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The era of wrath unleashed by the holocaust of world wars fractured the sensibilities
of humans. The pain was intense in Europe, especially in France, which went
through the inferno of murder and torture under German occupation. To
Albert Camus, war was no adventure but a disease, like typhus. While the tragedy
perpetrated by war was massive, the infringement of human rights in genocidal spaces like
Rwanda was no less pathetic. And the denial of human rights to large chunks of humankind
based on creed and color compounded this inhuman predicament either in America or
nearer home in India.
The first paper in this combined issue, "The World Is What Was Given, The World
Is What We Make: Albert Camus' Bifocal Credo in The Plague", by Sreedharan Thoyakkat, explores the disease of war depicted through the symbol of fly. The author brings out
the objective facticity of the novelist's presentation. In her paper, "Woman as a Metaphor
in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale", Sonia Chadha examines the dystopia
of women being treated as mere procreative machines, when most wives are sterilized
by nuclear pollution. In his paper, "Affective Travel: Terror and the Human Rights
Narrative in Véronique Tadjo's The Shadow of
Imana", Pramod K Nayar considers the
travel writing as a human rights discourse, presenting the contact zone of suffering and
violation in what he calls `genocidal space' in Rwanda. It is the narrative of individual
suffering, which makes it an ethnography of mourning.
This issue offers three papers dealing with commonalities of literary and
cultural interests. Sunita Rani and Nibir K Ghosh, in their paper, "Democracies and
Dilemmas: August Wilson's Fences and Datta Bhagat's Routes and Escape Routes", consider
the persistence of the basic problems of discrimination, inequity and injustice, both in the
US and India. The discrimination meted out by the whites to Troy Maxson when he
wanted to reach the top as a baseball player, is depicted by Wilson. The metaphor of
fences indicates their confinement to the ghettos. Bhagat presents the varied responses of
uncle Kaka, Sathish, Hema and the angry Arjun to the problem of caste discrimination.
When there is so much to complain about such discrimination, it is heartening that there is
an exponent of religious harmony, as discussed by N S Gundur in the paper, "A Portrait
of the Popular Philosopher as a Mystic Songster: A Study of Basavaraj Naikar's Light in the House", when the Muslim Sharif Saheb was accepted as disciple by
Govindabhatta. In fact, the saint was a Muslim by birth but a Veerashaivite by faith; the saint's songs
are meditations on life beyond flesh and blood, and Sharif was indeed a sincere seeker
of Truth. In her paper, "Past Present and Past: Expressionism on the American and
Indian Stage", Sudha Rani Kaja brings out the similarities of theater techniques employed
by Arthur Miller in the US and Mahesh Dattani in India, to mirror middle-class
protagonists in their plays. Miller and Dattani use expressionism through the deployment of
multilevel stage, disturbing time sequence by moving the plot backward and forward, and
through liberal recourse to symbols, for portraying the psyche of Wily Loman and the
underbelly of Indian society, respectively.
We have on offer three papers dealing with three distinguished American writers:
Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Wright and Saul Bellow. Srirupa Chatterjee, in her paper,
"Joyce Carol Oates's The Gravedigger's Daughter and Martha Nussbaum's Development
Ethics", contests the charge that the novelist sensationalizes and commercializes
issues of poverty and violence. The author shows that Oates offers a powerful description
of America's disenfranchised and their violence-ridden world, poignantly articulating
the problematic of racial discrimination and economic deprivation experienced by the
Schwart family, in the absence of what Nusbaum calls "all capabilities", and argues for
determining the quality of life not by measuring Gross Domestic Profit (GDP), but by
measuring individual's growth. Examining the pervasive and corrosive impact of the demands
made by Jim Crow on the psyche of colored people, Ahad Mehervand, in his paper, "Jim
Crowism: The Catalyst for Bigger Thomas's Violence in Richard Wright's Native Son", argues that it is in the restrictions laid down by Jim Crow, trying to confine the blacks to
the ghettos and their stereotypes constructed by the whites, that much of the provocation
for violence lies. These acts correlate with those theorized by Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, assuming that blacks themselves accept, even welcome, these restrictive
codes, which recall the psychological dynamics between the colonizer and the colonized. Ritu
R Agarwal, in her paper, "Saul Bellow's Herzog in the Light of Susan Sontag's Essay `Against Interpretation'", attempts to show that in Bellow's complex novel, form is not
an additional component but is essential like content, in the words of Sontag. The
epistolary novel tries to explore and dissect the mind of Herzog. The author examines the skilful
use of images and symbols like flowers, clock and kitchen, by the novelist.
In view of the rising impact of globalization, the need for effective teaching of
English and the acquisition of adequate proficiency in that language is paramount. In his
paper, "The Delta Approach to English Language Teaching", S P Dhanavel proposes a
method for making teaching and learning English
grammar bete noir of both teachers and
learners, a little interesting, even exciting. He suggests the use of acronyms and abbreviations,
like GIPP for gerund, infinitive, participial and prepositional, and VANPAPCI for the
eight parts of speech. The suggestion may help in memorizing, but will it help gift grammar
with a little glamor? The last paper, "Language Attitudes and Popular Culture: A
Critical Discourse Analysis Study of the English Language in India", by Bindia Bhalla
and Gurupdesh Singh, presents copious data collected during the period 2002-2007 from
popular media like The Tribune, The Hindu and Business Week (blog), and by employing the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of Fairclough, demonstrates the way popular
media try to convince the readers about the need for excellence in English for great
job opportunities and fabulous paychecks in semi-government and private
organizations. Perhaps, it is straining the obvious!
The issue also includes a perceptive review by Sonali Das of Khalid Hosseini's
evocation of the plight of womenMariam and Lailain Afghanistan, in his disturbing novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns. The suns surely seem to scorch remorselessly the sense
of feminine dignity behind the veil.
-- S S Prabhakar Rao
Consulting Editor |
