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London’s The Mutiny of the Elsinore:
A Tragic Allegory of the Whole Proletarian Destiny
-- Abdulsalam Hamad
Although almost critical consensus claims that The Mutiny of the Elsinore is London’s worst novel, it can be argued that it really is a novel of exceptional force, thematically, symbolically and structurally. This paper, however, seeks to show that London’s art as a novelist in the novel is to mystify the reader, and in choosing a particular narrator, he entirely conceals his own voice. London does not leave us in any obscurity; everything is visible and palpable and all is narrated with a completely concrete externalization. He adroitly transfers the tragic struggle of the individual to the struggle of the whole class without resorting to any kind of symbolic ending or verbal wish fulfillment. The Mutiny of the Elsinore is thus a modern tragedy, a social protest novel in which London evidently intends to stir our consciences, to make us aware of the real facts of life. It is indeed a masked satire on the whole established socio-political system.
© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Memoirs of Two Marginalized Women: A Comparative Study of
A Life Less Ordinary and The Truth About Me – A Hijra Life Story
--Shymasree Basu
Feminist scholars have long asserted the value of memoirs to explore feminine subjectivities and give the readers a sense of the difficulties involved in the diverse processes of self-actualization that every woman undertakes in her given space. Revathi and Baby’s narratives are significant as their struggles are struggles of the marginalized women. However, this similarity does not entail an identical trajectory in their quest for self-actualization. Both of them have to face separate forms of societal suppression working through various agencies such as patriarchy, institutional religion and cultural taboos. Yet, the narratives celebrate their quest for identity as legitimate ones albeit having their own set of difficulties. These narratives may be ranked alongside Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Quentin Crisp’s The Naked Civil Servant in their successful exposition of the inner lives of the marginalized individual and different ways through which they have to evolve survival strategies to claim their own space and identity in society. Baby’s quest is triggered off by her maternal subjectivity as she realizes her own selfhood in the process of trying to give her children a better life. On the other hand, Revathi’s struggle for self-actualization starts from the day she accepts her identity as a transgender individual. The paper tries to establish how these two separate, contemporary narratives coming from marginalized women are a clear indication of the hybrid identities of womanhood prevailing in India today.
© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
The Sufferings of a Subaltern Mother:
A Comprehensive Study of Baburao Bagul’s Short Story “Mother”
--Vaishali Punjani
Generally, subaltern literature is related to colonizer-colonized framework within a society. In this research paper, the author wishes to put forward some ideas regarding the cultural, social and economic spheres of the society and the subalternity of the Dalit women in it. The Dalits are marginalized and when one is talking about the Dalit woman, she becomes more than thrice marginalized as we believe in patriarchy and our rules are such that they do not give any kind of liberty to a woman. Here, a woman is depicted with a new point of view of being subaltern as she is Dalit and a widow, and moreover, she is a single parent. The author wishes to take interest in the character of a mother who is a wholesome nourishment to the son who, at last, accepts the rumors about his mother being a ‘slut’. Why cannot our patriarchal society accept a mother being alone and still pure in her relationships? If she has relation with someone after being a widow, why cannot she marry a person of her choice? Why do males have wrong ‘concepts’ about a widow but cannot accept her being with someone else?
© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Inhabiting Feminism and the Feminine in J M Coetzee’s Foe
--K Narasimha Rao
John Maxwell Coetzee has made use of the white woman narrator in three of his novels: In the Heart of the Country (1979), Foe (1986) and Age of Iron (1990). Coetzee’s white women narrators fall into two categories: those who see Coetzee’s mimicry of the white woman’s voice as an appropriation of otherness, and those who see the white woman’s voice as an appropriate vehicle or textual strategy for interrogating structures of power, authority and language. Coetzee’s work brings to the fore the differences within feminism, and his representations of his own self-positioning are not feminist but feminized, in order to show how this informs his use of feminism and white women narrators. The constant need to measure one’s own pain by the pain of others is a feature of the rhetoric of most political movements. Coetzee and many writers like him often use metaphors of feminization in order to emphasize their own profound sense of disempowerment. This paper aims at studying Coetzee’s representation of this marginality and his “writing without authority,” in the characters of his white women narrators, who construct “their” texts or “story”.
© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
The Difficulty of Being Good in Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey
--Richa Joshi Pandey
The present paper seeks to elucidate the Parsis’ struggle for existence in Bombay that is not the city of the Parsis’ heydays. The author is of the view that the characters of Mistry’s Such a Long Journey exhibit exemplary courage in the face of limiting economic and socio-political conditions of a rapidly transforming Bombay along with the exigencies of national and international politics. The author refers to Gurcharan Das’s The Difficulty of Being Good, a text that looks at aspects and characters of the Mahabharata to interrogate and throw light on contemporary problems, while studying aspects of the epic itself in a spirit of interrogation. The author proposes to illustrate the heroic courage of Mistry’s characters in the said novel, which she finds comparable to that of the epic heroes, her aim being to explain both rare facets of exemplary strength and human virtue and the limitations of character, given the inevitable and unsolvable nature of the world in which we live.
© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Fiction as Social History: A Study of Khushwant Singh’s Novels
--Radika Chopra
This paper re-evaluates the fiction of Khushwant Singh, a Sahitya Akademi fellow. What makes his fiction noteworthy is that it depicts with force, brilliance and passion the problems which torture and torment the Indian spirit in contemporary times. Though Khushwant Singh is famous as “India’s most prized dirty old man”, his fictional writings have hardly received the attention they deserve. My purpose here, however, extends beyond a mere reading of his fiction. I wish to argue that the conventional ways in which Khushwant Singh is understood—as a “salacious gossip” and a writer whose books “make for brisk sales at railway stalls”—are actually insufficient if not misleading. I argue that his body of work underlines the specific features of many social problems which engage our attention and it seeks to give us a sense of direction, whither we are to advance and how.
© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Whitman’s “One’s Self I Sing”:
A Linguistic and Stylistic Analysis Based on Formalism
--Julia Devardhi and Deepika Nelson
This paper is a linguistic stylistic analysis of Walt Whitman’s lyric, “One’s Self I Sing”. The study involves an analysis and synthesis that examine how ordinary simple language has been used in the realization of a particular subject matter, quantifying all the linguistic means that coalesced to achieve a special aesthetic purpose. These linguistic features as applied here to Whitman’s poem include how, through a network of lexical selection (diction), the tone in the text is revealed; how the stylistically significant phrasal and clausal typology, sentence structures and punctuation patterns have combined to produce the aesthetics of the poem under study. The ‘democratic theme’ in the poem is brought out with amazing flexibility and dexterity. Additionally, the paper also looks into the aspects of Formalist Criticism and how these aspects help the reader to focus on the form which eventually leads to the content.
© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
Chinua Achebe (1930-2013): Light of Conrad’s Dark Africa
--GRK Murty
‘Art’, observed Arnold Schoenberg in 1910, “is the cry of despair of those who experience in themselves the fate of all mankind.” And that is what Chinua Achebe, a noted Nigerian writer, did for more than five decades: gave voice to the hitherto voiceless African race, its culture, identity and language through his novels, poetry, short stories and essays, all with a passion to make his fellow readers realize that “their past—with all its imperfections—was not one long night of savagery from which the first European delivered them.” His literary output was a legitimate nationalist-striving to unshackle the erstwhile colonialists from the decades of denigration and selfabasement, and prod them to regain belief in themselves. He, standing right in front, pursued the mission of “re-education and re-generation” of his society till he breathed last. A peek into that striving is what is attempted in this paper.
© 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.
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