"Necessity
Freed Spinoza and Imprisoned Yakov": The Presence
of Spinoza's Ethics in Malamud's The Fixer
-- Gustavo Sánchez
Canales
In the works of Bernard Malamud, the issue of imprisonment
is fundamental not only as a symbol of the acceptance
of human being's limitations in life but also as a way
to evidence his/her subjection to superior forces such
as Nature's laws. Ironically, in Malamud, imprisonment
is a key element in the protagonist's freedom. In this
paper, I will focus on the presence of Spinoza's concepts
of God, Freedom and Historical Necessity, and State
in Malamud's The Fixer. It will be shown that
reflecting on these concepts in the light of Spinoza's
Ethics will eventually help us understand Yakov
Bok and his role and position in the world.
©
2008 IUP . All Rights Reserved.
That
the People Might Live: Strategies of Survival in Contemporary Native American Fiction
-- Brajesh
Sawhney
The range of Native American literature encompasses
a history of twenty thousand years and a geographic
area extending from the Arctic Circle to the tip of
South America. It rises from a rich and tragic context.
While on the one hand, Native American writers celebrate
their rich cultural and spiritual past, while on the
other hand, they share the historical experience of
colonization. Though the discovery of America has been
described as `conquest' or `manifest destiny,' Native
American writers have countered it by regarding it as
an `invasion' that is still continuing. Most of the
contemporary Native American writers, N Scott Momaday,
James Welch, Louise Erdrich, Wendy Rose, Leslie Marmon
Silko, Gerald Vizenor, Sherman Alexie and Joy Harjo,
relate in their writings how the process of colonization
has debilitated their cultures, religions, traditions
and identities. There is an awareness in their work
that they once had a sense of belonging to their land,
their tribe, their tradition, their religion, much of
which they have now lost. They now have an agonizing
sense of unbelonging. Strategies of survival dominate
contemporary American writing. The present paper will
highlight the strategies of survival adopted by contemporary
Native American writers, which include returning to
their past as a repository of values, presenting alternative
epistemological realities to counter the sweep of Euro-American
culture, forging new historicity to challenge the metanarrative
of Western history and breaking down the stereotypes
associated with the Natives.
©
2008 IUP . All Rights Reserved.
A
Critique of Immigrant Psyche: A Study of the Selected
Works of Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri
-- A Rama Krishna Rao and
R V Jayanth Kasyap
Writers of the Indian Diaspora, who were earlier called
the expatriate writers, have carved for themselves a
special niche in the arena of literature. Tapping their
varied experiences and rich exposure to advantage, these
writers wrote with a broad vision and perspective. In
the modern world of flux, uncertainty and confusion,
and constant erosion of identities, they explored major
issues like cultural conflicts, immigrants' alienation,
pysche and changing social values. Most of the writers
endeavored to define the experience of migrancy. They
made a substantial contribution to the expatriate sensibility,
which is considered to be a phenomenon in commonwealth
literature. Among the prominent writers who were sensitive
to the subtleties of the lives of immigrants are Bharati
Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri. Bharati Mukherjee gained
considerable distinction as a novelist and short story
writer. She has authored six novels, two short story
collections and a few works of non-fiction. Jhumpa Lahiri
received great acclaim with the publication of her short
story collection, Interpreter of Maladies. She
published her first novel The Namesake in 2003.This
paper focuses on the role of psyche in the life of an
immigrant. It attempts to diagnose the illness caused
by frustrated psyches and tries to examine certain possible
remedies. The basic problem that plays havoc with the
psyche is the individual's inability to adjust. Mukherjee
and Lahiri identify cross-cultural exposure as a further
source of the predicament of the immigrants. An individual's
potential to strike a balance would address this problem.
All these factors ultimately launch an individual on
a search for self. The paper looks at the creative configurations
in which both the writers seek identity. Both present
through their fictional works existential zeitgeist.
Interestingly, they acknowledge that it is painful for
an immigrant to put down his/her psychic roots, which
establish one's identity. Herein lies the strength of
mature art.
©
2008 IUP . All Rights Reserved.
Confronting
Patriarchal Violence: A Comparative Reading of Mahasweta Devi's "Draupadi" and Ambai's "Black Horse Square"
-- Rekha
and Anup Beniwal
By critically focusing on two stories, i.e., Mahasweta
Devi's "Draupadi" and Ambai's "Black
Horse Square", and reading them with and against
each other, this paper tries to showcase how these writers
offer two distinct, yet overlapping perspectives on
the causes and consequences of the sociocultural violence
against women. Both of them diagnose this violence as
a function of the conflict between representation and
self-presentation of woman. Through these stories, these
authors destabilize the patriarchal representational-praxis
in order to etch out a blueprint for agential and representational
empowerment.
©
2008 IUP . All Rights Reserved.
The
"Other": A Still Question of Postcoloniality
-- Vikrant Sehgal
The present paper derives from the premise that any
criticism of colonial or post-colonial literature depends
for its force on the recognition of its self-definition.
During the last two decades, Literary Studies in the
United States have been revitalized by an extension
of "minority" writing beyond African-American
literature into other national contexts. The influx
of these specifically non-western texts into the American
University curriculum and the emergence of Western critical
discourse on the subject provide examples of effective
challenges to the canon. The acceptance of these vast
and diverse literatures, now studied under the somewhat
generalized title "postcolonial texts", has
been aided by exemplary work done by current theorists
of marginalized literature such as Homi Bhabha, Henry
Louis Gates, Abdul JanMohamed, David Lloyd, Joyce Cary,
Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak. This paper attempts
to analyze the question of the grounds of postcolonial
discourse and looks at the `Fanonian' tradition of postcolonial
critique and its implications for contemporary cultural
politics.
©
2008 IUP . All Rights Reserved.
Quest
for Self: A Study of Angus Wilson's As If By Magic
-- Ramesh K Misra
Angus Wilson's As If By Magic has often been
read as a self-conscious, parodic, picaresque narrative,
ambitious in its global range and concerns. Its formal
brilliance, parody and pastiche have also received much
attention. However, the novel does not appear to have
been seen in terms of the Campbellian paradigm of Separation,
Initiation and Returnthe three stages of the mythological
adventurewhich the hero ventures on from the world of
common day into a region of supernatural wonder and
encounters the fabulous forces to register his decisive
victory. Finally, the hero comes back from his mysterious
adventure with the power to bestow boon on his fellow
men. The present paper seeks to examine Wilson's As
If By Magic as a quest narrative, structured
largely in the picaresque tradition. However, Wilson
does not borrow literally from the Spanish predecessors,
though he retains some of their major techniques, which
account for the picaresque element at the structural
level. In fact, in the process, to emphasize his humanistic
concerns, Wilson transcends the traditional picaresque
mode of fiction by subverting the pattern.
©
2008 IUP . All Rights Reserved.
Looking
Through the Kaleidoscope: The Dickensian Heroine
-- Seema Murugan
Charles Dickens has created a wide variety of heroines
are as various as the different novels in which they
are depicted. In his novels, women are depicted as either
beautiful and empty or significant and effective, or
as self-sacrificing metaphors. Sometimes one feels that
in his fiction the female characters contribute to the
growth of the male protagonists only to be overshadowed
by them. There is this strange nexus between void and
womanhood, which is enacted in Dickens' fiction. In
a sense, Dickens seems to be celebrating womanhood by
confining his heroines within the labyrinthine passages
of his novels. The present paper is an attempt to study
the Dickensian heroine as if viewed through a kaleidoscope.
©
2008 IUP . All Rights Reserved.
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