The protagonist of Roald Dahl's Matilda embarks on an ambitious reading project, avidly devouring a substantial quantum of literary classics from the local library. This paper revisits Dahl's much-loved book to examine the protagonist from the lens of her reading list with the contention that tracing her remarkable development corroborates what reading research has noted about the benefits of reading fiction. It seeks to demonstrate how Matilda's reading of serious literature empowers her with a far more advanced consciousness than she would have otherwise had, although her disposition to empathy remains open to debate. Finally, it proposes that her "return" to the world of the fairytale at the end of the book signifies not a regression, but a crucial step in her growth. The paper concludes with the assertion that with or without her magical powers, Matilda makes a compelling case for the transformative power of literature.

Renowned psychologist Abraham Maslow's romantic vision of a self-actualized human being and novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand's visualization of an ideal human being are similar in many aspects. While the psychologist conceived an encouraging picture of the fundamental nature of human beings (what they could be), the writer, through her novels, envisioned what people who have reached that stage are capable of achieving (how they ought to be). Both treat happiness as a state of mind that is achievable by all, rather than an emotional state that is dependent on external factors. While Rand in her fiction and Maslow in his theories have listed a number of common traits as prerequisites for an individual to lead a constructive and happy life, the ability to resolve or integrate dichotomies, according to them, plays a vital role in deciding a person's psychological health. Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged contains many such dichotomies that human beings battle with in the course of their lives. This paper explores how the characters in Atlas Shrugged successfully deal with some of these dichotomies and as a consequence lead joyful lives. Since the mental health of a person is crucial to one's wellbeing and happiness, the objective of this paper is to discover solutions to internal conflicts that can disrupt the tranquility of the human mind.

As an astute muckraker, Arundhati Roy uses the narrative technique of "inversion" to express her concern for all categories of the marginalized, be they women, children, factory workers, or paravans. In true muckraking tradition, her novel touches upon a plethora of social evils-political and social hypocrisies, patriarchal property rights, ill-treatment of divorced women, caste issues, wife-battering, and so on. A strong sense of grievance lends an angry color to her work. Roy's The God of Small Things as a specimen of women's writing displays an obsessive urge to articulate anger through the technique of "inversion," in turn made possible through the novel's constantly changing perspective and its nonlinear progression. "Inversion" accounts for the undertone of irony that runs through the novel. It colors the title, the ordering of each individual chapter, as well as the controversial end. "Inversion" ensures the effectiveness of the title in foregrounding the "small things" as the central preoccupation of the novel. It also works cleverly to expose the contrast between the apparent and the real and thus upset reader expectations. It also determines the ordering of the events that constitute the novel's diegesis. The technique of inversion allows the event of the punishment to precede the so-called crime. The crime is relegated to the end, and ironically makes possible the inversion of a happy ending to a sad story.

The debate on the relationship of a woman with her body and her men has been a keen subject of interest for both men and women for ages, and it has undergone tremendous vicissitudes for various reasons. A woman can experience her body as "facticity" rather than "contingency" (Tidd 2004, 56). She can really choose how to "exist" with her body. She need not allow her embodiment to be predefined by the patriarchal society. She can very well allow her body to be "other than herself." All these possible choices still stand at the threshold of accomplishments for every woman, waiting for the debate of "to be" or "not to be" or "to have become" a woman to be resolved unanimously. The obtainability of these choices and the debate of to be or not to be form the base for Boonyi's "becoming" in Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown. In fact, "to be" a woman is expediently interpreted as "to have become" a woman. This construed interpretation is taken in this paper to analyze Boonyi's "third-phase." The paper further endeavors to scrutinize the coincidence of Simone de Beauvoir's key term "becoming" and the term "made woman" of Minh-Ha with Boonyi's "third-phase"-her return from Max's captivity to her village and her exile thereafter.

The study analyzes the letter form J M Coetzee's novel Age of Iron (1990) takes as an extended act of communication in the light of Roman Jakobson's Communicative Model. Mrs. Elizabeth Curren, the white elderly protagonist of the novel who is dying of cancer, writes a lengthy letter to her daughter and chooses a vagrant trespassing her property to post it to her after her death. Given Coetzee's (1992) description of the act of writing as a performative act, Mrs. Curren can be seen as performing an extended act of communication in which an addresser sends a message to an addressee in a given context via a mutually understandable code and with reciprocated signs of contact. Overwhelmed by the recurrent, but failed, attempts to understand the truth and convey it in a letter to her, she chooses to redefine the act of writing/communication as an escape from the truth, rather than as a channel of it. This she does intentionally, producing a failed/dysfunctional act of communication, which, when approached in the sociolinguistic context of Jakobson's Model of Interactive Communication (1960), is better understood. Though Mrs. Curren tries in different ways to come to terms with the truth, and though her attempts at doing so earn her the credit of a hard worker, she eventually sees escape through writing as the route to salvation. Her letter to her daughter, therefore, is her way of telling us that she refuses to live with this burden, the burden of the truth, and chooses to rid herself of its heaviness through liquidating the truth it bears in the letter she writes.

This paper approaches the question of identity in a posttraumatic condition through the lens of schema theory, with reference to Tom McCarthy's novel Remainder (2005). It examines how schema construction provides enough clues for understanding the protagonist's attempt to form his lost identity. The close analysis of the novel is done through Stockwell's (2002) definition of schema theory. Schema theory offers psychological and scientific proofs for the protagonist's behavior, revealing how his mental obsession and motivations for reenactments are directed by cultural forces. This obsessive behavior constantly changes from one state to another. The theory will make these constant changes in behavior trackable by examining the character's changing principles of his schemata, which, according to Stockwell (2002), first develops, then changes, and finally gets refreshed in a posttraumatic situation. Finally, the paper interprets the protagonist's crisis of identity as the modern man's passage from modernism toward postmodernism and the traumatic reaction to this transition. The paper also pinpoints the pros and cons of the schema approach.

The paper analyzes the depiction of Nepali Gulf migrants across several documentaries. Using Michael Rothberg's "traumatic realism" as a framework, the paper identifies three forms of Nepali trauma: Physical trauma that documents the migrant laborers' living conditions and its effect on their corporeal reality; Psychological and Emotional trauma proceeding from the above, and also their sense of failure and distance from their families back home; and Financial trauma of the poor economic status of the Nepalese. The paper serves as an introduction to a diaspora that is rarely studied in diaspora studies.

Questions of association and dissociation are recurrent motifs in practically all forms of discourse, especially in political discourse. Political actors rely on a range of strategies to align themselves with and demonstrate in-group solidarity while "othering" the out-group. The study employs the pragma-cognitive model of association and dissociation proposed in Wieczorek's (2013) clusivity theory to analyze the inauguration speech of President Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria. Using this model, the study deconstructs the unique character of the speech, unpacking the sociopolitical forces that underlie the text. Specifically, the study analyzes the speech in line with the pragma-cognitive features of politeness, common ground, referentiality, and conceptual metaphor. The analysis uncovered that the speaker's claim of belonging to everybody and nobody is questionable in view of the evidence of association and dissociation in the text.