The term “metafiction” has stemmed forth varied tendentious criticisms and problematically denied all sorts of arduous efforts to confine it to any specific straightjacketed definition. While literally the prefix “meta” means “beyond,” making metafiction a literary offshoot which is “beyond fiction,” critics have been divided on the true nature of metafiction. Despite the multifarious interpretations of metafiction by various critics, we can attempt to figure out a few characteristics which include foregrounding the fictionality of fiction and reality, laying bare the writing technique, presentation of the paradoxical status of author-power, intertextuality, authorial intrusion and interaction with fictional characters, direct address to the readers, and projection of language as an arbitrary system. This paper seeks to locate the classic metafictional traits in Paul Auster ’s much-celebrated novel Travels in the Scriptorium and discern the answer to the question posed by the novel toward its ontological existence.

Development of Native Literatures is one of the most important developments of the twentieth century. The literature written by the Natives not only tries to resuscitate their culture which had been under attack for many centuries by the colonial powers, but it is also an attempt to shatter the stereotypes that have shown tremendous resilience in popular culture and literature. The current paper is a study of Native American writer Louise Erdrich’s novel The Game of Silence. The novel gives the readers a peep into the lifestyle of the Native Americans. In the course of showing the readers the lifestyle of Ojibwe people, Erdrich shows that the Natives were not barbarians or cannibals as shown by the colonial narratives, rather they cultivated and nurtured a culture that made excellent use of local conditions and environment. The novel also discusses the religious beliefs of the Natives and makes clear that the religion of the Indians was not a superstition as described by the missionaries and the colonial writers. The Natives in the novel appear to be sagacious, kindhearted, and morally upright. Erdrich shows that the Indians were inherently civilized. For them, civilizational etiquette did not lie in outer appearance; rather it was a part of their daily routine and an integral part of their existence.

Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, crafted in the style of Indian Puranas, abounds in religious and Dharmic elements. It depicts the discourse of Gandhian nationalism which has donned the garb of sacredness to stir and gratify the Indian religious sensibility. Myths are revised to fulfill political motives. Gandhi is portrayed as an incarnation of Shiva, who is on the mission to set free Brahma’s “beloved daughter from the enforced slavery.” Besides, the novel is wreathed in Dharma as law on the cosmic plane, as duty on the social plane, as virtue on the moral plane, and as religion on the spiritual plane.

The Palace of Illusions is one of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s acclaimed novels that portrays Draupadi as a very strong and powerful character and retells the Mahabharata from her perspective. Tracing Panchaali’s life—from her fiery birth and lonely childhood, through her complicated relation with the enigmatic Krishna, to marriage, motherhood, and most relevantly her secret affection for Karna, her husbands’ deadliest foe—it is a deeply moving human story about a woman born into a man’s world. The paper studies Divakaruni’s dexterous portrayal of one of the strongest mythological heroines and her focus on reconstructing the grand epic from Draupadi’s perspective.

Canada, a global community home for many people of different races and cultures, embraces all cultures—cultural diversity being one of the country’s most important national characteristics. All ethnocultural groups have official sanction to identify themselves with the culture of their choice and yet retain access to social and economic equality. Irrespective of race or ethnicity, the individuals in a multicultural society are entitled to equal treatment, protection from racial discrimination, equality of opportunity, and the right to remain culturally different. This proved an advantage to a diasporic writer operating within Canadian multiculturalism. The right to retain one’s culture has made many of the diasporic writers go back to their mother country in the choice of themes. The paper discusses how Rohinton Mistry and Shyam Selvadurai, the two South Asian diasporic writers of Indian and Sri Lankan origin, too have gone back to India and Sri Lanka respectively in fictionalizing their lived experiences set in their countries of origin.

There is something dangerous in T S Eliot’s poetry which is explosive, iconoclastic, violent, injurious, scary, and darkly optimistic, or one may even call it implicitly gothic. The dark elements in his poetry owe largely to the milieu, yet it moves from frame to frame, poem to poem, which perhaps showcases that there is something more to this panorama of the dreary that might have resulted out of his fascination for the past. In his creative works, the past, which appears in allusive form, is cherished as a container of the now lost ontological balance of being. The past in the poet has been analyzed from the vantage point of the writer’s urge for a tradition. But in this paper, an attempt has been made to demonstrate his use of memory and his production of the gothic in his early poems. Also, the paper intends to explicate how Eliot’s ghostly world that conjures up from his memory provides a useful lens for understanding the ways in which he represented the fears and anxieties of his time.

The aim of this paper is to examine how project-based learning can help Business Management students develop their communication skills. A cross-disciplinary project designed for the third-semester students of a business school in Bengaluru (Karnataka, India) was assigned to five student teams. Based on the outcomes of the project, it is concluded that project-based learning is an effective way to make students become autonomous learners and develop communication skills.

Language learning and language teaching are complicated processes which involve myriad factors such as intelligence, care, feedback, and stroke, grounded in Self-determination Theory (SDT) and Transactional Theory (TA), which may facilitate or hinder language learning and language teaching processes. This study contends that the four effective psychological factors, namely, language teachers’ conceptions of intelligence, care, feedback, and students’ stroke can be used as lenses to find out the association between and among teachers and students. The participants in the study comprised two hundred female students and thirty English language teachers. Four instruments were administered (one for teachers and three for students): Language Teachers’ Conceptions of Intelligence Scale (LTCI-S); Teacher Care Scale (TC-S); Language Teacher Feedback Scale (LTF-S); and Student Stroke Scale (SS-S). The results of Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient revealed that there was no statistically significant correlation between language teachers’ conceptions of intelligence and teacher care. However, there were statistically significant relationships across language teachers’ conceptions of intelligence, students’ stroke, and teacher feedback. The results of the regression model revealed that language teachers’ conceptions of intelligence cannot be predicted based on teacher care, students’ stroke, and teacher feedback.