1st RIOC - Page 3

Humans, Animals and Habitats: Liminality and Environmental Concerns in George Saunders’ Fox 8

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287 views

Raisun Mathew1 & Dr. Digvijay Pandya2

1Doctoral Research Scholar, Department of English, Lovely Professional University, Punjab (India), E-mail: raisunmathew@gmail.com, orcid.org/0000-0003-3427-0941

2Associate Professor and Research Supervisor, Department of English, Lovely Professional University, Punjab (India), E-mail: digvijay.24354@lpu.co.in, orcid.org/0000-0002-5985-9579

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s10n4

Abstract

With the equal treatment of binary oppositions related to environmental concerns, the hypocrisy of human beings continues to dominate on earth having no counterpart to compete except the ones within the same race. Intruding into the unexplored habitats has helped the race to expand their jurisdictions, often with the exercise of power and unrivalled exhibition of uniqueness. This qualitative research paper aims to interpret the environmental concerns discussed in George Saunders’ Fox 8 in the light of the characteristics of coercive liminality exercised by the invasive domination of humans over the inhabitants. The intrusion of human beings transforms natural habitats to man-made environments, thus making it exclusively accessible only for their purposes. Human invasions lead to domination and it entails exploitation that results in the displacement of inhabitants and resources from their natural habitats. Introduction of the concepts such as coercive liminality from the textual interpretation and the argument of resultant counter-liminality develop the core of the paper. The research contributes to the perspective of liminality on studies related to environmental transitions and alterations due to human intervention.

Keywords: American Literature, domination, environment, exploitation, liminality.

Pink Floyd’s Time: an aural metanarrative exploring time through form, lyric, and musical arrangement

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516 views

Shobana P Mathews1 & Vishal Varier2

1Associate Professor, Christ University.  ORCID: 0000-0001-9700-9420. Email: shobhana.p.mathews@christuniversity.in,

2III MA-English.  ORCID: 0000-0001-9966-4402.Email: vishal.varier@eng.christuniversity.in,

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s10n3

 Abstract

The inability of language to capture the essence of time is a crisis that has been expressed by philosophers starting from St. Augustine to Paul Ricoeur. Appearing on their seminal album, Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd’s Time is a profound artistic attempt which transcends this language barrier by using music to bring the listeners to a more direct confrontation with time; doing so by juxtaposing time as calibrated and as experienced through the music and the lyrics, and by making the reader experience time-based affects such as impatience, expectation, monotony, and such. As a direct function of song, time is experienced as musical time in the song, thereby ensuring that the listener’s confrontation with time is immersive, with lyrics that describe the nature of experienced and calibrated time working synchronously with the music to complete the image. In the context of its release in 1974, the 6:52 minute song was in engagement with the concept of time as well, in that it was among the pioneering ones which redefined radio broadcast time beyond the standard 3 minutes afforded to popular music tracks, with the commercially preferred listener span in mind. The matter of time thus becomes a multi-layered formal engagement in the song, at the level of lyric, recording, music and listening, thereby making possible an image of time that is polished and rounded. These aural, lyrical and production-based concepts will be addressed and expanded upon to show how Pink Floyd’s Time functions as a metanarrative in how it uses and invokes the elements of time to talk about time.

Keywords: Aurality, aural narrative, metanarrative, language, aspects of Time

Nature and Self Reflection in Tagore’s The Crescent Moon

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327 views

Ayanita Banerjee

Professor of English, University of Engineering and Management, New-Town- Kolkata. Email: abayanita8@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s10n1

Abstract

To perceive the human world in co-existence with nature and thereby to nurture freedom and constructive processes we need to rethink the transformative literature of Rabindranath Tagore, who explored an environment conscious, almost ecocritical vision of human existence inspiring a “deep ecological” sense of identification with the immediate environment. Tagore’s philosophy of nature with its wide range and variety reifies the real possibility of ‘living, learning and uniting oneself’ with the “organic wholeness of nature”. The relationship between the man and nature remains interwoven in his writings promoting an intimate, interdependent relationship revealing “the deepest harmony that existed between man and his surroundings”. The paper dealing with Tagore’s simplest collection of poetry The Crescent Moon in particular lays emphasis on the relationship of the mother and the child developing out of his traumatic experiences of childhood namely losing his mother quite at an early age and his subsequent identification with nature as an ‘alternative mother-principle’ Nature confers a psychological closure by connecting him with Mother Nature (my italics) “mother nature you have taken me in your affectionate embrace and have begun to sing your imposing music to me rich in harmony and melody”. Nature removed from the crudity of its daily entanglements activated within him a spirit of companionship and receptivity revealing to him “the deepest harmony that existed between him and his surroundings”.

Keywords– Mother- nature, symbiotic-coexistence, alternative-mother principle.

Study of Trauma and Transgression of the ‘Adult-child’ in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy-Man

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384 views

Jharna Choudhury

Ph.D. Scholar. Tezpur University, Assam, India. Email: jharnachoudhury123@gmail.com

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0916-373

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s9n6

Abstract

Bapsi Sidhwa’s characterization of Lenny Sethi in her fourth novel, the 1991 historical fiction Ice-Candy-Man, is formulated by the heterogeneous impact of the 1947 partition of India on the psychopathology of children. This paper observes how the trope of trauma problematizes the embodiments of childhood, contradicting its axiomatic paradisiacal nature. Parallel to the chaos of communal massacre, mass migration, dysfunctional parenting and the marginality of women and children, Lenny’s traumatic experience surpasses a singular-episodic trauma, and is laden with a multiplicity of source factors, thereby generating “complex trauma” (van der Kolk et al., 2007, p. 202). The child narrator acquires symptoms of irregular curiosity, hyper-vigilance, somatic complaints, fear, PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and transgresses specific social norms. Lenny is a choreographed child, a problem-child, taxonomized as the ‘adult-child’ in the paper. Now, the question is whether to see the ensuing malfunction symptoms as a diagnostic criterion or adaptative human resilience? Drawing from Anjali Gera Roy’s concept of “intangible violence” (Roy, 2020, p. 43) the paper examines textual openings where the stages of childhood and adulthood deconstruct itself, approximates, and overlaps inside each other; taking cues from a relatively less-documented narrative angle of the child victim of partition.

 Keywords: Ice-Candy-Man, Trauma, Transgression, Partition, Adult-child, Embodiment

The New Face of Abuse?: Questioning the Fall of the Father and Assessing the Child Exploitation in Deborah Moggach’s Porky

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224 views

Poulomi Modak

Ph.D Scholar (JRF), Department of English, Cooch Behar Panchanan Barma University, West Bengal. Email: poulomimodak1992@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s9n3

Abstract

In contemporaneous world child sexual abuse is possibly the most heinous kind of child exploitation; therefore, continuous dialogue and discourse regarding the child sexual abuse should be given the primordial prominence in order to be well aware about and thereby engage with possible measures against this monster in the closet. It is in this context that the paper attempts through a detailed and critical analysis of Deborah Moggach’s controversial novel Porky to make a reading of the narratives of pain, sufferings, and trauma inflicted upon the ‘abject’ body. Further, the novelist has incorporated the havoc of non-consensual incest which concomitantly attributes the novel as a site for insightful discussion. The proposed article, therefore, interrogates family as a possible locus of sexual exploitation of the children. This reorientation of family as a disintegrated entity eventually brings forth the question of victim’s rehabilitation. Extending this, the paper finally argues any possible healing of the oppressed body.

Keywords: abusive father, body shaming, child molestation, non-consensual incest, psychological trauma

Palate Tales, Kitchen Truths: Coming Home to Cooking in the Time of Covid

206 views

Ananya Dutta Gupta, Ph.D 

Associate Professor, Department of English, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. Email: ananya_duttagupta@yahoo.co.uk

   Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s25n0

Abstract:

“Palate Poetry, Kitchen Truths: Coming Home to Cooking” is a long essay comprising non-didactic philosophical reflections on the wisdom of home cooking attained over the first three months spent in Covid-19 lockdown.  I make a case for home cooking and home eating as an experiential strategy that can, mutatis mutandis, alert us to ontologies and knowledge systems that resist the seeming inexorability of neoliberal, millennial urbanised living. I do so without holding forth any normative rejection of technology and other exigencies of modern living; and gesture instead towards an inclusive paradigm where machines can be applied towards a promotion of food making and food sharing that is ethical, cosmopolitan, community-minded, ecologically aware, and yet forward-looking. The auto-ethnographic methodology covers both the analytical prose and the interspersed poems it provides a discursive matrix for. I found myself planting these poems (and accompanying images of food from my kitchen) at strategic moments in the argumentation so as to allow the reader, experimentally, a detour and respite from the critical density of the prose. I suppose I am experimenting with the possibility of treating of the same subject in different mediums and then gathering them back into the fold of the personal, reflective essay.

Keywords: Poetry, auto-ethnography, Cooking, Pandemic, technology.

 

Understanding colonial masculinity and native bodies: Rereading the discourse of homoeopathy as a feminist form of medicine

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251 views

Anjana Menon

PhD Research Scholar, E-mail: anjanaabhinavmenon@gmail.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0423-8959

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s8n2

Abstract

A body can also be read as a site for the production and maintenance of social power. In colonial India, western biomedicine often acted to reinforce the reason/nature split and made manifestations in dualistic divisions between mind/body, and men/women. With the advent of the ‘masculine’ western biomedicine, the indigenous population lost the authority and autonomy over their self-knowledge and social power of their bodies. Thus, Homoeopathy found a space in the spiritual discourse of Indian nationalism as a ‘feminine’ element. This paper is an attempt to analyse how the rhetoric on homoeopathy was effectively employed to redress the grievances of masculinity in health care unleashed by the British state. The study lays stress on power imbalance within the practitioner/patient relationship, the exclusion of social concerns from the biomedical model, and the trivialisation of knowledge within the clinical encounters.

Keywords: Colonial power, masculine body, medical encounters.

The Fear of Camp Life: Understand the Spatial Reality and Formation of Discourse

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281 views

Joydip Dutta

PhD Scholar, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India, E-mail: joydipdaju@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s7n2

Abstract

The paper makes an existentialist analysis of refugee Camps in West Bengal that came into being after the Indian Partition in 1947 when the state received a large number of asylum seekers from the-then East Pakistan. The objective of the paper is to discuss the construction of Camp life in terms of the affect of fear. Camps have been largely interpreted as the active agents of rehabilitation, space of political movements or supplier of informal labourers. The principal enquiry here however would be to interrogate if the camp is home for the refugees or it has a separate existential reality in the face of fear which goes beyond the questions of rehabilitation. Borrowed from Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) the concept of fear in this paper does not indicate any specific character or definite future. Rather, fear unfolds as an ‘affect’. In West Bengal, construction of the Camp by the government was presupposed for rehabilitation of the refugees from East Pakistan (Bangladesh). Hence, in-itself a Refugee Camp functioned to control the population by its norms, rules, and regulations. On the other hand, it was constructed as temporary shelter for the refugees. Therefore, the temporal character signifies how Camp constitutes the refugees through ‘care’ and how they encounter reality in that situational condition. The paper will not focus on fear as only as detrimental to the life of the refugees. Rather, it tries to show how the affect of fear may also unfold the possibility of that space by engaging with the elements of speech, silence or listening that constitutes the discourse of Camp. The paper would explore how as a temporary shelter of the refugees, Camp life has been constructed as a discourse in terms of spatial boundary and limits. Coopers Camp in Ranaghat, West Bengal here is taken as a case study to explicate the discourse of camp life in the light of fear and ontologically address the refugee question in post-Partition subcontinent.

Keywords: Refugee Camp, Fear, Affect, Space, Rehabilitation, Experience

Partition of Bengal: a Posthumanist Study of Select Literary Works

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834 views

Indra Sankar Ghatak

PhD Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. E-mail: indrasghatak16@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s7n1

 Abstract

The Indian Partition ushered in one of the most historical migrations in human history where millions had to change their native affiliations. This event led to the formation of two nation-states (India and East Pakistan) out of a single cultural geography and the drawing of boundaries (Radcliffe line) disrupted the emotional, cultural and spatial link of the people with the native countries. Selected short stories from Bashabi Fraser’s Bengal Partition Stories and the memoirs in Adhir Biswas’ Border: Bangla Bhager Dewal encapsulate the variegated experiences of the dislocated during 1946-1955, who were sabotaged by fellow Bengalis in the name of gender, community (bangal-ghoti), and religion. This paper looks at select samples from the collections mentioned above and correlates them with the history of the period. It raises the question “of which ‘human’ is the posthuman a ‘post’?” (Ferrando, 2019, p. 9) The narratives from the Bengal partition capture the phenomenon of border crossing which had led to fluid identities (refugees/migrants/infiltrators) as individuals had been deterritorialized and reterritorialized. The migrant bodies symbolize an anthropogeographic entity that had been exploited severely, and the refugees present themselves as the cultural metaphor in order to capture the traumatized and ambivalent condition of post-national human beings.

Keywords: partition, posthuman, identities, boundaries, cultural.

The Contemporary Dystopian Reality of Slavery and Modern Capitalism in Octavia Butler’s Parable Novels

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322 views

Cr Patricia Mary Hodge

Research Scholar, Department of English, NEHU. E-mail: patclhodge93@gmail.com, Orcid id: 0000-0002-3786-8060

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s6n5

 Abstract

Critical dystopia as an analytic category for historical enquiry explores contemporary reality and its specificities in time and space. It functions as anagnorisis or recognition of the dystopian realities in the present through its generic mode of familiarising the heightened dystopian elements of the text as possible evolutions of current oppressions. This paper suggests that this anagnorisis through comparison and extrapolation is limited and needs to consider how the text ironically reveals the absence of historical specificity through its comparison of the contemporary present and the imagined future. Instead, specificity is replaced with a linear historical trajectory where dystopia occurs cyclically in metamorphosed forms within a fixed, yet evolving power-structure. This projects the nature of the dystopia in the text part of an evolutionary process, not a product of its historically specific period. Through the interrogation of how the legally abolished system of slavery is historically shifted into the future hyper-capitalist market system in Octavia Butler’s Parable novels, this paper will reveal how the anagnorisis of the novels functions to locate dystopia as present and evolving in a historical trajectory of cyclical structural repetition. This familiarisation of the historical event of slavery in the novels posits the dystopian text’s anagnorisis as not simply the recognition of dystopian elements specifically in the present but broadens it to the recognition of the historical evolution of those same human atrocities that appear to ‘resurge’ in dystopia.

Keywords: Slavery, capitalism, dystopia, anagnorisis

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