Determinism is the philosophical position that for every event, including human interactions, there exist conditions that could cause no other event. Albert Bandura, through his idea of reciprocal causation, accepts the chances of a person's behavior being conditioned. Keith E Rice suggests that reciprocal determinism considers how what we do and who we spend time with-our behavior-impacts upon and changes the life conditions in the environment we experience and how we respond cognitively and emotionally, and possibly psychologically too, as a person to the environmental feedback we then receive. This paper attempts a study of Helen Macdonald's heart-wrenching, talon-sharp memoir H Is for Hawk based on reciprocal determinism and triadic reciprocal causation.

The paper begins with the notion that autobiography is the most important and emphatic tool of self-narrative because it is an ideal blend of reality and imagination. Taking its illustrations from Omprakash Valmiki's autobiographical narrative, Joothan: A Dalit's Life, which retells his experiences of torment, neglect, domination, and coercion since his childhood, this paper elucidates the socioeconomic circumstances that not only questioned the Dalit subalternity but also emphasized the importance of constructing a new identity and rewriting history.

Lorraine Hansberry was the first African American female playwright and writer who had her best-known play A Raisin in the Sun performed on Broadway. Her dramas are often taken to be the best representatives of African American identity. Racism, segregation, and African Americans' difficulties in a capitalistic society are some of the issues which had occupied her mind, career, and plays. Henry Louis Gates is the most contemporary dominant figure in African American Studies. He has taken Saussure's "signification" and redefined the term. He states that "Signifyin(g)" in African American discourse is a linguistic wordplay, a deferral of meaning, a self-conscious manipulation of meanings that underscores the playfulness of language and meaning-making mechanisms. The African American concept of "Signifyin(g)" is totally different from its Saussurean meaning in Standard English. By "Signifyin(g)," the difference between the meanings of "signification" of Standard English language and that of the African American vernacular is emphasized. The Standard English meaning functions according to the Saussurean law of meaning making, whereby the signified differentiate themselves from other existing signifiers. But the vernacular meaning is made quite differently. This paper applies the notion of "Signifyin(g)" to Hansberry's play The Drinking Gourd. The paper first introduces and describes the notion, then discovers some examples of the same in the said play, and finally discusses the connotations of the "Signifyin(g)" parts. Thus, the paper describes how this technique has enriched Hansberry's works.

This paper applies "construal," a concept from Cognitive Grammar, to Alice Munro's short story "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage." Like (post)modernist stories, Munro's story has multiple plots and narrators and develops out of constant spatiotemporal shifts. Such features mark the story with narrative slippages, that is, smooth shifts and turns of perspective. The study examines the applicability of construal for literary interpretation. It provides a close reading of Munro's story in the light of cognitive construal, dividing the story based on its narrative slippages and investigating the perspective and construal of each scene. The analysis shows interplays between subjective and objective construals in each slippage. Also, the paper discusses the tensions between narrative points of view and construals and takes them as the limitations of the concept of construal when applied to a complex literary work. Cognitive Grammar does not address such tensions in complex narratives; it, therefore, needs to expand its potentials in this respect.

The paper explores the concepts of place, memory, and identity in M G Vassanji's The Assassin's Song in the light of humanistic geography which arose as a reaction to spatial sciences in the 1950s and the 1960s. As far as the basic meaning of the word "place" is concerned, it involves location, an area, or a specific direction. In the realm of humanistic geography, place is endowed with meaning, memory, and experience, and it provides a base to carry out the sociocultural practices associated with daily life. Karsan's life in Pirbaag as an adolescent and as an aspiring student at Boston-Harvard, his married life with Marge Thompson in Canada, his new identity as Krishna Fazl while working as a professor in a college in British Columbia, his familial life and tragedy in the form of his only son's death, his return to India, his research period at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, and finally his getting back to his roots and assuming the role of the Saheb (spiritual leader) of Pirbaag are a testament to the view that place determines one's experiences and thereby plays a decisive role in the shaping of identity.

Sufism represents the inward or esoteric side of Islam, often contested as an alternate form of Islam. Studies show that the first Sufi to visit India was Mansur al-Hallaj, but this fact is contested as many believe that al-Hujwiri, commonly known as Data Ganj Baksh, was the first Sufi to visit India in the eleventh century. When the Sufi poets from Central Asia arrived in India, the land was already dominated by Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Zoroastrianism. Thus, the Islam practiced in this region had already been colored by the local cultural norms. As Ira Lapidus and Ishaq Khan have mentioned, the foreign Sufis formed a body of ulema representing the "normative" Islam or high tradition, while the masses or the common folk followed the Islam of their venerated Sufis, forming another form of Islam, namely, "popular" Islam or low tradition. This created, as Ishaq Khan mentions, a cleavage between the foreign culture and the indigenous culture, which was later on bridged by lesser known Sufi poets across India singing Sufi ideology in the form of folksongs and folktales. This paper studies these lesser known or indigenous Sufi poets who were very popular among the masses but find little mention in the academia. The paper focuses on the literature produced by these Sufis and how they filled the gap between the normative Islam and the popular Islam prevalent among the common people.

This paper studies the relationship between the perception of phonological assimilation and elision and ESL (English as a Second Language) listening proficiency. It is believed that variation in word-final consonants tends to cause ESL learners problems with word recognition in connected speech. However, research findings do not conclusively support the relationship between this phenomenon and ESL listening success, since, among other things, the range of mechanisms analyzed has not been carefully controlled. This research was intended to throw light on the relationship between two processes of reduction-namely, assimilation and elision-and ESL listening proficiency. One hundred sixty-nine first-year undergraduate English Studies students and twenty undergraduate native speakers participated in this study. They were asked to discriminate thirty-two elided and thirty assimilated forms from their canonical counterparts. The results revealed that recognition of assimilated forms does not seem to be related to ESL listening success. Recognition of elided forms, however, was found to be weakly related to ESL listening proficiency. The results showed that release burst of first word final stop appeared to contribute to successful discrimination between forms. The results also revealed that ESL learners recognized more easily those instances of assimilation and elision in which the word final consonant was /t/ rather than /d/. On the basis of these findings, implications for the teaching and learning of ESL listening and reduced forms are drawn.

Translation has variously been described as "transfer of meaning," "substitution of meaning," "carry-over of meaning," "regulated transformation," etc. If in the West it is attributed to the second fall of man, meaning loss of common language of mankind, in India, it is taken as "new writing." It involves both the processes of reading and writing and is a bilingual activity. The safe and sound definition of translation could be "new creation" in the target language. The best examples could be the different versions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in different regional languages of India based on Valmiki's The Ramayana and Vyasa's The Mahabharata respectively. The major theories of translation are Polysystem theory of translation propounded by Itamar Even-Zohar and Gideon Toury; Canadian feminist theory of translation by Susan Bassnett, Barbara Godard, and others; Deconstructive theory of translation by Jacques Derrida; and Cannibalistic theories by Haroldo de Campos and Augusto de Campos. The praxis of translation helps the cause of nation-building and moves toward the creation of World Literature, transcending the boundaries of a nation.