PANDEMIC AND LITERATURE: A STUDY ON KAKKANADAN'S VASOORI

Ensemble ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol SP-1 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-107
Author(s):  
RENU ANNA BOBAN ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Infectious Diseases ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Race ◽  
Regional Literature ◽  
Human Reaction ◽  
Look Back ◽  
History Of

The current pandemic situation has completely altered our lives. In this context, it is imperative to look back at the history of human civilization to see how the ancient faced such situations. Works dealing with the horrors of plague have been written in various regional literature across India, the famous being Rabindranath Tagore’s Puraton Bhritto, Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi and U.R Anandamoorthy’s Samskara. The article focuses on a Malayalam novel, Vasoori, written by Kakkanadan (1968) which revolves around the lives of common village folk caught in the jaws of smallpox. The novel focuses on the lived in experience of a community forced to face the disease almost every year. It is enlightening to go through the novel in the current Covid-19 pandemic as it concentrates on the first human reaction to pandemics – fear. By using the motif of smallpox, Vasoori pushes the reader to reflect on the ancestral fear of humans to infectious diseases and how it completely shatters the body’s internal perceptions. Thus reading Vasoori in the current pandemic situation is one way of understanding how the human race dealt with a disease for which there seemed no solution in sight.

scholarly journals Mr Povondra’s Collage in Hungarian

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 117-129
Author(s):  
Anna Steinbachné Bobok
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Close Connection ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Race ◽  
Composite Part ◽  
Text Types ◽  
Character Identity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Wide Assortment

AbstractKarel Čapek’s The War with the Newts combines a wide assortment of textual forms and genres to portray the assumed history of the newts in close connection with that of the human race. Newspaper articles, scientific studies, notes of drunken sailors, and other inserts form a unique collage in style as well as in layout. In the various editions of the originally 1948 Hungarian translation of the novel, the textual arrangements of the most composite part of The War with the Newts – the second book – are significantly altered compared to the Czech edition. Moreover, the introductory sentences of the inserts, the typefaces, and the stylistic differences tend to suggest that there is a different notion of text and reading underlying the Hungarian versions. Other unifying tendencies traceable in the translation, e.g. standardized language use or concepts of character identity, can be correlated with these features. As the borders of various text-types within the Czech text are reorganized and re-established in the translation, a different position of the reader and a different idea of the literary text emerge. My aim is to demonstrate the translational differences and try to account for them with an underlying concept of text and translation embedded in the Hungarian variant.

scholarly journals Lessons Learned from a Global History of Pandemics

2020 ◽  
pp. 38-41
Author(s):  
Lenos Archer-Diaby
Keyword(s):  
Infectious Diseases ◽  
World Health Organization ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
World Health ◽  
Global History ◽  
Look Back ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Health Organization ◽  
Global Population

PANDEMIC: the term making headlines across the world, instilling fear in many, and urging scientists across the world to unite and find a cure. For as long as the global population has exploited freedom of travel, so too have infectious diseases spread. Outbreaks have been nearly constant since the dawn of mankind; however, not all escalate to global levels. There have been many pandemics in history, the most recent being COVID-19 declared as such by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 12th, 2020.1 As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt our everyday lives, it is important to look back in history and reflect on what previous pandemics have taught us.

“What Freedom?”

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-331
Author(s):  
John Owen Havard
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Free Condition ◽  
Narrative Design ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
John Owen

John Owen Havard, “‘What Freedom?’: Frankenstein, Anti-Occidentalism, and English Liberty” (pp. 305–331) “If he were vanquished,” Victor Frankenstein states of his monstrous creation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), “I should be a free man.” But he goes on: “Alas! what freedom? such as the peasant enjoys when his family have been massacred before his eyes, his cottage burnt, his lands laid waste, and he is turned adrift, homeless, pennyless, and alone, but free.” Victor’s circumstances approximate the deracinated subject of an emergent economic liberalism, while looking to other destitute and shipwrecked heroes. Yet the ironic “freedom” described here carries an added charge, which Victor underscores when he concludes this account of his ravaged condition: “Such would be my liberty.” This essay revisits the geographic plotting of Frankenstein: the digression to the East in the nested “harem” episode, the voyage to England, the neglected episode of Victor’s imprisonment in Ireland, and the creature’s desire to live in South America. Locating Victor’s concluding appeal to his “free” condition within the novel’s expansive geography amplifies the political stakes of his downfall, calling attention to not only his own suffering but the wider trail of destruction left in his wake. Where existing critical accounts have emphasized the French Revolution and its violent aftermath, this obscures the novel’s pointed critique of a deep and tangled history of English liberty and its destructive legacies. Reexamining the novel’s geography in tandem with its use of form similarly allows us to rethink the overarching narrative design of Frankenstein, in ways that disrupt, if not more radically dislocate, existing rigid ways of thinking about the novel.

Organization of restrictive quarantine measures to prevent especially dangerous infections

2020 ◽  
pp. 6-11
Author(s):  
Petr Ilyin
Keyword(s):  
Infectious Diseases ◽  
Clinical Symptoms ◽  
International Health ◽  
World Health ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Entire History ◽  
Health Organization ◽  
Former Ussr ◽  
Health Regulations

Especially dangerous infections (EDIs) belong to the conditionally labelled group of infectious diseases that pose an exceptional epidemic threat. They are highly contagious, rapidly spreading and capable of affecting wide sections of the population in the shortest possible time, they are characterized by the severity of clinical symptoms and high mortality rates. At the present stage, the term "especially dangerous infections" is used only in the territory of the countries of the former USSR, all over the world this concept is defined as "infectious diseases that pose an extreme threat to public health on an international scale." Over the entire history of human development, more people have died as a result of epidemics and pandemics than in all wars combined. The list of especially dangerous infections and measures to prevent their spread were fixed in the International Health Regulations (IHR), adopted at the 22nd session of the WHO's World Health Assembly on July 26, 1969. In 1970, at the 23rd session of the WHO's Assembly, typhus and relapsing fever were excluded from the list of quarantine infections. As amended in 1981, the list included only three diseases represented by plague, cholera and anthrax. However, now annual additions of new infections endemic to different parts of the earth to this list take place. To date, the World Health Organization (WHO) has already included more than 100 diseases in the list of especially dangerous infections.

Reading Statelessness

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyndsey Stonebridge
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Political Sovereignty ◽  
History Of

Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the failure of human rights to address statelessness is well known. Less commented upon is how important literature was to her thought. This chapter shows how Arendt’s 1940s essays on Kafka connect the history of the novel to shifting definitions of legal and political sovereignty. Arendt reads The Castle as a blueprint for a political theory that is also a theory of fiction: in the novel K, the unwanted stranger, demolishes the fiction of the rights of man, and with it, the fantasy of assimilation. In a parallel move, Kafka also refuses to assimilate his character into the conventions of fiction. Arendt’s reading changes the terms for how we might approach the literature of exile and of human rights.

V.S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing, and Caribbean Thought

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Ghosh
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Development ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Derek Walcott ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Kamau Brathwaite ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
History Of ◽  
Principal Subject ◽  
Intellectual Formation

This book presents a new portrait of V.S. Naipaul, one of the twentieth-century’s most controversial writers about colonialism and its aftermath, by looking at his relationship with the Caribbean, the region of his birth. It argues that whilst Naipaul presented himself as a global public intellectual—a citizen of nowhere—his writing and thought was shaped by his Caribbean intellectual formation, and his investment in Caribbean political debates. Focusing on three key forms of Caribbean writing—the novel, the historical narrative, and the travel narrative—it shows how the generic, stylistic, and formal choices of writers had great political significance. Telling the story of his creative and intellectual development at three crucial points in Naipaul’s career, it offers a new intellectual biography of its principal subject. By showing Naipaul’s crucial place in the history of Caribbean ideas, it also provides new perspectives on a number of major writers and thinkers from the region, including C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter, George Lamming, Derek Walcott, Maryse Condé, and David Scott.

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
English Language ◽  
Book History ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Volume Nine of this series traces the development of the ‘world novel’, that is, English-language novels written throughout the world, beyond Britain, Ireland, and the United States. Focusing on the period up to 1950, the volume contains survey chapters and chapters on major writers, as well as chapters on book history, publishing, and the critical contexts of the work discussed. The text covers periods from renaissance literary imaginings of exotic parts of the world like Oceania, through fiction embodying the ideology and conventions of empire, to the emergence of settler nationalist and Indigenous movements and, finally, the assimilations of modernism at the beginnings of the post-imperial world order. The book, then, contains chapters on the development of the non-metropolitan novel throughout the British world from the eighteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. This is the period of empire and resistance to empire, of settler confidence giving way to doubt, and of the rise of indigenous and post-colonial nationalisms that would shape the world after World War II.

Restoration Theatre and the Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Transition ◽  
Strong Affinity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Restoration Theatre ◽  
Restoration Comedy ◽  
London Stage

This chapter explores the broad cultural transition from drama to novel during the Restoration period, which triggered one of the most productive periods in the history of the London stage. However, when it comes to the eighteenth century proper, the novel is more likely to be identified as the century's most significant and appealing popular genre. The chapter considers why the novel has largely superseded drama as the literary form to which ambitious and imaginative literary types without a strong affinity for verse writing would by default have turned their attention and energies by the middle of the eighteenth century. Something important may have been lost in the broad cultural transition from drama to novel. This chapter, however, contends that many things were preserved: that the novel was able to absorb many of the functions and techniques not just of Restoration comedy but of the theatre more generally.

An Essay on the Origins of the Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Whitmarsh
Keyword(s):  
Single Point ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Scholarship

This chapter discusses the history of scholarship trying to trace the origins of the novel, and the impossibility of attempting to pin down a single point of origination.

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