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Poetics of Space and Its Association with Human Soul in Brian Dillon’s In the Dark Room

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Hassan Abootalebi1 & Alireza Kargar2

1PhD student of English Language and Literature, Kharazmi University, Tehran, Iran. Email: abootalebi2010@gmail.com

2M.A in English Language and Literature, Lorestan University, Khorramabad, Iran. Email: alirezakargar1984@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 4, July-September, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n4.26

Abstract

The present paper intends to analyze and put under scrutiny Brian Dillon’s memoir In the Dark Room (2005) in the light of Gaston Bachelard’s theories of house as an intimate space explicated and expounded on in his magnum opus The Poetics of Space (1964). Since Bachelard’s ideas are often associated with phenomenology which accentuates the significance of the manner in which phenomena appear to us and are given meaning, the house and objects in it as a place of intimacy are of paramount importance to him. The spaces along with objects are not merely possessions which can be lived in or owned by individuals, but rather they express and suggest human emotions and human soul. They also have the power to transport us back into a distant past and evoke deeply buried memories and feelings. The house, says Bachelard, protects both daydreaming and the dreamer and allows one to dream in peace. Moreover, it provides a restful place in which imagination and thought are both stimulated. The title-mentioned work can be investigated in the light of Gaston Bachelard’s theories to provide proof for the above claim. The narrator of In the Dark Room is surrounded with objects and places which are capable of taking him back to the past arousing his interest and making him conjure up bygone days. Not only does the house function as a metaphor for evoking memories, but also the street and the place in which Dillon’s mother was hospitalized are accentuated. Hence, in the subsequent sections of the current paper, first phenomenology will be defined and elaborated on, then Brian Dillon’s selected work will be scrutinized based on Gaston Bachelard’s house-related theories and notions in order to demonstrate the association of the house and its objects with human soul and imagination.

KEYWORDS: Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space, Brian Dillon, In the Dark Room, phenomenology

Review Article: The Crises of Civilization: Exploring Global and Planetary Histories (2018) by Dipesh Chakrabarty

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Publisher: Oxford University Press (2018). Language: English

ISBN-13 (print edition): 978-0-19-948673-1. ISBN-10 (print edition): 0-19-948673-5

Reviewed by

Shikha Vats

Doctoral Fellow and Teaching Assistant, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology – Delhi. Email: shikhavats.iitd@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 4, July-September, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n4.25

W. E. B. Du Bois (1903) had famously said that the problem of the twentieth century “is the problem of the color-line” (p. 13). Dipesh Chakrabarty declares, in this new volume, that the question of the twenty-first century will be that of climate crisis. The major events of the twentieth century, including the processes of imperialism, colonization, and globalization led to widespread migration of people all across the globe framing new intersubjective equations such as oppressor-oppressed, privileged-marginalized, mostly along what Du Bois called ‘the color-line’. The major fallout of this colonial and capitalist project in the last century has been global warming which is set to affect the entire planet and hence needs to be at the forefront of all policy decisions in the twenty-first century. In order to grapple with this new age of the Anthropocene, whereby human beings have become a geophysical force capable of altering the course of the planet, Chakrabarty urges a rethinking and reformulation of the discipline of history…Full Text PDF

Book Review: Interpreting Cinema: Adaptations, Intertextualities, Art Movements by Jasbir Jain

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Reviewed by

Somdatta Mandal

Former Professor of English, Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, W.B. Email: somdattam@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 4, July-September, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n4.24

Film studies now has become a full-fledged discipline with several theoretical approaches lined up behind it and has a strong foothold in serious academics. Films are now read from various perspectives as text, as a serious novel is read over and over again, since every successive reading/viewing yields additional insights into their meaning. Interpreting Cinema: Adaptations, Intertextualities, Art Movements by eminent academician and scholar Jasbir Jain is a collection of sixteen essays which explores the academic aspect of film studies and has a wide range of primarily Hindi films for discussion crossing decades, genres and cultures. The essays in this volume take up adaptations from fiction and drama both from within the same culture and across cultures and explore the relationships between cultures and mediums. There are individual essays on relationships, theoretical frameworks and art movements, reflecting the intimate connection between critical theory and filmmaking…Full Text PDF

Review Article: Rewriting Tibet in The Tibetan Suitcase: A Novel (2019) by Tsering Namgyal Khortsa

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885 views

Publisher: Blackneck Books, (Under the Imprint: TibetWrites)

The First edition (November, 2019). Language: English. ISBN: 978-93-85578-12-0

Reviewed by

Koushik Goswami

PhD Research Scholar, Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University. Email: koushikgoswami4@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 4, July-September, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n4.23

The Chinese invasion and occupation of Tibet in 1950 compelled a sizable number of Tibetans to leave their homeland. They were relocated to India, Nepal, Bhutan and different parts of the world as refugees. These displaced people do not want to forget their own history. Tibetan authors have taken upon themselves the responsibility of keeping alive the memory of the great exodus in which Dalai Lama was a participant and of what happened after that. The flame of patriotism and the desire for a return to the homeland filter through their literary works. These authors writing in English nurture a free Tibet in their national imaginary. As the Tibetans lack political and military power to overwhelm the might of the Chinese colonisers, the works of these writers of Tibetan origin are of paramount importance. Combining the functions of both creative authors and activists, they help sustain the Tibetan struggle for freedom, draw global attention to the plight of Tibetan refugees scattered all over the world and put pressure on the repressive Chinese regime in Tibet. They address issues related not only to their longing for their distant homeland, its culture and the political situation there but also to their own lived experience in the diaspora…Full Text PDF

Review Article: English Studies in India: Contemporary and Evolving Paradigms (2019)

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Edited by Banibrata Mahanta and Rajesh Babu Sharma

Publisher: Springer (Singapore, 2019). ISBN 978-981-13-1524—4

Reviewed by

Himadri Lahiri

Professor, Department of English, Netaji Subhas Open University, West Bengal, India. Email: hlahiri@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 4, July-September, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n4.22

In the context of the changing times and gradual evolution of what we know now as ‘New Humanities’, it is time for us to re-evaluate the role of English studies. As the hangover of colonial ideological control and the reigns of ‘universal truths’ waned and as new generations of students, teachers and academic administrators took control of the discipline, English studies began to face new ideological and pedagogical challenges. Moreover, the perception that the study of Humanities does not have much utilitarian values and hence government funds should be diverted to the study of science and technology has put English studies in a precarious condition. At a time when the academic fraternity is wrestling with discursive questions on textual-methodological orientations, pedagogical experimentations and innovative teaching-learning designs in order to sail through the adversity, the publication of the book under review is a welcome event…Full Text PDF>>

Review Article: Homelandings: Postcolonial Diasporas and Transatlantic Belongings (2016) by Rahul Gairola

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Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Ph.D.

Director, Folded Paper Dance and Theatre Limited (Hong Kong, India, Seattle). Independent Researcher, Fulbright-Nehru Scholar, 2017-2018. Email: kanta.kochhar123@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 4, July-September, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n4.21

We all discover over and over again the kind of strange and violent stranglehold history has over us. We deploy histories to explain our pasts, identify the present, and orient us to the future. As Rahul K. Gairola shows in Homelandings: Postcolonial Diasporas and Transatlantic Belongings, the multiple currents of history have dictated our methods for establishing our home-sites: who belongs and who does not belong in any given place. Our “at-home” practices, one dimension of “the double-bind of history as home…” (2016, xvi), have a deep and lasting impact on how we move about and participate in the world-at-large. Homelandings provides a timely intervention into the theoretical discourse on the “home-site” as the outcome of a “home-economics” that continually reenacts the persistent racism, classicism, sexism, and queerphobia of a neoliberal bio-political governmentality of the Anglosphere (Bennet’s term, cited in Gairola, 18). The project offers “homelandings,” Gairola’s neologism, as the process of resistance to and reappropriation of “home-sites”: “producing new homes in which alternative modes of community and belonging flourish and reproduce” (17). Homelandings—with “landings” as the demarcator of that which is in motion, always about to happen—then act as a series of transversal disruptors of the neoliberal sphere. In this way, these resistances provide a conceptual and practical apparatus for the emergence of domestic orientations, relations, and spaces, even if these are often provisional…

Book Review: A Primal Issue: Stories of Women by Subrata Basu

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Number of Pages: 144. Publication Year: 2020. Publisher: Orient Blackswan

ISBN: 9789352879045. Price: Rs. 295.00/-

Reviewed by 

Ms. Adishree Vats

Assistant Professor, Department of English Studies, Akal University, Talwandi Sabo, Punjab. Email: vatsadishree8@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 4, July-September, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n4.20

The book, “A Primal Issue: Stories of Women”, is a gripping, enthralling anthology of analytical stories, translated by Subrata Basu, and written originally in Bengali by Jagdish Gupta, a “trailblazer” (p. xv) of modernist movement in India. With its epicentric plunge on the word “primal”, the book very meticulously exhibits a valorous investigation of interdictions and anathemas existing in the splendid post-Tagore chapter of Bengali literature. This revelatory compendium stresses on Jagdish Gupta’s seven translated stories, all originally published between 1927 and 1959, with females as chief characters, scrutinizing the intense connotations of life at personal as well as societal levels.  Every chapter is dedicated to one story so as to undrape the aggregation of the dilemmas, quandaries, and predicaments of Bengalis in general and women in particular for whom the repugnance of conservatism continues to exist. The stories unsparingly underscore the barbarous realities of the society, such as polygamy, child-marriage, widow-remarriage, women’s oppression and marginalization..Full Text PDF

Review Article: We Mark Your Memory: Writings from the Descendants of Indenture (2018)

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Edited by David Dabydeen, Maria del Pilar Kaladeen and Tina K. Ramnarine

Reviewed by

Arnab Kumar Sinha

Assistant Professor, Department of English and Culture Studies, University of Burdwan, West Bengal, India. Email: arnab.ks@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 4, July-September, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n4.19

Writing the history of indentured diaspora primarily depends on the available archives that contain the official and personal documents related to this history. While the State archives contain scanty materials for research in this area, considerable efforts have been made by the descendants of the indentured labourers to retrieve personal narratives of their ancestors. Retrieving these personal narratives, have indeed, played a major role in creating small family archives, which have inspired the present generation of authors/researchers to document the history of indentured diaspora. Indeed, this history is the outcome of intensive research on the genealogies of the descendants of indentured labourers. Stories narrated by the indentured labourers, old photographs, diary writings, travel documents and such other records are significant archival materials based on which the present generation of authors/researchers trace their family’s past as well as that of the community. These family archives provide considerable resource for research on history of indentured diaspora. It is in the context of this background that the anthology, We Mark Your Memory: Writings from the Descendants of Indenture (2018) edited by David Dabydeen, Maria del Pilar Kaladeen and Tina K. Ramnarine may be considered as a worthy contribution to the history of indenture diaspora. This anthology, which the editors of the book claim to be a “commemorative volume” (Dabydeen, Kaladeen, & Ramnarine, 2018, p. xii), is an attempt to collate the creative/critical pieces written by the descendants of indentured labourers (coolies). Production of such an anthology to mark the centenary year of the abolition of indentureship (1917) is a praiseworthy initiative. The publication of this book is the outcome of a collaborative venture between the School of Advanced Studies, University of London and the association of Commonwealth Writers, which inevitably foregrounds the active global network of almost thirty writers from various regions of the world working seriously on this project of retrieving the lost indentured narratives. The editors of the book acknowledge the genuine contribution of the association of Commonwealth Writers, which is “the cultural initiative of the Commonwealth Foundation” and this association, the editors claim, “inspires and connects writers and storytellers across the world, bringing personal stories to a global audience” (Dabydeen et al., 2018, p. vii). The pronoun ‘we’ of the title of this book represents the storytellers of the present generation, while the determiner ‘your’, mentioned in the title, refers to the coolies, the ancestors of these storytellers. The book therefore is indicative of academic activism that seeks to highlight the significance of reading, researching and discussing these personal narratives in the context of indenture diaspora…Full Text PDF>>

Moderating Effects of Academic Position and Computer Literacy Skills on E-learning Portal Usage: SEM Application on Theory of Planned Behaviour

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Mohamed Majeed Mashroofa1, Athambawa Haleem2 and Aboobucker Jahufer3

1Senior Assistant Librarian1, Science Library, South Eastern University of Sri Lanka,

E-mail: mashroof@seu.ac.lk,

2Senior Lecturer in Accounting2, Faculty of Management & Commerce, South Eastern University of Sri Lanka, E-mail: ahaleem@seu.ac.lk

3Professor in Statistics 3, Faculty of Applied Sciences, South Eastern University of Sri Lanka, E-mail: jahufer@seu.ac.lk

 Volume 12, Number 4, July-September, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n4.18

 Abstract

The main objective of this research is to investigate the moderating effect of academic position and computer literacy level on usage of the online learning portal among academics by examining the factors from the perspective of the Theory of Planned Behaviour as the basis for conceptual model. Academic position and Computer Literacy skills are used as moderators. The population of the study comprised 5399 academics. Systematic proportionate sampling techniques applied to gather data, with 400-sample size. Data were received from only 320 university academics, giving a response rate of 80%. SPSS and AMOS version 23 were instrumented to analyse the data and Structural equation modelling was used to find the model fit and causal relationships. This study reveals that both attitude and subjective norm have influences on the behavioural intention but not the perceived behavioural control. Behavioural intention and perceived behavioural control had a direct association with Portal Usage. Both gender and academic position moderate the association of exogenous and endogenous variables. This study will help to set up new work norms that will set aside time for teaching activities through the E-L portal, prepare policy guidelines, and provide incentives to faculty members to encourage E-L portal usage. Universities can use the finding to improve their concerns of the factors involved, as that would enable the academics to use more effectively the online learning system installed at great cost in the universities. In addition, this theoretically contributes to consider the academic position and the computer literacy skills level as the determinants of portal usage.

Keywords:- Academic position, Computer Literacy, E-Learning Portal, MOODLE,  VLE,  Sri Lanka, Theory of Planned Behaviour

 

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Understanding the Gender Biases in Modern and Pre-modern Times through Mricchakatika and Utsav

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Prabha Shankar Dwivedi1 and Priyanka Tripathi2

1Assistant Professor of English, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Tirupati. prabhas.dwivedi@iittp.ac.in

2Associate Professor of English, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Patna. priyankatripathi@iitp.ac.in

 Volume 12, Number 4, July-September, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n4.17c

Abstract

Gender Bias is a phenomenon that strengthens in India as a result of personal values and perception, traditionally assigned roles on the basis of sex and regressive ideologies deeply entrenched in patriarchy. Vasantasen? is the protagonist of the M?cchaka?ika of ??draka, a classical Indian masterpiece written in c. 350 BCE which was later adapted into a Hindi film–Utsav (1985) written and directed by Girish Karnad. Despite being an adaptation, in its filmy avatar, Karnad denies Vasantasen? love and respect due to her profession and resorts to endorsing the conventional whereas in the original text she is a respectable woman. The article offers a comparative study of the treatment given to courtesans in general and reflects upon their complex realities by comparing the treatment of an Indian courtesan of two historically apart periods.

Keywords: Gender Bias; Courtesan; Film Adaptation; Patriarchy; Culture

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