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.