Volume 11 No 3 2019 - Page 2

Expression of Multidimensional Identities in the Post-truth World: Innate Identities in Saramago’s Blindness

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Joby Joseph1 & Catherin Edward2

1Research Scholar, Holy Cross College, Affiliated to Bharathidasan University, Trichy.

Email: jhobu@yahoo.co.in

2Associate Professor & Research Advisor, Department of English, Holy Cross College, Trichy

Volume 11, Number 3, October-December, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n3.09

ABSTRACT

The Psychological wavelengths intermingled in pursuance of roots of various characteristics as reflected through the novel Blindness are different conceptual explorations. Identity is an intricate term in the present scenario. For him, the novel is a medium where socio-cultural and political issues are addressed and his voice acts as a didactic language that represents the colonial and postcolonial subjects. Moreover, he illustrates the political ideology in a different way. The representation of the other by a meta-narrative voice is the hallmark of Jose Saramago’s novels. In his novels, he acts as an all-knowing narrator or implied author who tries to transform the society and the Portuguese culture in general. The representation of the other in the novel Blindness is a kind of historical discourse which is articulated as artificial, a constructed category, a power-based and discriminatory construction. Of course, it is communicated through conventional, discursive and narrative strategies. Hence, we find a relation between history and story in these narratives. As so many disaster narratives start, Blindness also begins with a disaster-traffic jam. It anticipates a search for identity. In the novel, Saramago invites our attention to think of a kind of chaos and horror that happens in Blindness. In the novel Blindness, the identities clash with one another owing to the common identity of blindness having a big and tremendous impact in it one way or the other. In short, the significance of blindness becomes dominant only when there is eyesight and the existence of the non- blind. In that way, the blind have their own identity and culture and Saramago tries to add more coloring to that identity in a philosophical and eschatological manner. The paper intends to explain that idea.

Keywords: Blindness, Post Truth, Identity Crisis, Physical blindness, Spiritual blindness, Globalization and Localization

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Book Review: Mohammed Hanif’s Red Birds: a Wildly Satiric, Piercingly Real and Darkly Humorous Narrative

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Book Name: Red Birds

Author: Mohammed Hanif

Genre: Fiction

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Year of Publication: 2018

ISBN: HB: 978-1-4088-9718-8

Reviewed by

Sukanya Saha

Assistant Professor, Department of English, SRM Institute of Science and Technology

SRM Nagar, Kattankulathur. Tamilnadu. Email: sukanyap@srmist.edu.in

Volume 11, Number 3, October-December, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n3.08

Red Birds’ is stylistically and thematically compelling narrative, weaving its tapestry with multiple perspectives, giving haunting insights laced with sarcasm. It is a remarkable feat of verbal audacity, wise, searing, psychologically intimate and fast paced examination of lives. Hanif admits that the book is not autobiographical in anyway, because his personal life is ‘fairly dull and predictable in a middle class kind of way’. Keep Reading

Demystifying the Non-human Animal: Analyzing Animal Agency through the Select Narratives of Jim Corbett

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Parul Rani1 & Nagendra Kumar2

1Research Scholar in English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee, Roorkee-247667, Uttarakhand, India.

Email Id: parulnet.e@gmail.com, ORCID Id: 0000-0002-9934-3585

2Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee, Roorkee-247667, Uttarakhand, India.

Email Id: naguk20@gmail.com

Volume 11, Number 3, October-December, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n3.07

 Abstract

The present article revives the jungle knowledge of a renowned Anglo-Indian hunter cum conservationist; Jim Corbett. The contemporary significance of Corbett’s first-hand experiences with the animals lies in providing an insight into the ways of the wildlife; unraveling the multilayered relationships of animals with their environment; including humans. The focus on animal behavior takes this paper to exemplify how the interspecies and intraspecies interactions validate the non-human agency. There is an attempt to bring Corbett’s select narratives from the collections — Man-Eaters of Kumaon, The Temple Tiger and More Man-Eaters of Kumaon, and Jungle Lore in dialogue with the ethological studies, that complement and precede the debate of the animal agency. Concerned with the question of the animal, this study evolves a critique of Heidegger’s dichotomy between the human and animal that sprouts on the idea of the relative non-agent(ic) functionality of the non-human animals. This study opts for an interdisciplinary approach of ethology and philosophy to execute a textual analysis of Corbett’s narratives to analyze the animals as agents.

Keywords:  animals, human-animal relationship, Jim Corbett, non-human animal agency

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Analyzing Discourse Coherence in Bengali Elementary Choras (Children’s Nursery Rhymes)

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Rajoshree Chatterjee1 & Jayshree Chakraborty2

 

1Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. Kharagpur – 721302. West Midnapore, West Bengal. ORCID ID: 0000-0001-5145-1889.

Email id: rajoshri.chatterji@gmail.com

2Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. Kharagpur – 721302. West Midnapore, West Bengal. ndian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. ORCID ID: 0000-0002-7926-2956. Email id: shree@hss.iitkgp.ernet.in

Volume 11, Number 3, October-December, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n3.06

Abstract

The present paper aims to explain the process of meaning making in Bengali elementary Choras (children’s nursery rhymes) by their intended target audience, little children, who are yet to develop their semantic, cognitive or linguistic skills. Chora, the Bengali oral folkloric counterpart of nonsensical verses for children, can be characterised as a type of dynamic discourse where socio-cultural elements occur abundantly though asymmetrically. Outlined by intermittent cohesive gaps, such discourses are however found to be thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated by the little children, despite their lack of prior textual and/or contextual awareness. Following this, it is observed that such rhymes or Choras are more about experiencing amusement that the children derive from the verses rather than understanding their denotative or connotative sense. Meaning making of such rhymes by the little children, we claim, occur not through the processing of semantics of the text but by directly experiencing the communicative intent of the discourse. Coherence of such dynamic and discontinuous discourses is therefore attained when their pragmatic intent, that is enjoyment – intertwined in the verses, is identified by the little children and reciprocated through affirmation. The analysis detects the predominance of coherence constructed at the discourse level and accordingly the methodology adopted to explain cognizance in elementary Choras is the theory of Discourse Coherence (Wang and Guo, 2014) which claims that coherence in discourse can be achieved jointly by the discourse producer as well as the receiver.

Keywords: Choras, Cohesion, Discourse Coherence, Pragmatic Intent

Consent, Choice and Stage: the Ambiguous Presence of Women in the KPAC

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Ashwathi

PhD Scholar, CWS, JNU, New Delhi- 110067. ORCID: 0000-0001-6048-7859.

Email: ashwathip02@gmail.com

Volume 11, Number 3, October-December, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n3.04

Abstract

Women had already started marking artistic endeavors and hence situating their identity in their respective fields by the early twentieth century. The left political movements and the socio-cultural movements, which were the by-product of and the supporting source for the political movements, also ‘included’ women as their members. Plays and theatre were one of the important fields in this respect in Kerala. Women were given ‘consent’ to make their ‘choices’ to make public appearances and be associated with these movements. But who were the consent givers to these women? This paper would look at the concept of men’s consent and women’s choices through the KPAC theatre and the plays. This paper would problematize the question of the importance of men’s consent in women’s decision making and the choices that they make for themselves. This paper would try to see what role and how this act of men’s consenting has influenced the female members of the KPAC as well as in the shaping of the characters in the plays produced by them.

Keywords: Women, Consent, Men’s Consent, Choice

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Sylvia Plath, the Well-Bred Malaise, and its Confession in ‘Daddy’

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S. Z. Abbas

Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, Wadi Al Dawasir, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Email: s.abbas@psau.edu.sa

Volume 11, Number 3, October-December, 2019 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v11n3.01

Abstract

Writing confessional lyrics, which are highly subjective and intensely personal, needs an extraordinarily sensitive mind that tends to break down while systematically probing that narrow and violent area of experience between the viable and the impossible, transmuted into poetry. This was Plath’s “way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.” Plath’s neurosis led her to commit suicide at the age of thirty-one, and since then critics have not been able to study her poetry away from her tempestuous life. The article studies a probable link between creativity and mental illness that Dean Keath Simonton calls ‘Mad-Genius Paradox,’ thereby floating a hypothesis that either it was Sylvia Plath’s writing that made her depressed and eventually influenced her decision to commit suicide or it was her depression and psychopathology that influenced her poetry, which resulted in her best collection Ariel. The article also studies her poem ‘Daddy,’ which is included in Ariel, hailed as “the Guernica of Modern Poetry,” more of a dying statement in a “controlled hallucination,” and concludes that Plath’s confessional mode, her psychosis, and her creative genius finds a zenith in the poem. ‘Daddy’ is a Freudian exercise where Plath finds her muse in her father while rejecting him and her ex-husband Ted Hughes as Fascists, who she adored as every woman does. The poem shows how the fall of the paternal ideal at the age of eight, resurrected in her matrimony with Ted Hughes, repeats itself, and therefore she should kill them both to be through.

Keywords: Sylvia Plath, Confessional Poetry, Mad-Genius Paradox, ‘Daddy,’ Trauma

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