DIASPORA AND IDENTITY IN NAIPAUL’S WORKS : A SELECT STUDY

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (66) ◽  
pp. 15461-15466
Author(s):  
Ankita Chaudhary

“Write what you know” - this is the age-old advice said by someone to all the novelists. Surajprasad Naipaul, generally known as V. S. Naipaul, took it more seriously than others. Naipaul’s grandparents migrated from Uttar Pradesh India to Trinidad. His grandfather started working as an indentured laborer in the sugarcane estates there. They faced many problems regarding settlement and adjustment in this new cultural environment. That’s why Naipaul’s works are replete with the themes of diaspora. He applied his uniquely careful prose style to the point where the observer has called him the greatest living writer of English prose. Often known as the world’s writer, Naipaul is both one of the most highly regarded and one of the most controversial of contemporary writers. Much of his work deals with individuals who feel estranged from the societies. The present paper is an effort to analyze his select works based on diaspora and identity. Different characters in his fiction and non-fiction works seem to be in search of their identity in this world. Cultural-clash and hybridity, these twin themes, are also dominant in his works and I have tried to highlight all these diaspora-related issues in this paper.

Author(s):  
Michael D. Hurley

Newman has been much vaunted as a ‘master’ of non-fiction prose style, and justly so. His felicity of phrasing is astonishing: so precise, so elegant, so vivid. This chapter admires Newman’s stylistic achievements too, but with a view to explaining why Newman himself baulked at such praise, by insisting instead on the importance of veracity over verbalism. While a number of different writings by Newman are surveyed in the course of the chapter, the argument comes to focus in particular on his seminal work of faith, Grammar of Assent, a book that took him some twenty years to write, which almost killed him, and which best exemplifies his suggestive but enigmatic definition of ‘style’ as ‘a thinking out into language’.


PMLA ◽  
1930 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 977-1009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard F. Jones

Literary style, like human personality, is a compound exceedingly difficult of analysis, for when its more obvious constituents are made clear, there still remains an illusive element, consciousness of which leaves the analyst with the unpleasant sensation of not having reached the bottom of the matter. As the most complex phenomenon in literature, style is the resultant of all the forces, known and unknown, underlying literary development, and the method and extent of the contribution made by each of these forces are a matter of probable inference rather than of positive demonstration. For that reason, any attempt, however ambitious, to account for the style of a literary epoch must be content with pointing out those more obvious influences that are combined and reflected in speech and writing, and with ignoring other factors which may escape detection. Under the protection of this confession I shall attempt to make manifest what seems to me the most important influence instrumental in changing the luxuriant prose of the Commonwealth into that of a diametrically opposite nature in the Restoration.


Author(s):  
Th. W. Hunt ◽  
Henry E. Shepherd ◽  
J. M. Garnett ◽  
T. Whiting Bancroft ◽  
Henry Wood ◽  
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Keyword(s):  

1968 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 248-259
Author(s):  
James R. Bennett
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Alan Rifkin

In this elegant and insightful piece of literary journalism, Alan Rifkin offers a sweeping account of how John Fante’s Ask the Dust has come to be a touchstone among contemporary writers in Los Angeles and southern California and a wellspring of the region’s literature. Combining his own personal journey as a writer of fiction and non-fiction with a survey of the works of such authors as Steve Erickson, Carolyn See, Joan Didion, Salvador Plascencia, Kate Braverman, and others, Rifkin traces a line connecting all of them to Fante’s signature work and its dreamlike image of the metropolis: “Every Los Angeles writer at the outskirts of vision feels a connection to Ask the Dust, the 1939 novel that, more than any other, seems to weep over this city’s corpse in the ecstasy of possessing it.”


Traditio ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 1-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debora K. Shuger

The standard, and practically the only, study of thegenera dicendiin classical rhetoric, ‘The Origin and Meaning of the Ancient Characters of Style,’ was published in 1905 by G. L. Hendrickson. In it Hendrickson argued that the plain style orgenus tenueoriginated in and remained firmly associated with philosophical dialectic, while the oratorical style (including both thegenus grandeandgenus medium) descended from sophistic and, in particular, Isocratic prose. The effect of this paper has been two-fold: a simultaneous exaltation of the plain style as the only rhetorical expression of serious and original thought and the conflation of the other two genera, these being criticized on the grounds that they appealed to the ear rather than the mind and were designed to exploit the emotions rather than inform reason. This effect can be observed most clearly in the subsequent scholarship on English prose style, particularly in the seminal essays of Morris Croll, who (to simplify a good deal) basically treats Renaissance prose style as the triumph of an introspective, searching, plain style over the musical formalism of Ciceronianconcinnitas.Since Croll, the term plain style has generally become an honorific appellation in English scholarship at the expense of an inadequately differentiated grand and middle style (these in turn being identified with Ciceronianism).


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