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Theorizing Men and Men’s Theorizing: Mapping the Trajectory of the Development of Victorian Masculinity Studies

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Natasha Anand

IGNOU (New Delhi), India

Volume 7, Number 3, 2015 I Full Text PDF

Abstract

This article presents an overview of critical studies on Victorian men and Victorian masculinity. It begins by defining masculinity and delineating how its sociology is typically understood as consisting of three main ‘waves.’ It then proceeds to tracing the early beginnings of Victorian Masculinity Studies through the late 1970s to the early 1980s. Subsequently, it provides a reading of major works on Victorian masculinity from the 1990s to the 2000s. In so doing, it argues how the trajectory of both literary and historical scholarship has moved away from the traditional focus on a unitary, homogeneous, and culturally sanctioned form of Victorian masculinity to the plurality of Victorian masculinities. Drawing from Connell’s theory of hegemonic masculinity, which posits a hierarchy of multiple masculinities engaged in power relations, the article reviews works that examine a series of dominant as well as subordinate masculinities as created, negotiated and sustained in the Victorian era. The article finally shows how the analysis of multiple forms of Victorian masculinity points toward the fluidity and instability of masculine identities thereby constructing the subject of Victorian masculinity as an ever-changing theoretical phenomenon embedded within historically, culturally and socially embedded discourse that is crucial not only to an understanding of Victorian studies but also to the academic study of both literature and history.

Keywords: hegemonic masculinity, masculinity vs. masculinities, subordinate masculinity, Victorian gender ideology Keep Reading

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“Batter My Heart”: Violence and the Sublime in John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 14

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Sonia Kotiah
University of Mauritius, Reduit , Mauritius

Volume 7, Number 3, 2015 I Full Text PDF

Abstract

In examining the sublime as recurring literary motif, this article proposes a philosophical reading of John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 14. This metaphysical poem posits a subjective persona whose spiritual dilemma is reflected by a violent desire to preserve individual autonomy and defy divine authority followed by eventual recognition of and submission to God’s will. Acknowledging that the notion of sublime is multi-faceted, the paper discusses how the sublime is mediated by violence in Holy Sonnet 14. The study is divided into three sections. While the first part provides a broad assessment of violence in Donne’s sonnets, the second part focuses on the creative and destructive characteristics of the sublime in Holy Sonnet 14. The third part then connects the sublime to Derridean aporia. Finally, the conclusion sums up the main aspects of the study.

Keywords: Donne, Metaphysical Poetry, sublime, violence Keep Reading

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Effectiveness of Advertisements: Comparative Analysis of Celebrity Endorsed Advertisements verses Animated Character Endorsed Advertisements

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Solanki Sandip P., Symbiosis International University, Pune, India
Sheth  Bhagyashree, Gujarat Technological University, Ahmedabad, India   

Volume 7, Number 3, 2015 I Full Text PDF

Abstract

This Study is mainly done in order to find out the relative effectiveness of Celebrity Endorsed Advertisements verses Animated Character Endorsed Advertisements on the purchase intention of children. Further, the Study is done for the same product and for the low involvement food product. The study finds that the impact of animated and cartoon characters in Advertisements is more than that of celebrities in advertisements especially for low-involvement food product category.

Keywords: Celebrity endorsed, Animated character, Children, Purchase intention, Television, Print, Advertisements.

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Digital Campus as Electronic Image of University

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Olga V. Galustyan

Southern Federal University, Russia

Volume 7, Number 3, 2015 I Full Text PDF

Abstract: This article is devoted to the problem of improving the quality of university education. It discusses the problem of using virtual educational area. Virtual educational area is one of the innovative technologies in education. Digital Campus of the Southern Federal University is demonstrated as an example of virtual educational area. Digital Campus “Incampus” includes all available information resources connected with training, social and administrative activities. It allows using electronic libraries of textbooks, giving consultations, creating students’ e-portfolio. The Digital Campus system allows the students to progress at their own rates. Tutors serve as guides during the studying process of the students. Active cooperation with the invited users from the other universities allows studying and implementing the best experience, conducting joint programs, publishing educational materials. All these form an electronic image of the Southern Federal University and develop identity of university. The author concludes that the use of Digital Campus in teaching encourages students’ self-education and reflection. All these increase the effectiveness of studying.

Key words: Digital Campus, electronic image, virtual educational area, e-portfolio Keep Reading

Resistance to Power: Subversive Elements in the Folk Performances of Medinipur, Bankura and Purulia

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Mir Ahammad Ali, Vidyasagar University, India
Mir Mahammad Ali, Ravenshaw University, Cuttuck, Odisha, India

Volume 7, Number 3, 2015 I Full Text PDF

Abstract

Under the broad domain of Performance Studies, the study of Bengali folk performances, specifically the folk dramas of West Bengal is dynamic and divergent. The folk performances of Bengal like the other folk performances in India are generally created and performed by the preliterate, illiterate or semi-literate people of rural areas and passed down orally from one generation to the other. These performances blended in with ritualistic observances are chiefly meant for the amusement and mere entertainment for the rural village folks. But it is also evident that behind their mere enjoyment, their long inert cry of being deprived and victimized can be detected in a number of folk performances. In such performances like Pata-Pala, Lalita-Sabar, Bhnar-Jatra or Sasthi Mangal of Medinipur, Manasa Mangal of Purulia or Jhapan of Bankura, the performers not only hint that they are being oppressed and ill-treated by the dominant power system of the society, a solemn voice of resistance to that oppressive and dominant discourse of its time in these performances. This paper aims to focus on such specific folk performances of three selected districts of West Bengal (Medinipur, Purualia and Bankura) where the subversive elements in these folk performances serve as resistance to power of the colonial, imperial or zamindari system.

 

Keywords: Performance Studies, Folk Performances, ritualistic, resistance, Keep Reading

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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 Question of Intoxication in 19th Century Colonial Bengal

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Tahmidal Zami
Independent Writer & Researcher, Bangladesh

Volume 7, Number 3, 2015 I Full Text PDF

Abstract

The paper explores how political, social, and cultural changes shaped the different trends of intoxication practices in 19th century colonial Bengal. At the onset of East India Company’s colonial rule in Bengal, the administration and its collaborators worked out modalities of profit-making from drugs-trade, especially through processing and export of opium. On the other hand, the colonial regime – that is, both administration officials and their social counterparts like missionaries – tightened control over intransigent social categories like Faqirs and Sanyasis. The intoxication practices of the Muslim and Hindu holy men became a key focus of the regime in classification, vilification, criminalization, and exclusion of these groups. Meanwhile, the privileged Babu class was transitioning in their use of intoxicants: subaltern addictions like ganja was vying with more aspirational and anagogic addictions like wine that facilitated assimilation into putative ‘civilization’. Following a surge in consumption under the civilizational aspiration, a discursive backlash with both secular and revivalist undertones rolled back the intoxication practices. Keep Reading

On the Chaotic Metaphors in Crashaw’s “Bulla”

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Ali Taghizadeh, Razi University, Iran

Mohammad-Javad Haj’jari, Razi University, Iran

Volume 7, Number 3, 2015 I Full Text PDF

Abstract

Richard Crashaw is the greatest English Baroque poet, and his “Bulla”, commonly translated as the “Bubble”, is one of the greatest poems in the Baroque sense. It reveals Crashaw’s literary adaptation of the New Science of the Renaissance and the early seventeenth century for his literary/artistic concerns. Highlighting the chaotic undertones of the Baroque, “Bulla” links Crashaw’s sensibility to the new discoveries of the period. Crashaw emphasizes the kinesthetic nonlinearity of the natural phenomena, culminated in the shape and essence of the bubble as a microcosm of the universe. Accordingly, he adapts the behavior of non-human environments to human nature, and then changes it to poetic themes; his poem compares, through intricate metaphors and symbols, the illusory and transient state of the bubble to life and poetry. Through his scientific outlook and interdisciplinary endeavor, Crashaw notifies humanity of the essence of the bubble as it symbolically stands for the transience of worldly pleasures and for poetry, in a universe of dynamic change. Worldly pleasures are, like bubbles, not only alluring and wonderful, but also deceitful and transient. Poetry is also a bubble, for it is attractive and grasping only if it is read; yet it tends to escape interpretation. And all happen in a process of becoming. The very structure and theme of the poem highlight Crashaw’s interest in such chaotic metaphors and symbols for his humanistic, literary, philosophical, and religious concerns, proving the fact that scientific thinking can convey the reality of life and stimulate spiritual thinking.

Keywords: Baroque, “Bulla”, Chaos, Crashaw, New Science

 Introduction

As a representative of the Baroque style, Crashaw’s “Bulla” is a rich poem in bringing the Baroque soul to life. The Baroque art and literature was somehow a reflection of the new scientific discoveries and philosophic ideas of the age as well as the consequent view about mankind’s new position on the earth and his worldly affairs. Crashaw’s poem is a representative one in reflecting these issues through its intricate and chaotic metaphors. Crashaw gives us a graspable sample as part of the newly discovered chaos in the form of a bubble. And then he applies to it to his individual concerns regarding life on earth and the essence of its pleasures.

“New Science” was one of the most remarkable influences on the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets which helped them develop new outlooks toward the universe and its phenomena. Through their scientific perception of nature and their intellectuality, the metaphysical poets rejoiced in expressing “human emotions in terms of scientific terminology” (Sundararajan, 1970, p. 70). With the publication of Copernicus’ On the Revolution of Heavenly Bodies (1543) the new worldview began. Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Bacon, Galilei, Kepler, Descartes, Christiaan Huygens, and Newton challenged the former scientific views of the universe throughout the Renaissance and the seventeenth century. Galilei’s “new science” of dynamics, Bacon’s “the school of experience”, Kepler’s discoveries regarding the “celestial motion” and “mathematical speculation”, Descartes’ discovery of analytic geometry, his observation of “geometrical figures in the process of becoming rather than contemplating them as fixed Verities”, and his concern with the features of the curves together with Pascal’s work on probability, all contributed to the New Science (Freidrich, 1965, pp. 108-111). Through Copernicus’ theory, Bruno’s investigations, and Galilei’s expansions, the earth was no longer taken as the center of the universe, and man could no longer be considered the aim of creation. The universe, newly discovered to be center-less, was now taken as “infinite yet uniform, a co-operative and continuous system organized on a single principle” (Hauser, 1992, p. 166).

With this new knowledge, mankind became “a tiny, insignificant factor” in such new world. The traditional “anthropocentric worldview” was replaced by a cosmic awareness of “an infinite continuity of interrelationships embracing man and containing the ultimate ground of his existence” (p. 167). Mankind thus began to develop changes along with the new discoveries. In Pascal’s words, the human nature was “in movement” (qtd. in Battistini, 2006, p. 24). Humanity was upset by the “melancholic sensation” deriving from the depravity of the earth from its centrality and its wandering state in the infinite space, without any “secure points of reference” in a universe of motion (p. 22). Besides the philosophical, political, and religious events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, new science influenced the rise and the development of the Baroque sensibility in Europe (Segel, 1974, Passim). Although the discoveries about the concept of movement in nature indicated scientific progress in the age, the evaporation of the ancient cosmology and the familiar world led to forms of “epochal melancholia” and deep anxieties regarding the vastness and chaotic form of the universe. That natural phenomena were in motion and the universe was ruled by chaos stimulated “the baroque obsession with the fragility of the human condition.” These anxieties manifested themselves in the literature of the era through the frequent images of a world which was rotten by “death and decay”, implying a “baroque melancholy” (Castillo, 2013, pp. 43-44). This worldview or “cult of nothingness” was tied to the discovery of infinity, the “indeterminacy of creation”, and the concept of “cosmic vacuum”. The latter concept was proposed by Bruno who held that “a sort of negative ontology” manifests itself in a set of new concepts in different fields of knowledge, all converging in a “praise of nothingness” (pp. 63-64). The Baroque was filled with a reflection of infinity and the interconnectedness of all beings. The object, in the sense of the Baroque, symbolized the universe “as a uniform organism alive in all its parts,” each of which signifying an infinite flux and containing the law which ruled the whole…Full Text PDF

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Autopoiesis and Cummings’ Cat

Aaron M. Moe, Washington State University  Download PDF Version Abstract Cummings shattered language, but he did so with precision. The

Women’s Health: a Critical Approach to Gender Issues, Ideas and Practices in India

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Shubhra Chandra

Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, Bhatter College, Dantan

Volume 7, Number 3, 2015 I Full Text PDF

Abstract

Women’s  health   status   is  an  emerging  subject-matter  of  study revealing  diverse  inequalities  in causes  and  outcomes  of  it  in  both  industrialized  and  developing  countries. Various  socio-cultural  and socio-economic  determinants  ranging  from diverse  ideology, beliefs, taboos  and practices  shape  the  manifestations, conceptualisation, consequences, appropriate  treatment, treatment-seeking  behaviour  and  treatment  response. The entire  gamut  of  discussion  of  this  paper  revolves  around  some  of  these  socio-cultural  and  socio-economic  determinants of  women’s  health  issues .

Keywords:  women’s  health, determinants, beliefs, practices, issues

Introduction

“Cradle of life; that’s the WOMEN.” Though it was long since identified that women represent one half of the world’s population, supporting an increasing numbering of families; living longer than their male counterparts for biological reasons; are also the one, who often suffer the greater burdens of illness and disability .The recognition of this ground reality has invoke the Government of India to reiterate ,rethink and reallocate and consistently increase the budget outlay for programmes on  family planning and women’s health with every Five-Year Plan .However, this has had little impact on the overall scenario ; resulting in contrasting and divulging inequalities in both developed and developing societies. Health concerns of women are often neglected if not unmet; and their lies the importance of emphasising this basic need of women; as health is something to be nurtured , in order to , prevent illness and diseases.

Illness and diseases and its perception, treatment form a common experiences process and is part and parcel of human life in every society. Every community has its own way of dealing with the illness based on certain preconceived knowledge, beliefs and practices build around health and illness, which invariably varies with the members of different communities, as well as, within the members of the same communities .The notion of health is related to the concept “healthy” which simply means living well despite, any inescapable illnesses and diseases. Thereby, health is the balance and integration of physical, mental, intellectual, emotional, occupational and environmental aspects of human condition.

The women’s health movement that started in the United States of America and spread worldwide has been successful in shifting the preconceived notion of women’s health from sex neutrality to gender specificity, from a biomedical model to a social model and to a holistic model, from dependency of the patient to self – determination of the patient, and from doctor – centred care to client–centred care (Richters, 2002). It is being recognised that everywhere women’s experiences, and presentations of their health problems are misunderstood (Chhabra, 2002). The concerns of women’s therapies, preventive and curative in various parts of the world have also been perceived differently (Richters 1992; Zaidi 1996; Vlassof & Manderson 1998).According to Richter (2002), while in some parts of the world the concerns and priorities may be clean water, malaria control, or safe childbirth, in the industrialized world activists charge that scientists have neglected to include women in the epidemiological studies and clinical trials, arguing that researchers mistakenly assumed that data from middle-aged white males apply equally well to women, minorities and the elderly .Partly because of these accusations, the field of gender-based medicine has come into existence, concentrating on the fundamental male-female differences in the incidences and prevalence of specific diseases, specific diseases risks, the response to risk factors, etiology, symptoms, manifestations, the presentation  of complaints, the experience of disease and complaints and the dealing with the complaints, the course of the disease, the psycho-social consequences of diseases, the appropriate treatment, treatment responsivity, the kind of health education needed, etc. (Kolk et al; the Journal of Women’s Health and Gender-Based Medicine ).  Despite, all the jargons in the Family Planning Programme and Reproductive and Child Health Programmes, India has failed to achieve the desired goals. In India, women have high mortality rate particularly, in their childhood and in reproductive years. Maternal mortality rates is high in the rural areas accounting for, 19% of still births and 27% of all maternal deaths from a global perspective .The health of Indian women is  linked to their  societal background and status .The United Nations ranks India as  a middle-incomed country. The United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report (2011) ranked India 132 out of 187 in terms of gender inequality. Gender Inequality Index (GII) is a multidimensional indicator determined by numerous factors including maternity mortality rate, adolescent fertility rate, educational achievement and labour force participation rate. India exemplifies many of these multidimensional indicators.

The term gender as used often to distinguish the differences between men and women that are socially construed from those that are biologically acquired is more a recent concept. A gender approach to a particular health aspect or a disease probes both the differential impact of it on women and men and the social, cultural and economic contexts within which the person live and work. According to Dr A martya Sen, “Burden of hardships fall disproportionately on women” due to inequalities like: mortality (due to gender bias in health care and nutrition), natality (Sex Selective Abortion and female infanticide), basic facilities (education and skills development), special opportunities (higher education and professional training),employment (promotion) and ownership ( home, land and property)…Full Text PDF

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The Ubiquitous Effect of Television and Dominant Surveillance in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451

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Abdol Hossein Joodaki
Lorestan University, Khorramabad, Iran

Volume 7, Number 3, 2015 I Full Text PDF

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to analyze Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451(1953) under the light of Jean Baudrillard’s notions of the media and the influences it can have on our daily lives, and under the light of Michel Foucault concept of sousveillance/ surveillance. Bradbury’s work portrays a representative sample of a culture where different fields including books, education, and history fall under the influence of the media. Guy Montag, the protagonist, initially participates in burning books as a fireman, and as the novel progresses he understands that he has so far been wrong in thinking that books can and do inculcate false notions into individuals, and begins to be skeptical of the manner in which people have been indoctrinated by television to believe that possessing books of any kind could be detrimental and hence should be gotten rid of. The existence of sousveillance/surveillance too, engenders an atmosphere of anxiety, trepidation and apprehension for subversive forces and therefore precluding any disturbance on the part of them.

Keywords: Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, television, sousveillance, surveillance, Baudrillard, Foucault Keep Reading

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Indicting Governmental Control, Military-Industrial Complex and Rogue AI: A Political Reading of Three Young-Adult (Science Fiction) Stories

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Sami Ahmad Khan

Jawaharlal Nehru University

Volume 7, Number 3, 2015 I Full Text PDF

Abstract:

This paper delves into the tangible materiality and political relevance of three Young-Adult Science Fiction stories by Indian writers in English. It analyses how these writers approach, interpret and address socio-political maladies afflicting today’s India. Utilising the theoretical framework of Darko Suvin’s novum, this paper scans the primary texts to locate how they formulate and highlight pressing issues of a developing India, and how these contemporary problems are foregrounded using the self-aware deployment mechanism of (YA) Science Fiction. It also identifies how these writers view the operationalisation of upcoming technologies.

Keywords: Indian Science Fiction, Science Fiction in Indian English, YA SF Short-Stories, Novum Keep Reading

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