s identity far from the homeland in an alien environment.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Caste and Outcast: Dalit Masculinity in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things
--Rajeshwar Mittapalli
zIn India, primarily because of the caste system, there are multiple conceptions of masculinity, and they are based on the position a man occupies within the caste hierarchy. Dalit masculinity is one of them. But from the upper-caste point of view, an “untouchable” man is dispossessed of masculinity and rendered a social eunuch, and therefore he should not even attempt to demonstrate his masculinity by, for example, establishing sexual relations with an upper-caste woman. Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things features a dalit young man called Velutha who becomes the object of
upper-caste men’s victimizing masculinist power and an upper-caste woman’s gaze. The woman in question is a Syrian Christian divorcee called Ammu. Taking advantage of the asymmetrical social order of India that privileges upper-caste men as well as women over lower-caste men, especially the dalits, Ammu too exploits and victimizes Velutha. He ultimately pays with his life for being a dalit, for being a man, and for being a dalit man who unwittingly challenges the hyper-masculinist upper-caste establishment.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Feminist Reworking of Folk and Fairy Tales in Angela Carter’s Short Stories
--Preeti Bhatt and Ritu Pareek
Angela Carter, the postmodernist British writer, is known for her novels and short stories, many of which present popular literary folk and fairy tales from a fresh perspective, using forceful, evocative imagery, and striking diction. In The Bloody Chamber and Other Short Stories, Carter (1979a) rewrites the tales of Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, and Bluebeard, and reshapes the original plots to engender unusual and startling endings. Fantasy is a literature of desire, which expresses unfulfilled dreams and represents what one wants and does not have. However, Carter’s stories, which are modern adaptations of popular tales, are meant not for children but for mature readers. Sex and violence form the pivot of their plot structure, and they include explicit and shocking descriptions of the male and the female bodies and bodily functions. Carter subverts the binary categories of masculinity and femininity as her female protagonists struggle for freedom from male authority and power, and emerge stronger and more compelling than their male counterparts. Carter’s narratives present women-centered plots and employ strategies like irony, satire, juxtaposition, and allusion to create a distinct nonconformist voice. This paper discusses the questioning of patriarchal narration in Carter’s stories, using the formalistic approach to examine the plot structure, character portrayal, and narrative devices in her fiction.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
From Naturalistic Savagery to Humanistic Redemption: Artistic Transformations in Joyce Carol Oates’s Short Stories
--Aswathi Velayathikode Anand and Srirupa Chatterjee
One of the most celebrated, prolific, and provocative writers of contemporary America, Joyce Carol Oates is widely acclaimed for her generic experimentations, which in turn facilitate her deep engagement with the depiction of the human condition. This paper highlights a significant transformation in Oates’s creative oeuvre and her artistic sensibility over her five-decade long writing career and argues that her stylistics has evolved from deploying a savage naturalistic worldview to articulating a redemptive humanistic vision. By critically examining five of her representative short stories, each from one decade since the sixties to the present, this paper aims to establish that the shifts in Oates’s artistic focus not only characterize the author’s mellowing sensibility but also emblematize her response to the changes in the literary imagination within the USA. It, therefore, reads “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (representing the 1960s), “The Tryst” (the 1970s), “Golden Gloves” (the 1980s), “The Hair” (the 1990s), and “Mastiff” (the new millennium) to assert that Oates’s literary musings, beginning with the turbulent counterculture years and culminating in the globalized new millennium, exhibit a remarkable transition from a naturalistic to a humanistic temperament.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
The Surrealist Dialogue Between Franz Kafka and Sadegh Hedayat: A Comparative Reading of
“A Country Doctor” and “Three Drops of Blood”
--Azra Ghandeharion and Milad Mazari
This paper aims at presenting an analytical reading of two short stories—Franz Kafka’s “A Country Doctor” and Sadegh Hedayat’s “Three Drops of Blood.” It also concentrates on the close affinities between these two narratives. Not only that Hedayat has been influenced by Kafka, both writers show great impact of Freud on their work of art. Thus the focus of attention has been on Freudian psychoanalysis. To justify why the stories are told in the form of dreams, a secondary analytical reading has been carried out by devoting emphasis to the school of surrealism and its stress on the unconscious. Given these analytical frameworks, the paper emphasizes on two major characters/narrators and the way they deal unsuccessfully with their surroundings, incidents, and other characters so as to create a balance between the internal conflicting forces of their personality. The paper concludes that both narratives follow roughly the same pattern of thought and ideology.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Honing English Skills for Employability Through Communicative Competence
--Jayagowri Shivakumar and Geetha V Sharma
Communication permeates all aspects of our professional lives. It is the key to having positive interactions and building and maintaining favorable relationships. The ability to communicate and have that message understood is vital in today’s world. Several employer surveys show that communication in English remains one of the most demanded skills by the employers. Students pursuing higher education in India are expected to possess high level of communicative competence by employers. This study seeks to investigate whether working on sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic competencies, rather than focusing primarily on linguistic competence, alone would enable users of English in the Indian context to communicate more successfully. A pilot study was conducted and data (audio recordings) were collected in various communication contexts. The analysis of the data shows varied levels of communicative competence and also communicative competence deficits in individuals.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
This Tricky Job: Literary Translation
--V V B Rama Rao
Prospective enthusiasts need a little understanding before practicing literary translation—what it entails and how to go about it for success. A translated literary text in a known language is a gift to a reader who does not know the source language. The reader goes to the translated text hearing about it, feeling that there would be something in it to his taste and appreciation. It is a well-intentioned gift, and it is only a churl who looks a gift horse in the mouth. Any comment on literary translation and the art and craft involved in it is not justified in repelling or undermining the translator.
© 2016 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
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