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Ontological Concerns in Charles Dickens’s “The Ivy Green” and Odysseus Elytis’ “The Mad Pomegranate Tree”: A Comparison

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Bibhudutt Dash, SCS College, Puri, Orissa

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Abstract

This paper compares the existential problems addressed in Charles Dickens’ poem “The Ivy Green” and the Greek poet Odysseus Elytis’ poem “The Mad Pomegranate Tree.” While it highlights Dickens’ portrayal of the theme of death, contrasted with Elytis’ rapture at the variegated functions and the youthfulness of the tree, it also underlines how the lithesome movement of the Ivy green upon the dead awakens in us an understanding of the inevitable. Keep Reading

Cultural Outlook of Literary Dialect in Hard Times and Silas Marner

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Serir-Mortad Ilhem, Abu Bekr Belkaid University, Tlemcen, Algeria

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Abstract 

This paper is an attempt to help plug the oral utterance as it occurs in dialogue with the cultural impact in a given society, i.e. to explain the cultural significance of the variants and indicate how the use of dialect by humble characters can interpret a whole system of society mapped by Dickens and Eliot in Hard Times and Silas Marner respectively. Otherwise, the paper is designed to provide the type of speech community in Hard Times and Silas Marner besides the different cultural components of such communities that could the dialectal variables, used by the different characters in the novels, amply reflect through their speech. Hard Times and Silas Marner offer interesting raw material for literary dialect analysis, since each of dialect characters denotes a linguistic strategy to reflect cultural interpretation. Keep Reading

From New Elocution to New Criticism and the Dismissal of Vachel Lindsay

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Brian McAllister, Albany State University, Georgia, USA

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Abstract

Vachel Lindsay’s fame was made, and ultimately ruined, by his performances of his “Higher Vaudeville” poems.  This essay discusses the performance of the Higher Vaudeville in light of ideas of the New Elocution movement of the early twentieth century which influenced Lindsay’s technique.  Lindsay conceived these poems as elements of a performance medium.  Ironically, some of the New Elocution ideas were indurated by the New Criticism, which discounted performance as constitutive of poetic meaning and led to Lindsay’s critical dismissal. A consideration of the Higher Vaudeville as performance argues that Lindsay’s achievement warrants critical reassessment. Keep Reading

Healing through Hip Hop in the Slums of Phnom Penh Cambodia

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Romi Grossberg, Independent Researcher and Performance Activist , Australia

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Abstract

Local non-government organisation ‘Tiny Toones’ is the first and only of its kind in Cambodia, to use hip hop to engage with, and empower the most disadvantaged children and youth in Phnom Penh. Working with young people from backgrounds of drug and alcohol abuse, prostitution, gang life, family violence and extreme poverty, it offers creative arts alongside education and life skills. Teaching life lessons through break-dance, hip hop dance, lyric writing, rapping, and art, Tiny Toones ‘speaks street’ to those that need it most, empowering them to believe in themselves, trust themselves and make better choices about their futures. The staff and students of Tiny Toones are living proof of how the creative arts can be used to change lives and free young people from their past. Keep Reading

Performance as Protest: Thumri and Tawaif’s Quest for Artistic Autonomy

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Shramana Das Purkayasth, Vijaygarh Jyotish Ray College, Kolkata, India

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Abstract

Indian cultural history testifies to the intimate bond the tawaifs had for centuries with the performing arts. Be it the pre-Mughal folk culture of rural India or the highly sophisticated culture of classical music in the Mughal courts, the tawaifs had always remained at the focal point of it. However conservative social paradigm never allowed them to belong to the mainstream Indian society. Concepts of honour, chastity and occupational propriety, with which patriarchy regulates a woman’s individual choices, constrained the tawaif to inhabit a limited space, isolated and solitary, alluring, yet infamous. In the present paper, I propose to explore how thumri reflects the tawaif’s own consciousness of her contradictory status as an outcast as well as an artist, indispensable to India’s musical heritage. Through a detailed structural analysis of the genre, I would discuss how the textual world of thumri with its distinctive formal and performative peculiarities supplies the tawaif with a potentially subversive “action repertoire”, enabling the nautch-girl to voice her desperate demand for autonomy. Keep Reading

Cities of Struggle and Resistance: The Image of the Palestinian City in Modern Arabic Poetry

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Saddik M.Gohar, UAE University, UAE

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Abstract

This paper aesthetically articulates the representation of the Palestinian city in modern Arabic poetry in order to argue that while Arab -and non-Arab poets-incorporate  variety of attitudes toward the city ,  the presentation of the Palestinian city reveals a radical difference from the rest of Arabic and non-Arabic poetry  due to the peculiar history of struggle, resistance and victimization characterizing life in the Palestinian metropolis.  To the Palestinian poets, in particular, the city is part of a homeland they have lost or a refugee camp that has been resisting the invaders for decades.  Contrary to western cities  inhabited by alien residents such as Eliot’s Prufrock, or Arab cities populated by strangers, outsiders, whores, outcasts and political prisoners  as in the literary  cities of Badr Shaker Al-Sayyab  and Ahmed Abdul-Muti  Hejazi , the Palestinian city is inhabited by heroes and martyrs.  These heroes who appear in contemporary Palestinian poetry and take different shapes personify the struggle and resistance of a nation that has frequently refused to surrender at times of crisis.  Representing the spirit of the Palestinian people confronting  a world replete with  treachery and hypocrisy,  the Palestinian city and its nameless heroes , in contemporary Arabic  poetry, is an embodiment of  an eternal and unlimited Palestinian dream , the dream of return, rebirth and liberation.  In this context, the paper affirms that unlike Arab cities which are associated with decadence, corruption, exploitation and moral bankruptcy, the Palestinian city,  due to the Palestinian history of exile, resistance, victimization and pain, is viewed in Arabic/Palestinian poetry as a location of heroism,  struggle, defiance and martyrdom. Keep Reading

‘There is Nothing as Old as a Child’: Childhood and Language in Rabindranath Tagore’s The Crescent Moon

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Josephine A. McQuail, Tennessee Technological University, USA

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 Abstract

Rabindranath Tagore was influenced by the British Romantic poets as well as by the sights, sounds and tradition of his own Bengali culture.  Tagore’s attitude to childhood is certainly similar to the adulation of the child begun as a cultural movement by the British Romantic poets. Tagore praises both the purity of the child as well as the Platonic essence of childhood in his writing on nursery rhymes. The child’s perspective is delightfully captured in his volume The Crescent Moon (1913). In a sense, through his exploration of the unconscious components of the mind of the child, Tagore in essence becomes father to himself:  his language eludes the Order typically imposed on linguistic expression in the Oedipal stage of development. Tagore’s recourse to childhood freedom arguably translated in his poetry to his radical experiment with language, which unfortunately cannot be reproduced entirely in translation. Keep Reading

México de afuera in Northern Missouri: The Creation of Porfiriato Society in America’s Heartland

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Craig Dennison

Westminster College, USA

Volume 2, Number 3, 2010Download PDF Version

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v2n3.04

Abstract

This essay examines the ideology of México de afuera in the novel La patria perdida by Teodoro Torres.  Torres, who fled Mexico after the onset of the Mexican Revolution, found a job as lead editor of La Prensa, the successful Spanish-language newspaper owned by Ignacio Lozano.  Living in San Antonio during the 1910s, Torres became familiar with the ideology of México de afuera before returning to Mexico.  His novel, which begins in northern Missouri, follows the return of Luis Alfaro to his homeland only to discover that he feels more at home, more in Mexico, on his farm north of Kansas City.  When studying the work and the life of Torres, the plot of this novel become problematic.  A man who lived in the United States for nine years before returning to Mexico, Torres certainly had the insight to provide psychological and emotional analyses of the immigrants and the understanding to write about the thoughts and feelings that many had experienced upon their return to the homeland.  Yet, why does Torres, who had returned to Mexico and done well for himself for over a decade before he penned this novel, invent an immigrant utopia on a farm in Missouri?  It is not a question that is easily answered, but after examining Torres’s life, the basic tenets of México de afuera and the novel itself, a conclusion can be reached.  Torres idolized Porfiriato society and Luis Alfaro’s farm is an idealized version of fin-de-siècle Mexico. Keep Reading

Rabindranath Tagore’s English Prose: “Some Qualities of Permanence”

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Fakrul Alam, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh

Abstract

This paper explores the enduring qualities of Rabindranath Tagore’s English prose and puts forward the thesis that not only the Gitanjali poems but also many other of his English writings attained “some qualities of permanence” almost wholly because of his artistic skills. In addition to the strength of his ideas and the intensity of his feelings, the main reason why his prose works found an appreciative audience for a long time in the west can often be attributed to his adroit use of the English language in his letters, lectures, essays and speeches and his ability to adjust his style in accordance with the occasion, the audience, the genre and the subject matter. Without the impact the English prose writings have had, Tagore’s international reputation would not have survived thus far. Indeed, the enduring popularity of a work such as Nationalism tells us quite clearly that while as far as his argument is concerned there is a lot that is still relevant for the world in Tagore’s English writings, they should still appeal to us also because of his eloquence and writing skills. Keep Reading

Contemporary Gujarati Poetry: For Whom Are They Writing?

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Mukesh Modi, D. M. Patel Arts and S. S. Patel Commerce College


Abstract:

The writer here describes the various ages and traditions of Gujarati Poetry, looks into the present condition and questions the practice of writing poetry for the pundits’ sake.

 Middle Age Gujarati Poetry

Gujarati poetry has basically evolved from Bhakti Literature of the 15th and 16th centuries. Oral tradition of Gujarati folklore dates back to the 12th century. So many seekers/devotees contributed immensely to the development of Gujarati poetry. Gujarati literature is divided broadly into two periods. The period from 12th century to the early 19th century is known as Middle Age, and the second period from 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century is known as Modern age. Looking at the Middle Age Gujarati literature, we find that the period was, as is the case with other Indian literature, dominated by poetry. In Gujarati, we have Narsinh Mehta Mirabai, Akho, Premanand, Shamal, Dayaram, Bhalan, Nakar, Bhim, Raje, Pritam, Dhiro, Bhojo and many others. With few exceptions, most of these poets liked to be known as devotees more and poets less. As Dr. Ramesh Trivedi mentions: “There was neither a consciousness of being poets nor attachment to being poets.” The central theme of Middle Age Gujarati Literature was religion. Since the society of the time was dependent heavily on religion, the hymns to devotions, wisdom and detachments were the major themes of the poetry of the age. Keep Reading