Ecocriticism is popularly thought of as a unidirectional exercise for preserving nature in its pr... more Ecocriticism is popularly thought of as a unidirectional exercise for preserving nature in its pristine and uncontaminated form. This view is grossly reductive because ecosystems are many, not one, local and not global. The natural green world is not always necessarily friendly to human aspirations. In fact, 'green' is the colour of falsehood, unreliability and deception in medieval English literature. The colonial medical discourses also endorse this diversity of the natural world. In these discourses, the tropical world of the European colonies is described as a 'diseased world' in contrast to the sanitized temperate world of the west. Since the boundary between humans and the environment is porous, human nature is perverted in environments hostile to human habitation. Bapsi Sidhwa's The Pakistani Bride documents the interrelationship between the arid, bleak and closed world of mountains in Kohistan and the perversity of the isolated pockets of feuding tribes that inhabited it. It foregrounds that it is impossible to improve human nature if we simply surrender to uncontrollable natural forces and abandon all efforts to ameliorate our living conditions. It is, therefore, essential to realize that ecocriticism is not merely concerned with the protection of pristine external nature. It is an effort to reframe our interactions with nature not as mastery but as negotiation. If human-made changes have endangered the life-supporting systems of the world, we should instead, as Rachel Carson urges, explore what alternatives are available to us.
Ecocriticism is popularly thought of as a unidirectional exercise for preserving nature in its pr... more Ecocriticism is popularly thought of as a unidirectional exercise for preserving nature in its pristine and uncontaminated form. This view is grossly reductive because ecosystems are many, not one, local and not global. The natural green world is not always necessarily friendly to human aspirations. In fact, 'green' is the colour of falsehood, unreliability and deception in medieval English literature. The colonial medical discourses also endorse this diversity of the natural world. In these discourses, the tropical world of the European colonies is described as a 'diseased world' in contrast to the sanitized temperate world of the west. Since the boundary between humans and the environment is porous, human nature is perverted in environments hostile to human habitation. Bapsi Sidhwa's The Pakistani Bride documents the interrelationship between the arid, bleak and closed world of mountains in Kohistan and the perversity of the isolated pockets of feuding tribes that inhabited it. It foregrounds that it is impossible to improve human nature if we simply surrender to uncontrollable natural forces and abandon all efforts to ameliorate our living conditions. It is, therefore, essential to realize that ecocriticism is not merely concerned with the protection of pristine external nature. It is an effort to reframe our interactions with nature not as mastery but as negotiation. If human-made changes have endangered the life-supporting systems of the world, we should instead, as Rachel Carson urges, explore what alternatives are available to us.
Posthuman" does not mean after human or beyond human. It is only a reconfiguration of what it mea... more Posthuman" does not mean after human or beyond human. It is only a reconfiguration of what it means to be human in the rapidly changing technological scenario. Though the Enlightenment concept of the human as autonomous, as a rational creature who by the use of the faculty of reason, can give any shape to the self as s/he wishes, has been discredited by Darwin's theory of evolution, Marx's dialectical materialism, and Freud's psychoanalysis, yet the biological and the technological world had not infringed upon the human, thereby reducing all claims of autonomy to sarcasm, as they do in the present era. The posthuman denotes, Cary Wolfe says, "the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being is not just its biological but also its technological world (Qtd Seldon etal 284). N. Katherine Haylesin How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodie in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (1999) contends that normal human beings become post-human by using prosthetic body parts adopting computer technologies. Donna Haraway has indeed conceived of the humans as cyborgs who are part human and part machine, the machine being a prosthetic extension of the human. In this age of Information Technology and social media, a natural corollary of the posthuman condition is Digital Humanities: This essay explores how the post human condition and digital humanities impact the interactive composition and interpretation of the literary text.
IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 2022
Subjectivity is gendered. From the moment of its birth the human infant comes under a regime of g... more Subjectivity is gendered. From the moment of its birth the human infant comes under a regime of gender under which one cannot be a subject without being male or female. Gender, Judith Butler asserts, is performative. It is created by acts which are really socially established ways of being a man or a woman. The "reiterative and citational practice" of gender norms constrains the gendered subject. A woman is "interpellated" as woman so that she internalizes the feminine norms like submissiveness, domesticity and passivity. Similarly, it is normative for a man to be dominant, aggressive and cruel on his women to ensure submission to his will. He has to "disavow" any marks of effeminacy or weakness within him. The gendered subject is constrained to repeat the norm because any deviant behaviour faces social abjection. In this scenario where the subject is socially or culturally constructed and social power, as Michele Foucault points out, does not flow simply from top to bottom but from all the sources familial, cultural and political, how is it possible to theorize oppositional agency? It is possible because the internalization of social norms usually engenders resistances within the subject. It is upto the gendered subject to heed these dissenting voices within her/him and become an agent by deflecting the norm. In Bapsi Sidhwa's The Pakistani Bride the male characters Qasim and Sakhi fail to impress because they mechanically perform the normative assignments of gender in spite of subversive tendencies within them. But Zaitoon, the girl from the plains who married a Kohistani tribal, realizes the inequities of the norm in her changed social position and runs away from her tyrannical husband. She ceases to be the victimized woman of feminist discourses and becomes an agent. I propose to analyze the complicacies involved in gendered subjectivity and the need to subvert gender norms through oppositional agency in my study of the novel in this essay.
Ecocriticism is popularly thought of as a unidirectional exercise for preservation of nature in i... more Ecocriticism is popularly thought of as a unidirectional exercise for preservation of nature in its pristine and uncontaminated form. This view is grossly reductive because ecosystems are many, not one, local not global. The natural green world is not always necessarily friendly to human aspirations. In fact, "green" is the colour of falsehood, unreliability and deception in medieval English literature. The colonial medical discourses also endorse this diversity of the natural world. In these discourses the tropical world of the European colonies is described as a "diseased world" in contrast to the sanitized temperate world of the west. Since the boundary between the humans and the environment is porous human nature is perverted in environments that are hostile to human habitation. BapsiSidhwa's The Pakistani Bride documents the interrelationship between the arid, bleak and closed world of mountains in Kohistan and the perversity of the isolated pockets of feuding tribes that inhabited it. It foregrounds the fact that it is impossible to improve human nature if we simply surrender to uncontrollable natural forces and abandon all efforts to ameliorate our living conditions. It is, therefore, important to realize that ecocriticism is not simply concerned with the protection of a pristine external nature. It is an effort to reframe our interactions with nature not as a matter for mastery but as a matter for negotiation. If human made changes have endangered the lifesupporting systems of the world, we should rather, as Rachel Carson urges, "look about and see" what alternatives are available to us.
In Homi K. Bhabha's discourse on the colonial condition hybridity is a central concept that affec... more In Homi K. Bhabha's discourse on the colonial condition hybridity is a central concept that affects both the coloniser and the colonized. The hybridity of the colonial subject is far from being an enviable achievement. Fanon has dealt black passionately with the sad consequences when the colonial subject internalizes a desire for the coloniser's whiteness and a dislike for his own blackness. Access to the coloniser's system of education makes him different from his own people. But this "difference" does not ensure "sameness" with the colonizer. This realization-he can never attain the whiteness he desires and never shed the blackness he disparages-creates an irrepairable chasm within him. The promise of being in two places at once turns out to be a "dissembling" affair. Having lost faith in his own civilization, he becomes "an abandonment neurotic", a compulsive rejecter of his own culture. He becomes an anomaly "the White man's artifice inscribed on the Black man's body". So Terry Collins dismisses this so called hybridity as a "violated authenticity". Rushdie's Aadam Aziz has his authentic identity violated after five years of medical education in Hiedelburg, Germany. It is metaphorically represented by the image of a "hole" within him, "a vacancy in a vital inner chamber". His whole life had been a quest for a supplement to fill this inner emptiness. The fragmented image of Naseem vouchsafed to him through the perforated sheet appears to be the desired supplement. He made the mistake of taking the collection of the sectioned vision of Naseem for the whole and suffered all his life. He dies a devastated man, literally cracking till his skeleton disintegrates inside the "weatherbeaten sack of his skin".
Arthur Miller"s All My Sons was first staged in New York in 1947, two years before the publicatio... more Arthur Miller"s All My Sons was first staged in New York in 1947, two years before the publication of Simone de Beauvoir"s The Second Sex with the famous opening sentence of its Book Two: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman". Beauvoir only foregrounded the fact that the prevailing ideas about women are socially and culturally constructed, not naturally created. Summing up Beauvoir"s argument , Margaret Walters says : "All through history woman has been denied full humanity, denied the human right to create, to invent, to go beyond mere living to find a meaning for life in projects of everwidening scope ... "She is seen by and for men, always the object and never the subject"" (98). Miller"s idolization of Kate Keller in the play written before Beauvoir"s sensational uncovering of the subordination
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni"s novel Sister of My Heart is based on female bonding in a world domin... more Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni"s novel Sister of My Heart is based on female bonding in a world dominated by men. Sudha and Anju, the two protagonists of the novel, are cousins born on the same day, raised up in the same house and finally married on the same day. Their marriage drives a wedge between them, geographically separating them, as Sudha moves to Midnapur to stay with her in-laws and Anju moves to U.S. where her husband Sunil is an IT
Lacanian psychoanalysis, Althusserian interpellation, and Foucaultian discourse have all foregrou... more Lacanian psychoanalysis, Althusserian interpellation, and Foucaultian discourse have all foregrounded the unstable and fragmented nature of subjectivity or self-hood. This fragmentation is even accurate in the case of women because of patriarchal domination and systematic exclusion of women from the public sphere. Shruti Das's "A Daughter Speaks" is a remarkable poem that expresses the fragmented subjectivity of an Indian girl and also opens up possibilities of an instrumental agency by reiterating the girls' helplessness and paradoxically weakening the normalization of this powerlessness by its compulsion for repetition.
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