A writer much ahead of her time, Pearl S Buck spent her childhood and early years of youth in China, and her writings about the East helped it in developing cultural ties with the West. Buck dealt with many multicultural issues, including race, immigration, women, and minority rights. She was a political activist who had a deep insight and understanding of world politics particularly American politics, and very well gauged the need to bring about a radical change in the global political scenario. Her works explicitly deal with these issues, which, in the 1990s and beyond, became focal points around which the philosophical discourse on multiculturalism was constructed. She believed in "cultural competence"-"the ability of a person to effectively interact, work, and develop meaningful relationships with people of various cultural backgrounds." This paper presents a multicultural reading of Buck's oeuvre and her work as a cultural and social activist.

This paper explores the centrality of autobiographical memory in the construction of self and the experience of cultural trauma through the narrative of Thomas McNulty in the novel Days Without End. The character recalls the gruesome wars and cruel famine, which caused much agony and suffering throughout his life. The study attempts to make a textual analysis by employing the framework of autobiographical memory to interpret the complex relationship between the personal and collective selves. The novel adopts a unique form of autobiographical narrative to represent a personal and social history, thus functioning as a cultural narrative. The memory of the famine trauma is embodied in the personal story of Thomas McNulty, who recalls the national crisis that occurred during the 1840s. Trauma occupies a substantially large portion of the autobiographical narrative. He relays his experiences of painful existence in his native land and struggles to establish his cultural identity in a foreign land. Hence, the paper aims to analyze the characteristics of personal memory and trauma manifested in the narrative for the representations of Irish collective memory and cultural trauma of the Great Famine.

Animal studies is a flourishing field of scholarship that focuses on human-animal interactions, representations of those interactions, and their ethical, social and political implications. Nonhuman animals are much more than a binary opposite to human animals. The animals that figure in literary works are quite often sidelined in our critical studies. This paper delves deep into the treatment of animals in the Borgesean oeuvre. At the outset, the theoretical framework is formulated, and the textual politics of animals in the works of Borges is analyzed in the ensuing part. The paper is predicated on the premise that Borges imparts complex philosophical ideas by recounting the animalia in his works.

Anita Rau Badami's The Hero's Walk is about ordinary characters who turn heroes overcoming the circumstances that challenge them. The story revolves around Sripathi Rao, the head of the family who leads a distressed life, his dutiful wife Nirmala, his son Arun who remains a constant disappointment to him, and his daughter Maya who marries a foreigner. Through diverse characters, Badami sheds light on Brahminical patriarchy, caste disparities, religious consciousness, the cultural conflict between East and West, a shift from traditional beliefs to transformational changes, and the chanciness of hope and loss that always accompanies life. If the novel, The Hero's Walk is to be compared with a battlefield, then the main characters are like the warriors fighting for their own identity and survival, while the minor characters are seemingly bizarre but are instrumental in elevating the principal characters. Though these minor characters do not play a significant role in one's life, their existence cannot be ignored. How the lead characters deal with these minor characters reflects their inherent nature and social behavior. This paper explores the themes in the novel through these minor characters.

Patriarchy is a social system wherein males have positions of dominance and are privileged over females. It also suggests the subordination of females to their male counterparts through a long period of conditioning. In such a system, the women are at the small end of the rope, whether in power, education, or right to inherit property. Bama, in Sangati (2005), and Baby Kamble, in The Prisons We Broke (2018), discuss the marginalization that Dalit women face. The oppressive and hegemonic nature of the Indian society has left them on the periphery with little or no access to resources. Moreover, they face multiple strands of patriarchy: the Brahminical and the Dalit. They are not only oppressed by the Brahmin men but also by the men of their own community. Their exploitation and marginalization at these two levels are captured by Bama and Kamble in their writings and thereby giving them voices. Thus, these works could be taken as a declaration of Dalit women's rights, their right to live with dignity and self-respect. The paper highlights how Bama and Kamble urge Dalit women to stand up against multiple patriarchies and strive to understand their rights and responsibilities as women and as human beings.

The study investigates the role of context builders in meaningful formation of Dogri folktales. Context determines meaning, and when language users employ it in folktales, the meaning is understood through intuition, native knowledge, and interpretation, further supported by grammatical structures. The traditional folklorists study tales-they provide interpretation or analyze their grammatical structures, but in the process one of them is compromised. However, this paper endeavors to strike a balance between the two when it analyzes Dogri folktales. The focus is to analyze folktales and their narrative structure while closely studying the interrelated events that lead to the formation of their discourse. For that, contextual information comes to the forefront, and the roles of cohesive units like discourse markers, topic words, creativity, and others become quite important.

Literary translation often depends on sociocultural and political/ideological conditions in the target context and requires alterations to be acceptable. In the religious and conservative climate of Iran after the Islamic Revolution, the expurgation of literature, including literary translations, has become part of the aim of the authorities in the area of cultural production. Literary translation has undergone drastic changes to comply with the cultural policies of the country. Thus, censorship in the form of intervention has been enacted in literary translation in order to conform to the ideological expectations of society. This study aims to examine areas that have been affected by translational censorship in literary translation and identify strategies applied by translators to comply with the censorial policies in contemporary times. Translatorial intervention was scrutinized in seven American novels translated into Persian. Given the drastic cultural and ideological distance between Iran and the West, a comparison of the translation of American novels in the Persian context showed that intervention occurred at three levels- vocabulary, structure, and grammar-to conform the text to the ideological, cultural, and political structures of the target context.

A major writer of twentieth century English Literature, T S Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and Order of Merit in 1948. His major works include The Waste Land (1922), Murder in the Cathedral (1935), Four Quartets (1943), and The Cocktail Party (1949). J Robert Oppenheimer, on the other hand, was an American theoretical physicist who was the Director of the Los Alamos laboratory for the Manhattan Project, which built nuclear bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A biographical film by Christopher Nolan, titled Oppenheimer, was released in 2023, based on the life and career of J Robert Oppenheimer. However, the point of similarity between these two diverse personalities is the impact of the Bhagavad Gita (Gita) on them. The Bhagavad Gita or "The Song of God" is considered a major philosophical poem which constitutes a part of the epic Mahabharata. Its themes of detachment, bereft of desire and love are central to the Four Quartets. Eliot tried to understand time and mystical experiences in Four Quartets in the light of the Gita, while Oppenheimer found solace in it. Gita's message of executing one's duty (karma) without caring for its result, impressed Oppenheimer. This paper attempts to present how an Indian philosophical poem impacted the Western world, i.e., Eliot's Four Quartets and Oppenheimer's life.

Complex Predicates (CPs hereafter) are multi-verbal constructions where Light Verbs (LVs hereafter) play a vital role (Alsina et al. 1997). Dravidian languages spoken in the southern part of India abound in CPs. The semantic and syntactic intricacies of LVs reveal a great deal of combinatorial possibilities with other verbal/nonverbal elements with respect to CP constructions in Telugu. Telugu, a language with rich morpho-syntactic features, has abundant CP constructions in which the LVs exhibit various syntactic and semantic behaviors, some of which are particular to Telugu and some universal in nature. Certain LVs in Telugu can even change the transitive value of the lexical verbs they go with and thus impact the argument structure, which in turn affects the semantic content of the whole CP construction. There is a special account of meanings expressed by LVs of Telugu, which in turn contributes to the study of LVs in particular and to the universal grammar at large.

Guru-shishya parampara (GSP), a longstanding tradition in Indian education system, emphasizes a spiritual teacher-disciple relationship for knowledge transmission. However, recent changes in Indian education system and rapid sociocultural and economic transformations have significantly altered the dynamics of GSP. This study explores unique tenets of GSP and changes observed in the tradition across ages. Through a systematic literature review, it identifies seven tenets constituting the bedrock of GSP. The study further investigates the transformation of the teacher-student relationship within contemporary Indian campus fictions (ICFs) employing Theme Framework Analysis on five ICFs. The findings suggest that the portrayal of the teacher-student relationship in contemporary ICFs starkly contrasts with ancient and medieval times. This study outlines the tenets of GSP, suggesting a departure from traditional norms. It implies a shift from the prescriptive GSP norm to a reinvented framework, adapting to a fast-paced, consumerist workforce, influenced by ICT and market-driven employability.