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“The Widow and the Wife”: Debating the ‘Woman Question’ in Muthumeenakshi (1903)

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Meenu B.

University of Hyderabad. ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9141-3921. E-mail: beingmeenu@gmail.com

  Volume 9, Number 2, 2017 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v9n2.26

Received March 1, 2017; Revised June 11, 2017; Accepted July 20, 2017; Published August 11, 2017.

Abstract

In this article, I look at the radical Tamil reformist novel, A. Madhaviah’s Muthumeenakshi published in 1903. This novel which dealt with common reformist issues of the time such as widow-remarriage and female education still struck a more radical note from the other reformist novels of the day in its support of the re-marriage of the widow who was not a virgin. In this paper, my attempt is to situate Muthumeenakshi amongst the other social reformist novels of the day and trace where the novel conformed to and departed from the other reformist novels. Through this, I plan to complicate the commonly held assumptions about social reform by bringing out the contradictions within the reformist project as well as explore the variety of positions within it and trace the aftermath of the reformist debates in India’s later history, especially in the nationalist discourse.

Keywords: Social Reform, Early Indian Novels, Tamil Novel, Woman Question, Widow Re-marriage, Female Education.

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Negotiation of Identity in K R Meera’s Hangwoman

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Hari M G

Assistant Professor, Department of English and Humanities, Amrita University, Coimbatore, India. Orchid: 0000-0003-0508-8112. Email: harimg09@gmail.com

 Volume 9, Number 2, 2017 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v9n2.25

Received May 15, 2017; Revised June 28, 2017; Accepted July 02, 2017; Published August 11, 2017.

Abstract

This paper explores the negotiation of identity in K R Meera’s novel Hangwoman, in the light of Michel Foucault’s deliberations on power, subjectivity, and critique. The novel’s layered delineation of the way power shapes subjectivity, and its insightful detailing of the scope for resistance the very process itself entails, echoes the thoughts of Foucault. Meera’s protagonist exudes an exemplary resilience when she confronts multi-faceted subjugation. The resistance that she makes is characterised by a resourcefulness to actively engage in the mechanics of power and to remake her own sense of identity. Thus power, as depicted in the novel, is a force that creates ‘identities’ and at the same time a productive network which gives room for remoulding identities. The paper, also, discusses the protagonist’s gritty resistance to the hyperrality of the postmodern visual media.

Keywords: Hangwoman, K R Meera, Foucault, Subjectivity, Critique, Power

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Indian Snakes and Snaky India: British Orientalist Construction of a Snake-Ridden Landscape during the Nineteenth Century

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Rahul Bhaumik

Department of History, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. Email: rahul_joy1981@yahoo.com

 Volume 9, Number 2, 2017 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v9n2.24

Received May 15, 2017; Revised July 03, 2017; Accepted July 15, 2017; Published August 11, 2017.

Abstract

This article explores British Orientalist construction of ‘snake-infested’ India focusing on the constitution of Orientalist discourse through the real experience of the colonisers gained in course of their extensive engagement with Indian wilderness while they began to subjugate more and more areas of the subcontinent. The main thrust of this article is to prove that, the Orientalist creation of the inferior image of venomous Indian snakes and the land they dwelled, as reflected in a range of nineteenth-century colonial literature, was definitely not a product fashioned through the Western interpretation of classical Indian texts; rather, this Orientalist understanding was inevitably fostered through the visible reality of livelihood in India and influenced by a traditional Christian sense of animosity towards snakes. This article, therefore, is a critique of the argument that scholastic construction of Orientalism derived only from the Western interpretation of scriptural accounts of the East.

Keywords: Indian Snakes, British Orientalism, Wild Orient, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Satan.

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

The Subaltern Voice in Kylas Chunder Dutt’s A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945

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Paromita Sengupta

Sovarani Memorial College, Jagatballavpur, Howrah. ORCID: 0000-0002-3381-0726. Email: paromitaseng@gmail.com

 Volume 9, Number 2, 2017 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v9n2.23

Received April 11, 2017; Revised July 12, 2017; Accepted July 15, 2017; Published August 11, 2017.

Abstract

This paper reads Kylas Chunder Dutt’s short fictional text A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945 (1835) as a postcolonial voice, engaged in the act of representation, and of interrogating colonialism much before postcolonialism took formal shape as a theoretical practice. The text represents the injustice of subaltern oppression, and, what is more crucial, more vital, prophetically uses the word “subaltern” in its present post-modern signification. Dutt’s writing enclosed within it the inescapable multi-tensions of the Bengal-British cultural negotiation, of which it was the product, but it was simultaneously implicated in the process of indigenous identity formation and in the formulation of subaltern consciousness.  The text not only suggests armed conflict as a tool of opposing colonialism, it is also prophetic in its use of the concept of the subaltern as far back as 1835- about a hundred and fifty years before Subaltern Studies was formally born.

Keywords: Identity, India, Nationalism, Subaltern

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Trouncing Noogenic Neuroses through Logos: a Logotherapeutic Reading of Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies

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Avijit Pramanik1 & Arindam Modak2

1Assistant Professor (W.B.E.S.), Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Purulia Government Engineering College, Purulia, West Bengal, India.

Email: apmanik90@gmail.com

2Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Durgapur, Durgapur, West Bengal, India. Email ID: arindam_m@yahoo.com

 

 Volume 9, Number 2, 2017 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v9n2.22

Received April 11, 2017; Revised July 12, 2017; Accepted July 15, 2017; Published August 11, 2017.

Abstract

The Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy, as Viktor E. Frankl’s Logotherapy is commonly hailed, veers around the proposition that the primary motivational force of human existence is neither ‘will to pleasure’ as propounded by Psychoanalysis nor ‘will to power’ of Adlerian concept but a sheer ‘will to meaning’. Logotherapy encapsulates the Greek word ‘logos’ in the sense of meaning, thus making itself a meaning-centred therapy to cure neuroses. Frankl quite sagaciously creates an ontological hiatus between noogenic neuroses and somatogenic neuroses declaring the former an offshoot of lack of meaning in life. Logotherapy aims to unlock the will to meaning and to assist the patient in seeing a meaning in his life under any miserable condition. This paper seeks to read Paul Auster’s novel The Brooklyn Follies in juxtaposition with the fundamental aspects of Logotherapy to discover the journey of the characters from noogenic neuroses to amiable social existence, from dark pessimism to bright optimism, from solipsistic life to family life, and from existential vacuum to richness of survival.

Key-words: Logotherapy, Noogenic Neuroses, Homeostasis, Noo-dynamics, Existential Vacuum.

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Black Female Bodies and Resistance in Gayl Jones Corregidora and Eva’s Man

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Smrity Sonal1 & Rajni Singh2

1 Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT (ISM), Dhanbad. Email: smritysonalekka07@gmail.com

2 Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT (ISM), Dhanbad. at IIT (ISM), Dhanbad, India. ORCID: 0000-0002-1569-8339. Email: rajnisingh18@gmail.com.

 Volume 9, Number 2, 2017 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v9n2.21

Received May 12, 2017; Revised July 10, 2017; Accepted July 15, 2017; Published August 11, 2017.

Abstract

For the black women writers, the body becomes a potent medium for addressing the misrepresentations of the black women in history. It gives them a scope to present the marginalized truths about them and to re-appropriate them as subjects. Gayl Jones’ writing is also grounded in the black women’s experiences. By giving her characters control over their bodies, she gives them a voice to articulate their truths. This article examines the ways in which the black women characters in Jones confront the body, their genetic inheritance, their degradation in history and their memories that have connections with a dark past. There is an attempt to demonstrate how the embodying of the physical self not only gives these women characters the courage to challenge the monolithic representations of black women, but also allows them to reclaim their spaces and to evolve as self-liberated, self-validated women.

Keywords: Gayl Jones, Black female bodies, Memories, Resistance, Reclamation.

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Tramping it out: Charlie Chaplin and the Modern

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Sonia Ghalian

Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities, India.

 Volume 9, Number 2, 2017 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v9n2.19

Received May 17, 2017; Revised July 11, 2017; Accepted July 20, 2017; Published August 11, 2017.

Abstract

Cinema as an art form struggled to find its place in the modernist canon until the Tramp, a populist figure, established itself as the icon of modernity itself. This paper is an attempt to explore different tropes of the Tramp existing across disciples and perspectives. By understanding the politics of the characterization of the Tramp, I attempt to enter the realm of modernity through Charlie Chaplin, the ultimate Tramp who addresses modernist concerns with a critical yet humorous account of the crises of human identity in the modern world.

Keywords: cinema, tramp, Charlie Chaplin, modernity.

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The Motive of Death in the Austrian Novel of the Late 1920s and Early 1930s

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N. E. Seibel,1 E. M. Shastina,2 N. I. Volokitina3 & N. F. Ziganshina4

1,3 South-Ural State Humanitarian Pedagogical University, Chelyabinsk

2Kazan (Volga Region) Federal University, Tatarstan

4Nizhnekamsk branch of Kazan Innovative University named after V. G. Timiryasov 

 Volume 9, Number 2, 2017 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v9n2.17

Received May 15, 2017; Revised July 21, 2017; Accepted July 25, 2017; Published August 10, 2017.

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the motive of death in the Austrian novels of the turn of the 1920s-1930s when a generation of rationalist writers appeared in the literature. Attention is drawn to the fact that Werfel, Musil, Broch, and Canetti were originally engaged in exact sciences, production, and commerce. Therefore, the meanings of the motives of death, which were used in modernistic literature even a little theoretically, were irrelevant for them. It is pointed out that writers, while addressing the issues on human destiny, boundaries of existence, life and death, look for new solutions and often find them in connection with the motive of warning, caution. Death becomes a shock, setting new goals to the living, or an indicator of moral fall of an indifferent character. The novels included in the study material are Franz Werfel’s “Barbara or Piety” (1929), Hermann Broch’s “The Sleepwalkers” (1928-1931) and Elias Canetti’s “Auto-da-Fé” (also known as the “The Blinding”) (1931-1932). The comparative methodology allows drawing conclusions about the author’s individual features of the solution of the ontological issues considered by the authors and provides the typological presentation of the functioning of the motive of death in the above-mentioned novels.

Keywords: motive of death, the Austrian novel, Werfel, Broch, Canetti, the imaginary and the true, transformation.

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Auditory Aesthetics and Literary Re-mappings: Trans-medial Forays into Joyce’s Ulysses and Beckett’s Ping

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Ronit Ghosh

Aalborg University, Denmark. Email: gronit79@gmail.com. ORCID: 0000-0002-8668-1286.

 Volume 9, Number 2, 2017 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v9n2.16

Received May 15, 2017; Revised July 21, 2017; Accepted July 25, 2017; Published August 10, 2017.

Abstract

In the present era binaries like poesis/techne or art/non-art are becoming increasingly tenuous with the emergence of New Media art cultures, where technology becomes an integral part of artworks. A spurt of commentaries regarding how New Media has redefined the cognitive, perceptual and artistic limits of what is traditionally regarded as art has resulted. However, there is a dearth of literature on how the conceptual vocabulary of contemporary or traditional art/literary practice has seeped into the precincts of the New Media art world. This, unfortunately, accounts for the current disconnect between contemporary art (which is conceived as conceptual art that is self-reflexive and meta-critical in character) and New Media art discourse (whose distinguishing feature is its tryst with technological implements). In an effort to bridge the conversational lacuna between the literary and the new media art disciplines, this paper indicates formal/structural tendencies in James Joyces’s novel Ulysses and Samuel Beckett’s short story Ping that evince receptive/interpretive tactics which significantly anticipate trends in Media art of the current times.

Keywords: New Media art, perception, Beckett, Joyce, transmedial

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Lawrence’s response to Futurism in the letters vis-à-vis his representation of “what the woman is” in The Rainbow

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Joyjit Ghosh

Associate Professor, Department of English, Vidyasagar University, Midnapore, West Bengal, India. Email: pathu_ghosh@yahoo.co.in

 Volume 9, Number 2, 2017 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v9n2.15

Abstract

D.H. Lawrence, as a conscious artist, was very much acquainted with contemporary art movements. A close study of his letters shows that Futurism as an artistic/literary movement appealed to him when he was passing through a transitional phase in his career as a novelist. The attempts of the Futurists to purge emotions of “the old forms and sentimentalities” was appreciated by Lawrence although he did not like their “ultra scientific” ventures to represent mental states. The present essay seeks to analyse two letters of Lawrence written in 1914 where he gives his response to Futurism, and at the same time it attempts to explore how this avant-garde art movement shaped the imagination of the author in conceiving the major women characters of The Rainbow (1915).

Keywords: Ego, Futurism, Marinetti, Self, Woman

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