America

Cross- Culture Dialogue in R.K. Narayan’s My Dateless Diary

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Pulkita Anand

Assistant Professor, Department of English and Modern European Languages, Banasthali Vidyapith, Rajasthan. ORCID: 0000-0003-0586-3975. Email: pulkitaanand@ymail.com

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.27

 Abstract

Man has desires to explore the unexplored, to chart the uncharted, and to know the unknown. R K Narayan takes us to different terrain in his work My Dateless Diary: An American Journey (1960). Though the book was written quite late by Narayan, it has an unmistakable stamp of his style and ease. Written in the first-person, it takes us directly to the core of the writer’s persona and his idiosyncrasies.  The book is about a journey to America and self in the act of writing, journeying inside and outside the world.  It is a conglomeration of fact and fiction, memories and desires, experience and observation, self and other, and the East and the West. The word ‘dateless’ is metaphoric in a way that many things are still prevalent in the present time.  In his witty and amusing tone, Narayan draws up the subtle difference in linguistic, cultural, social, economical, religious and professional aspects of American and Indian ways of life, which at once invites comparison and contrast. It seems to be a mingling of two cultures in literature. Narayan reveals how we Indians get easily adjusted and assimilated in any culture. He also depicts no desire on the parts of Indians to subvert this general representation. The paper aims to dwell on these aspects as reflected in the text. It also attempts to see how Narayan juxtaposed the Indian and American ways of life, and how they complement each other in their ways.

Keywords:  India, America, culture, life, travel, self.

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Image of America in Telugu Cinema: A Study of the Cultural Implications

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D. Sudha Rani

VNR Vignana Jyothi Institute of Engineering and Technology (Autonomous), Hyderabad.

Email: sudharanikaja@yahoo.co.in

 Volume 10, Number 1, 2018 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v10n1.12

Received September 27, 2017; Revised December 11, 2017; Accepted December 30, 2017; Published February 04, 2018.

Abstract

Telugu cinema is one of the most popular art forms among Telugus across the globe. It has played an important role in understanding and depicting the life, society and the culture of Telugus as an authentic art form of the society. This depiction is not restricted to the life in native sates of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana but continued to the life of immigrant societies inhabited by Telugus across the globe. Albeit migration of Telugus to different counties is a pre independence phenomenon, their migration to USA is more a post independence phenomenon that is unique in many ways. Among them, the cultural implications involved in migration from Andhra Pradesh to America are certainly noteworthy. Telugu cinema took this seriously and treated it on a significant level. In this context, it becomes imperative to study the mediascape of Telugu cinema to understand the Telugus’ perspective of America that played significant role in encouraging migration of considerable number of Telugus to America. This paper studies the image of America created by the mediascape of Telugu cinema to understand the Telugu diaspora and the attempt Telugu cinema made in bridging these two cultures (America and Andhra Pradesh) and the cultural implications involved.

Keywords: Telugu cinema, Telugu diaspora, America, mediascapes, image, cultural implications

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Narratives of Diaspora and Exile in Arabic and Palestinian Poetry

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Saddik M. Gohar, United Arab Emirates University

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This paper underlines the attitudes of Palestinian / Arab poets toward the issues of exile and identity integral to their traumatic experience of Diaspora and displacement. From a historical context  and within the parameters of colonial / postcolonial theory , the paper  advocates a new critical perspective exploring the dialectics of exile and identity in Palestinian / Arabic poetry in order to argue that  exile , in contemporary world literature ,  becomes  a signifier  not only  of living  outside  one’s homeland but also of  the  condition caused by such physical absence. Aiming to reach a state of reconciliation rather than conflict, the poetic voices, analyzed in the paper, reflect a sense of nostalgia and emotional attachment toward their homeland. The paper  argues that Palestine, for  the Palestinian poets, is not  a paradise or an idealistic utopia that only exists in  their  poetry and  imagination but  a geographical reality caught up in national and religious limbos  and rooted in the trajectories of colonial history and diabolical  power  politics. Keep Reading

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Rumpa Das, Maheshtala College, South 24 Parganas, India

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Contemporary English poetry by Afghan women presents a remarkable reading experience. Critical explorations, at ease with post-colonial conditions, minority solitude and feminist readings, have largely remained inimical to the unique, yet chequered history that women poets such as Zohra Saed, Sahar Muradi, Sara Hakeem, Fatana Jahangir Ahrary, Fevziye Rahzigar Barlas and Donia Gobar document in their works. Most of them write in their native Dari and Pushtun languages as well as in English and often their English compositions have smatterings of their native tongues. Even though individual experiences differ, these women delve into the collective memory of oppression, pain and unrest to give vent to their feelings, and seek to reach out towards a sorority of shared angst. This paper seeks to explore the complex cultural contexts which have given birth to Afghan women’s poetry in exile. Keep Reading

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Matt Shedd, University of Oregon, USA

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Bob Dylan’s recent albums have returned to a more basic sense of American vernacular and poetics, employing stock phrases that evoke a rural America of the past. However, the past does not provide any shelter from modern day angst and impending devastation. We see this particularly in the 2001’s Love and Theft, coincidentally released on the day of the Twin Towers attack. By foregoing concepts of radical artistic individuality, Dylan use more traditional folk poetics to provide a historical and communal account of the descent of the United States into what Dylan calls “an empire in ruins.” Keep Reading

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Susmita Paul, Independent Scholar

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The Function of Scientific Metaphor in Thoreau’s Walden

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Robert Tindol, Shantou University

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Henry David Thoreau’s Walden has often been lauded for its philosophical advice “to simplify” and for its energetic response to the question of how human beings fit into the natural world. In terms of language, the very manner in which the author describes and metaphorizes nature in the microcosm of Walden Pond furthers the theme of simplification, and further contributes a novel approach to the very concept of seeing and understanding. Walden is not simply about reducing life to the barest common denominator of existence, but also about understanding how to debride just enough of the superfluities to provide insights into how amalgamating nature with human language can lead to a new humanistic vision of renewal. Thus, the employment of scientific metaphor in Walden is linked to the humanistic quest for guidance in the conduct of life. Keep Reading

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Revisiting Untraded Paths: Literary Revisions of Eighteenth-Century Exploration Journals

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Miriam Fernández-Santiago, University of Granada, Spain

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The present article proposes a revision of the American imperialistic, scientific, literary and historical origins as they were encoded and re-coded in the writings and rewritings of exploration journals. It theorises on the reciprocal influence that the official and the personal, the scientific and the fictional, the historical and the epical have in the production of a national referent as it is inscribed within the American travel-writing tradition. This article proposes an allegorical and literal reading of “line drawing” in its study of texts by William Byrd, Charles Mason and Thomas Pynchon, which merges experienced and reported realities into a complex multi-text. Keep Reading

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Charles Olson and the Quest for a Quantum Poetics

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Douglas Duhaime, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

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This paper investigates the ways the American poet Charles Olson helped twentieth-century writers create a “quantum poetics” that could reflect the discoveries of modern relativity theories and particle physics. In the first third of my paper, I show how Olson’s seminal essay “Projective Verse” advances a method of reading poetry which draws from Einstein’s special theory of relativity. In the second third of my paper, I discuss the ways Olson drew from quantum mechanics in his poetry and prose. There I also show how Olson’s writing invites readers to construct a method of reading rooted in physicist Niels Bohr’s principle of “complementarity.” In the final third of my paper, I show how Olson used Einstein’s theory of a unified field model to theorize poetry as a unified field of action. Keep Reading

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Paula Hayes, Strayer University, Tennessee, USA

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Van Jordan uses physics in his poetry to explore many sub-texts—such as, race in American society, gender, autobiographical memories of youth,as well as the story of Albert Einstein’s marriage to his first wife.  Van Jordan examines the possibility that Einstein’s wife may have helped in discovering the theory of relativity despite the fact that Einstein failed to give her any credit for doing so. The poet’s stories of his personal memories of experiencing youthful love and disillusionment, along with the poet’s unfortunate encounters with racism in America, are juxtaposed in the Quantum Lyrics beside the story of Albert Einstein’s personal life.  The poet moves back and forth in the volume between the language of music and the language of science as a means of exploring how far either one can penetrate to the core of the human experience.  Keep Reading

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