scholarly journals Unreal Homes: Belonging and Becoming in Indian Women Narratives

Humanities ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 133
Author(s):  
Sofia Cavalcanti
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
Indian Women ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
Moving Force ◽  
Structural Framework ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Jhumpa Lahiri ◽  
A Site

In an epoch which has to do fundamentally with space, the concept of home has entered the epistemic scene, both as a commodity and a discursive formation. Contemporary Indian women writers, who are a major facet of present Anglophone literature, have often chosen the domestic sphere as the structural framework of their stories. However, despite the traditional idea of home as a static physical site where women’s lives unfold, a more complex and fluid concept emerges from their narratives. After discussing conflicting definitions of home both as a site of belonging and becoming, I will provide a comparative analysis of the short story Mrs. Sen’s by Jhumpa Lahiri and the novel Ladies’ Coupé by Anita Nair. By looking at the transitional spaces inhabited by the women protagonists—respectively, the diasporic space in the U.S. and a train car in India—I will show how home is a psychic-inhabited place taking shape in memory, imagination, and desire. In conclusion, home is an unreal site at the core of women’s subjectivities, transcending the physicality of the homeland or the household and assuming a metonymic significance. Its inward or outward-moving force gives birth to “homeworlds” made of liminal paths where new possibilities of identity construction are produced.

Contesting Homogeneity: Stereotypes and Heteronormativity in Aruni Kashyap’s His Father’s Disease

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debajyoti Biswas
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Regional Identity ◽  
Power Structure ◽  
Northeast India ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Literary Regionalism ◽  
A Site ◽  
Dialogic Space

Abstract This article analyses Aruni Kashyap’s short story collection His Father’s Disease. Kashyap challenges hegemonic structures through an emerging writing area tentatively classified as ‘Anglophone fiction from Northeast India’. By engaging with Foucault’s reading of Power/Knowledge this article examines the disciplining of literary regionalism (Anglophone literature from Northeast India), territory and sexuality encapsulated in Kashyap’s exposition of heteronormative societies across cultures. Through the stories Kashyap weaves a dialogic space within the narrative world that challenges various forms of stereotypes relating to regional representation in literary works as well as regional identity and sexuality prevailing in the contemporary world’s existing social and literaryscape. Therefore, it becomes pertinent to observe how Kashyap’s text becomes a site of contention where on one hand the stereotype is accommodated within the power structure, hence controlled and regulated by various agencies, and on the other hand the same knowledge is appropriated by the author as a counter-narrative/reverse-discourse.

Imagining Africa’s futures in two Caine Prize-winning stories: Henrietta Rose-Innes’s “Poison” and NoViolet Bulawayo’s “Hitting Budapest”

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aghogho Akpome
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Dominant Position ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
A Site ◽  
Chemical Explosion

Since its launch in 1999, the annual Caine Prize for African short stories has assumed a dominant position on the continent’s literary landscape. It has been hailed for the exposure it provides for its winners who are mostly budding writers. Expectedly, it has also attracted stinging criticism, especially for what is perceived to be its legitimization of stereotypical narratives about Africa. In this article, I examine how the two winning entries of 2008 and 2011 represent contemporary African realities and in so doing reinforce the growing significance of the prize and the short story genre to modern African literary expression. I argue that, taken together, Henrietta Rose-Innes’ “Poison” (2007) and NoViolet Bulawayo’s “Hitting Budapest” (2010), both set in cities, contribute to problematic imaginings of African futures. Bulawayo does this through her representation of slum life and dystopian childhoods in Zimbabwe while Rose-Innes’s story speculates on the apocalyptic aftermath of a chemical explosion in post-apartheid South Africa. I highlight, also, how these two narratives reflect apparent relationships between the short story and the novel in contemporary African writing as well as the increasing role of the postcolonial city as a site from which unfavourable visions of postcolonial societies are generated.

Crumbling into Dust

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Levi Barnard
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Unfinished Business ◽  
Black Newspapers ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Antebellum Period ◽  
David Walker ◽  
Historical Times

This chapter situates Chesnutt’s writing within a tradition of black classicism as political engagement and historical critique extending from the antebellum period to the twentieth century and beyond. Reading Chesnutt as a figure at the crossroads of multiple historical times and cultural forms, the chapter examines his manipulation of multiple mythic traditions into a cohesive and unsettling vision of history as unfinished business. In the novel The Marrow of Tradition and the late short story “The Marked Tree,” Chesnutt echoes a nineteenth-century tradition that included David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, and writers and editors for antebellum black newspapers, while at the same time anticipating a later anti-imperial discourse generated by writers such as Richard Wright and Toni Morrison. Chesnutt provides a fulcrum for a collective African American literary history that has emerged as a prophetic counterpoint to the prevailing historical consciousness in America.

Ireland and Europe after 1973

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Hand
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Real People ◽  
Economic Union ◽  
A Site

This chapter argues that the novel form is best suited to giving expression to the multifaceted Irish reality. Ireland, in the modern moment, is a place of incongruity and contradiction: it is at once a site of colonization and post-colonization, as well as simultaneously positioning itself as an integral part of a modern, globalized, economic union. The novel’s being bound to the immediate moment, while also aspiring toward the transcendence of immutable art, perfectly reflects an Irish mood caught between the violent actuality of war and a desire for mundane ordinariness. Indeed, it can be argued that the novel form offers a very human, and humane, lens through which to expose the hidden histories and anxieties of real people. Certainly the Irish novel has consistently done this from the seventeenth century onward, as it has charted the story of Ireland’s complex emergence into modernity.

Madrasas and the Making of Islamic Womanhood

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hem Borker
Keyword(s):  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Marriage Education ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
The Media ◽  
Education And Employment ◽  
A Site ◽  
Anthropological Literature ◽  
Educational Journeys ◽  
The Ideal

This ethnography provides a theoretically informed account of the educational journeys of students in girls’ madrasas in India. It focuses on the unfolding of young women’s lives as they journey from home to madrasa and beyond. Using a series of ethnographic portraits and bringing together the analytical concepts of community, piety, and aspiration, it highlights the fluidity of the essences of the ideal pious Muslim woman. It illustrates how the madrasa becomes a site where the ideals of Islamic womanhood are negotiated in everyday life. At one level, girls value and adopt practices taught in the madrasa as essential to the practice of piety (amal). At another level, there is a more tactical aspect to cultivating one’s identity as a madrasa-educated Muslim girl. The girls invoke the virtues of safety, modesty, and piety learnt in the madrasa to reconfigure conventional social expectations around marriage, education, and employment. This becomes more apparent in the choices exercised by the girls after leaving the madrasa, highlighted in this book through narratives of madrasa alumni pursuing higher education at a central university in Delhi. The focus on journeys of girls over a period of time, in different contexts, complicates the idealized and coherent notions of piety presented by anthropological literature on women’s participation in Islamic piety projects. Further, the educational stories of girls challenge the media and public representations of madrasas in India, which tend to caricature them as outmoded religious institutions with little relevance to the educational needs of modernizing India. Mapping madrasa students’ personal journeys of becoming educated while leading pious lives allows us to see how these young women are reconfiguring notions of Islamic womanhood.

The Short Story: A Very Short Introduction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Kahn
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
The Press ◽  
Character Study ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Plot Design

The Short Story: A Very Short Introduction charts the rise of the short story from its original appearance in magazines and newspapers. For much of the 19th century, tales were written for the press, and the form’s history is marked by engagement with popular fiction. The short story then earned a reputation for its skilful use of plot design and character study distinct from the novel. This VSI considers the continuity and variation in key structures and techniques such as the beginning, the creation of voice, the ironic turn or plot twist, and how writers manage endings. Throughout, it draws on examples from an international and flourishing corpus of work.

Women, Writing and the Iraqi Ba'thist State

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hawraa Al-Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
The State ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Resistance ◽  
Cultural Revival ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Site ◽  
Material Form

The book examines the trajectory of the state sponsored novel in Iraq and considers the ways in which explicitly political and/or ideological texts functioned as resistive counter narratives. It argues that both the novel and ‘progressive’ discourses on women were used as markers of Iraq’s cultural revival under the Ba‘th and were a key element in the state’s propaganda campaign within Iraq and abroad. In an effort to expand its readership and increase support for its pan-Arab project, the Iraqi Ba‘th almost completely eradicated illiteracy among women. As Iraq was metaphorically transformed into a ‘female’, through its nationalist trope, women writers simultaneously found opportunities and faced obstacles from the state, as the ‘Woman Question’ became a site of contention between those who would advocate the progressiveness of the Ba‘th and those who would stress its repressiveness and immorality. By exploring discourses on gender in both propaganda and high art fictional writings by Iraqis, this book offers an alternative narrative of the literary and cultural history of Iraq. It ultimately expands the idea of cultural resistance beyond the modern/traditional, progressive/backward paradigms that characterise discourses on Arab women and the state, and argues that resistance is embedded in the material form of texts as much as their content or ideological message.

Iraq

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haytham Bahoora
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Social Realism ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
War In Iraq ◽  
Critical Social

This chapter examines the development of the novel in Iraq. It first considers the beginnings of prose narrative in Iraq, using the intermingling of the short story and the novel, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century, as a framework for reassessing the formal qualities of the Arabic novel. It then turns to romantic and historical novels published in the 1920s, as well as novels dealing with social issues like poverty and the condition of peasants in the countryside. It discusses the narrative emergence of the bourgeois intellectual’s self-awareness and interiority in Iraqi fiction, especially the novella; works that continued the expression of a critical social realism in the Iraqi novelistic tradition and the appearance of modernist aesthetics; and narratives that addressed dictatorship and war in Iraq. The chapter concludes with an overview of the novel genre in Iraq after 2003.

scholarly journals Office Setting as Organizational Structure in “Bartleby the Scrivener”

SAGE Open ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 215824401769043
Author(s):  
Lori Duin Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Structure ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Institutional Ethnography ◽  
Interpersonal Dynamics ◽  
Office Setting ◽  
Linguistic Markers ◽  
The Social ◽  
Bartleby The Scrivener ◽  
A Site

This article uses a methodology from the social sciences known as institutional ethnography to analyze the office setting in Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby the Scrivener” as a site of social organization. This approach contributes to an understanding of how that office came to adopt specific structures as crucial to its functioning and how, as a consequence of those structures, individuals’ roles within the organization’s hierarchies became constituted. As fieldwork occurs inside of organizations, institutional ethnography also provides a tool for identifying and evaluating linguistic markers for an individual’s placement within a larger organizational structure. This approach to the story seems particularly useful for understanding the interpersonal dynamics at the heart of “Bartleby.” At the same time, it provides a method for identifying the larger institutional process at work in Melville’s story, one that contributes to the reproduction of a system of social relations in the workplace that requires subordination and compliance to insure its success.

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