|
History
in Inquisition: Postmodernist Poetics in Toni Morrison's Beloved
-- Sathyaraj Venkatesan and G
Neelakantan
Toni
Morrison's trilogy comprising Beloved (1987), Jazz
(1992) and Paradise (1997) by "remembering"
and reimagining cartographies of history, critiques explicitly
the idealist historiography and subvert the absolutism of
grand historical metanarratives. For instance, Beloved,
by both deliberately positing a liminal figure like Sethe
and foregrounding her horror-driven story of slavery, poses
a threat to integrity and presumed continuum of history; while
Jazz and Paradise reconsider and reassess the
cultural and political history of the black community, respectively.
In so doing, these novels as documents participate in the
postmodern project of subverting historiographical hegemony,
and thereby, problematize the status of history, historicity,
and historiography. This emphasis on historical relativism,
contingency, and questioning of epistemological/ontological
status of history binds Morrison's novels with the central
concerns of postmodernist historiography, particularly with
the theoretical postulates of critics such as Michel Foucault,
Hayden White, Roland Barthes and Linda Hutcheon. In the light
of theoretical insights from these postmodern critics, this
essay seeks to substantiate the notion of revisionist historiography
and reconstruction in Morrison's trilogy. Broadly stated,
our aim is to locate Morrison's Beloved in the interstices
of history, historiography and literature in order to explicate
the postmodernist poetics of history as exemplified in the
novel. Among other questions, the essay seeks to investigate
Morrison's narrative and thematic modes that aid the author
in this exemplary decolonization and also her larger aims
behind the postmodern strategy of remapping.
©
2007 IUP . All Rights Reserved.
Locating
the Self: A Diasporic Perspective on Lorraine Hansberry's
A Raisin in the Sun and Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse
of a Negro
-- Guru Charan
Behera
Cultural
displacement experienced by blacks across America resulted
in the mental constituency of "an imagined community",
which suffers from "natal alienation". There is
an intense diasporic urge to get back to African roots and
to achieve optimum ethnic/cultural identity through persistent
resistance to Eurocentric domination. At the same time, there
is a desire to eschew localized minority status in the globalized
transnational context. The paper locates the American black
feminine self as presented by Lorraine Hansberry in A Raisin
in the Sun and by Adrienne Kennedy in Funnyhouse of
a Negro amid the pulls of contesting cultural orders.
©
2007 IUP . All Rights Reserved.
Consolidation
of Ethnicity: The Use of Myth in Maxine Hong Kingston
-- Tessy C Anthony
Globalization
implies standardization. Preserving ethnicity is inherently
an act of resistance to globalization, as it pits the local
against the global. Maxine Hong Kingston, through the woman
warrior myth, extends a local myth to universal significance.
Myths ensure the survival of ethnicity. A myth is a configured
form of language. Myths survive through transmission and transmission
recreates the myth in multiple versions. There is no pristine
version of a myth which may be considered authentic or primary.
Myths are transmitted through talk stories or through writing.
Kingston reconstitutes the traditional chant of Fa Mu Lan
to suit a modern American context of peace, not war. She is
conscious of the First World attempts to efface the Chinese
American identity. Preserving ethnicity through myth is a
counter action to the First World hegemony. America, presumably,
upholds multiculturalism. But Americanization is an attempt
at standardization or globalization. Ethnicity comprehends
heritage, physical characteristics, traditions, cultural characteristics
and ethnic values. Consolidating ethnicity is an act of resistance,
as it seeks to preserve and assert ethnic identity, and to
prevent the homogenization of ethnic minorities. The transformation
and recreation of myths prevents their lapse into cliché.
Subtle changes in the orientation and configuration of myths
work out the fine adjustments that match alterations in culture,
values, and belief systems. Ethnicity is not a condition of
stasis. In a cultural context of plurality, ethnicity must
be a dynamic condition marked by a constant dialogue with
the mainstream. Kingston is conscious of this dialogue. In
the globalizing world, ethnicity can survive only by remaining
dynamic. Ethnic identities resist the hegemony of mainstream
culture by infiltrating and undermining the American language
itself. Kingston does this by repositioning the warrior woman
myth. The myth is reworked to transcend its local moorings.
Kingston does this by giving the familiar myth a context-transcending
cutting edge.
©
2007 IUP . All Rights Reserved.
Seeking
Grace in the Wilderness: Creative Evocations of Childhood
Experiences of Native American Writers
-- Ruby George
The
dislocation and displacement experienced by the younger members
of the community of Native Americans provide an insight into
the trauma of growing up, resulting in the disintegration
of their cultures. Even as the natives were engaged in a desperate
struggle for retaining their hold on their land and their
traditions, many Native American writers staged a spirited
fightback against the `invasion' by the immigrants. Through
their literary contributions, especially the autobiographical
narratives, they gave a new lease of life to their sacred
values and communal acts of worship that always nurtured and
sustained the natives. While dwelling on the poignant growing-up
stories of selected native American writers, this paper focuses
on two types of sociocultural environment in which the children
find themselves: The `tipi' environment and the Boarding School
environment. Although the children were wrenched from their
homes and placed in alien settings, they responded affirmatively
to their alien settings. The Native American writers have
successfully combined modern and traditional methods of story
telling to provide us memorable accounts of young natives
who are engaged in seeking grace in the wilderness at the
most defining moments of their lives.
©
2007 IUP . All Rights Reserved.
Whose
Heart is it Anyway? Deconstructing
the Darkness in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness
-- Sambit
Panigrahi and T Ravichandran
Conrad's
epoch-making novel, Heart of Darkness, yields to a
multiplicity of interpretations by a multiplicity of interpretive
communities. Replete with a characteristic duplicity of language,
thought, and perception, the text is stubbornly self-elusive
and inherently ambiguous. Critics in the past, notably, Chinua
Achebe, have mostly provided a unidirectional interpretation
to the text, thereby, consciously or unconsciously, undermining
and negating other possible interpretations. However, the
poststructuralist approach recognizes Conrad's narrative in
the light of plurisignation. Accordingly, the narrative propels
the reader towards the welter of undecidable possibilities,
towards an intellectual deadlock or aporia. Particularly,
it identifies the fact that Conrad, above all, has attempted
to unravel the corrupt Eurocentric mind that perceives the
Africans as a degenerate race. And Conrad finally emerges
more as an unbiased "racialist" than a prejudiced
"racist" that writers like Achebe conceive him to
be.
©
2007 IUP . All Rights Reserved.
The
Postmodernist Katherine Mansfield: Beyond the Self of Modernism
in `The Garden-Party'
-- Gerardo
Rodríguez Salas
Katherine
Mansfield's modernist literary canon is characterized by a
quest for evanescent selfhood. The split subject or indetermanence,
as termed by Ihab Hassan, including indeterminacy and immanence
suggests a different perception of self and an attempt to
discover unity in discord, departing from the sublime and
hermeneutic code of Barthes. In the analysis of Katherine
Mansfield's "The Garden Party", the author shows
the split personality and evanescent selfhood of Laura Sheridan,
who tries unsuccessfully to free herself from the social mask
imposed by her mother and empathize with the social outcast
family of her neighbor Scott in the moment of his death. She
tries to discover essence of self beyond social artificiality,
but is forced to coexist with the system. She cannot understand
the transcendent reality, but can only intuit. The paper convincingly
argues that Mansfield is in line with the postmodernist eclecticism
rather than with the unitary intuition of modernist allotropic
self.
©
2005 Agora: An Online Graduate Jounal. This article
was earlier published in the Agora: An Online Graduate
Jounal, Vol. 3, No. 2. Reprinted with permission.
Ecocriticism
and Ecofeminism: Pushing
the Limits of Postmodernism
-- Jyotirmaya
Tripathy
Though
ecocriticism and ecofeminism have been appropriated by postmodernism,
they resist postmodern and poststructuralist ideas that everything
is sign and that there is nothing called natural. This reduction
of nature into sign, and meaning into a linguistic deadlock
called `aporia', which postmodernism does, not only poses
imaginary problems as real, but also spells ideational death
for nature. While offering an ecological critique of postmodernism,
the essay uses the term `postmodernism' both as a condition
that announced the death of the subject, and also its poststructuralist
manifestations in literary theory. This is illustrated by
textual examples from native-American and other eco-conscious
literatures, which defy the textualization of the universe
and nature. Ecology, the essay seeks to argue, posits an alternative
way of recording that reveals the being of the other rather
than its elision. Native texts, in contrast to postmodern
polarization, are about interrelationships and interdependence.
These texts see the lack of communication between human and
nonhuman, as a problem of human langue and suggest
alternative ways to understand and appreciate nature. The
essay also draws upon the insights of `thing theory' and argues
that things have a life of their own and that they exist autonomous
of human perception.
©
2007 IUP . All Rights Reserved.
Comparative
Literature, Entropy and Integrating Paradigm
--
José Carlos Redondo Olmedilla
This
paper introduces the necessity of an integrating paradigm
within the realm of Comparative Literature studies. The necessity
of a new paradigm is made clear by regarding the rest of disciplines—literary
and extra-literary—as integrating elements of it. This
pattern is presented as opposed to some recent trends that
are characterized by fragmentation and false specialization.
It also analyzes some old fears and attitudes, such as the
fear of science and the Comparative Literature label as an
Arts discipline. To support this proposal, literary works
are considered as communication elements and not as mere artistic
constructs. From this stance, the author supports integration
and the integrity paradigm basing these concepts upon the
principles of physics, like the energy and entropy law. Everything
leading to demonstrate that the Comparative Literature universe,
like the universe itself, must be and is continuously expanding.
©
2007 IUP . All Rights Reserved.
Mode,
Meaning, and Synaesthesia in Multimedia L2 Writing
-- Mark Evan Nelson
This
study of digital storytelling attempts to apply Kress's (2003)
notions of synaesthesia, transformation, and transduction
to the analysis of four undergraduate L2 writers' multimedia
text creation processes. The students, entering freshmen,
participated in an experimental course entitled "Multimedia
Writing", whose purpose was to experience and explore
the processes of multimodal textual communication. With the
support of empirical data drawn from interviews, student journals,
and the digital story-related artifacts themselves, the author
shows how synaesthetically derived meaning may be a natural
part of the process of creating multimodal texts. Considering
the special case of non-native English speakers, the paper
also demonstrates that synaesthesia may have both amplifying
and limiting effects on the projection of authorial intention
and voice. Before reading the following, it is suggested that
the reader view examples of the multimedia essays discussed
herein.
©
2006 Mark Evan Nelson. This article was earlier published
in the Language Learning and Technology, Vol. 10, No.
2. Reprinted with permission. |
