scholarly journals Existentialist Perspective: A Study of Bharati Mukherjee’s Fiction The Holder of the World

2021 ◽  
pp. 28-45
Author(s):  
Dr Savita Yadav

The present study explores and analyses the existential perspective in Bharati Mukherjee’s novel The Holder of the World; she tries to represent the fluid nature of immigrants due to frequent dislocations and relocations, which facilitate the characters to transform and assimilate into a new environment. The protagonist, Hannah Easton, discards nostalgic feelings and celebrates the latest opportunities in a liberal environment. Being a fearless, brave, and bold, spirited woman, she chooses her ways of life freely and accepts the consequences frankly. Bharati Mukherjee, one of the path breaking Indian American novelists and short story writers, has constantly made efforts to voice the immigrant experience of women. Hannah initially suffers from cultural shock, but being resourceful establishes her authentic existence by understanding the new environment utilising her full potential via free choices.

Author(s):  
Surbhi Bhatt ◽  
Mahipal Singh Rao

Stories of Jumpha Lahiri are the evidence of immigrant lives, their displeasures, disenchantment, struggles, dreams, integrations, etc. Immigrant experience, as well as identity, really is without question the elements of Interpreter of Maladies which have been explored possibly the most by researchers. In the stories in Unaccustomed Earth have been commended for presenting different aspects of the Bengali diasporic sensibility. The eight stories in the collection show the quest for identity in the diasporic situation. They scrutinize numerous identities as well as a dilemma in the lives of immigrants. This article will study the short story about the immigrants those who have to live their homeland by the Indian-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri, two of those three works, Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and Unaccustomed Earth (2008), are short story collections and are some of the very well known ones.


Author(s):  
Emma Simone

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study explores Woolf’s treatment of the relationship between self and world from a phenomenological-existential perspective. This study presents a timely and compelling interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s textual treatment of the relationship between self and world from the perspective of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Drawing on Woolf’s novels, essays, reviews, letters, diary entries, short stories, and memoirs, the book explores the political and the ontological, as the individual’s connection to the world comes to be defined by an involvement and engagement that is always already situated within a particular physical, societal, and historical context. Emma Simone argues that at the heart of what it means to be an individual making his or her way in the world, the perspectives of Woolf and Heidegger are founded upon certain shared concerns, including the sustained critique of Cartesian dualism, particularly the resultant binary oppositions of subject and object, and self and Other; the understanding that the individual is a temporal being; an emphasis upon intersubjective relations insofar as Being-in-the-world is defined by Being-with-Others; and a consistent emphasis upon average everydayness as both determinative and representative of the individual’s relationship to and with the world.


Author(s):  
Nina Bosak

The demonolexis in Yu. Andrukhovych’s long short story “Recreatsii” (“Recreations”) has been analyzed in the article. In the course of the research there have been outlined the following lexical-semantic groups of demonomens: toponymic and onomastic names, modified lexemes, names of the rituals, genuine Ukrainian demonomens, obscene words and expressions, demonomens of Biblical origin, names from the world mythology and general demonolexis. The special lexical-semantic group has been formed by non personificated demonomens, which serve to convey the peculiarities of the contemporary Ukrainian writers’ mentality, their habits through speech. Such nomens help to reveal the protagonist’s soul, show the positive and negative sides of his personal ego, demonstrate the duality of the human perception of the world, indicate the causes of phobias, emotions, sensations. Key words: demonolexis, demonomen, lexical-semantic group, non personificated demonomen.


Imbizo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Danson Sylvester Kahyana

The article examines how selected works in Uganda’s first anthology of prison-authored work, As I Stood Dead before the World: Creative Writing from Luzira Prison (2018), handle one of the issues of paramount importance to inmates and their families: the possibility that convictions in courts of law are not foolproof since judicial officers are human beings and therefore susceptible to error. Drawing from four examples: two poems (Jackson O’s “Letter to Aber” and Sebuuma Gadafi’s “Twenty-Years”), one short story (Rachael Pearl Orishaba’s “A Secret”), and one short play (Jennifer Janette’s “What If It Wasn’t Kato?”), I show how different inmates imagine situations where judicial officers (prosecutors and magistrates/judges) make errors of judgement that see innocent people convicted of crimes they did not commit. The article closely reads the four selected pieces with the objective of investigating how creative writers can help judicial officers realise how important it is to turn every proverbial stone before a conviction is made.


2011 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 722-756
Author(s):  
Jon Adams ◽  
Edmund Ramsden

Nestled among E. M. Forster's careful studies of Edwardian social mores is a short story called “The Machine Stops.” Set many years in the future, it is a work of science fiction that imagines all humanity housed in giant high-density cities buried deep below a lifeless surface. With each citizen cocooned in an identical private chamber, all interaction is mediated through the workings of “the Machine,” a totalizing social system that controls every aspect of human life. Cultural variety has ceded to rigorous organization: everywhere is the same, everyone lives the same life. So hopelessly reliant is humanity upon the efficient operation of the Machine, that when the system begins to fail there is little the people can do, and so tightly ordered is the system that the failure spreads. At the story's conclusion, the collapse is total, and Forster's closing image offers a condemnation of the world they had built, and a hopeful glimpse of the world that might, in their absence, return: “The whole city was broken like a honeycomb. […] For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky” (2001: 123). In physically breaking apart the city, there is an extent to which Forster is literalizing the device of the broken society, but it is also the case that the infrastructure of the Machine is so inseparable from its social structure that the failure of one causes the failure of the other. The city has—in the vocabulary of present-day engineers—“failed badly.”


IIUC Studies ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 55-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammed Sarwar Alam

Imperialism has been the most powerful force in world history over last four or five centuries. The world has moved from the colonial to post-colonial era or neoimperialism. Throughout the period, the imperialists have changed their grounds and strategies in imperialistic rules. But the ultimate objective has remained the same- to rule and exploit the natives with their multifaceted dominance-technological, economic and military. Through dominance with these, they have been, to a great extent, successful in establishing their racial and cultural superiority. George Orwell is popularly known to be an anti-imperialist writer. This paper, I believe, will lead us to an almost different conclusion. Here, we discover the inevitable dilemma in a disguised imperialist. We discover the seeds of imperialism under the mask of anti-imperialism. In this regard, it studies his revealing short story "Shooting an Elephant". It also humbly approaches to refute Barry Hindess' arguments supporting neoimperialism.   doi: 10.3329/iiucs.v3i0.2664   IIUC STUDIES Vol. - 3, December 2006 (p 5-62)  


Janus Head ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-135
Author(s):  
Keith Moser ◽  

This interdisciplinary essay investigates J.M.G. Le Clézio’s short story “Martin” from the collection entitled La Fièvre (Fever) from the lens of recent empirical studies related to bullying. The 2008 Nobel Laureate in Literature creates a rending portrait of the physical and cerebral anguish suffered by casualties of peer-victimization. The profound inner turmoil experienced by the protagonist Martin mirrors the searing pain felt by millions of innocent victims around the world on a daily basis. Although the nefarious, long-term effects of bullying are often dismissed by misinformed individuals as a reflection of “boys being boys,” research unequivocally demonstrates that bullying is a global pandemic that should be taken seriously. In this disquieting narrative from the early part of his illustrious career, Le Clézio extends an ethical summons to the reader which compels us to think harder about the dire social consequences of bullying. Specifically, the tragic dénouement leaves little room for ambivalence concerning the author’s position related to the anguish experienced by casualties of peer-victimization. In “Martin,” it is the destabilizing realism that attacks the sensibilities of the reader the most. Although this text is a work of fiction, it deeply resonates with the reader given that deplorable incidents, which leave deep inner scars, like the one described in “Martin” occur far too often all across the globe. When analyzed in conjunction with the disconcerting research compiled by international scholars from around the world, “Martin” is an invaluable tool that allows us to catch a small glimpse of the unbearable torment felt by the victims of these heinous crimes.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-153
Author(s):  
Burong Zeng

Non-taster is a photo essay exploring the elusive connections between the change of taste and the immigrant experience based on my story of losing taste at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak. The world, which used to be dirty, viscous, and alive has rapidly become hygienic, distanced, and virtual. I documented the packaging and food sauce for breakfast via a series of scanned images and photographs during the second and third lockdown in London. The photos of spicy sauce and food packaging reveal the desire to reconnect with the senses. Alongside apathy, nostalgia, and homesickness, Non-taster laments the changes of the senses and desires in the post-pandemic period.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (8) ◽  
pp. 29-36
Author(s):  
Alexis Dubon ◽  

How do you find common ground with those that believe in a vast, intricate, media conspiracy to hide the truth? In this work of philosophical short story of fiction, the narrator drives out to his parent’s house to visit them for the holidays. Much to his surprise, when his parents open the door, they are only two feet tall! He is concerned that his parents, like many in the world, have shrunk to half their size. His parents, however, are equally concerned about their son because they believe he, and others in the world, have doubled in size. The son tries to explain to his parents that they have shrunk, that is why their house, and all their belongings, seem so large. However, his parents believe he, like many others, have an altered idea of what reality is, and that they have been lied to by the media and local officials. The son continues to come year after year to visit his tiny parents, who continue to refuse that they have changed, not the world around them.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document