scholarly journals Masterji’s Resistance in Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower: An Embodiment of the Struggle of the Marginalized Class

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-93
Author(s):  
Badiuzzaman Shaikh
Keyword(s):  
Lower Class ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Entire Country ◽  
Last Man ◽  
The Rich

Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower, published in 2011, is a trenchant critique on the effects of globalization, urbanization, privatization and capitalism in the post-colonial era in India. All these changes in the contemporary society have effectively bifurcated the entire country into two groups—the rich and the poor, the centre and the margin, the privileged upper class and the underprivileged lower class. In the novel Dharmen Shah, a real estate mogul represents the first group of people who are socio-politically and economically highly influential, whereas Yogesh A. Murthy, aka Masterji, is the embodiment of the marginalized class that are constantly dominated and exploited by the former group. My present paper aims to analyse in detail how far Masterji is able to resist the scabrous sufferings unleashed by the rich realtor Dharmen Shah, and how far Masterji’s resistance becomes an incarnation of the resilience of marginalized people in the contemporary society.

Are Democrats Really the Party of the Poor? Partisanship, Class, and Representation in the U.S. Senate

2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 848-865 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cory Maks-Solomon ◽  
Elizabeth Rigby
Keyword(s):  
Social Issues ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Roll Call ◽  
Economic Issues ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Policy Representation ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The U.S

Scholars have identified partisan differences in policy representation—with Republicans more often found to represent the rich, while Democrats align with the preferences of less affluent voters. This paper explores these partisan differences, questioning this simple conclusion on both theoretical and methodological grounds. Instead, we develop and test a theory in which elected officials of both parties represent their co-partisans, who agree with one another on many policy issues. Yet, on a subset of issues, upper class and lower class co-partisans have diverging policy preferences: rich and poor Democrats disagree on social issues while rich and poor Republicans disagree on economic issues. We analyze roll call voting in the U.S. Senate and find that, in these cases, senators of both parties better represent the preferences held by affluent members of their party. Our findings underscore the value in examining the content of policy debates and theorizing about different forms of representation.

scholarly journals Language and Politics: Prose as a Medium of Societal Apartheid in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-74
Keyword(s):  
Lower Class ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Julius Caesar ◽  
Contextual Approach ◽  
Class Discrimination ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Language And Politics ◽  
Aristotelian Rhetoric ◽  
At Home

This paper studies the use of prose in Julius Caesar as a tool of political and social apartheid and class discrimination. Usually, Shakespeare assigns blank verse to upper-class characters and prose to lower class ones. The study analyzes three occasions in which prose is used by two patricians and an eloquent cobbler. The paper means to explain the diversion of patricians to prose and add another voice to the already heaping interpretations given in criticism. It argues that the diversion of the two patricians to prose has two functions. Firstly, it shows that prose is indigenous to the poor and the patricians use it when they address the poor or talk about them. Secondly, Shakespeare shows that the diversion of the patricians to prose is a wrong choice and leads to moral depravity or failure of mission. In contrast, the cobbler uses prose effectively because it is indigenous to him and he feels at home using it. The study uses the contextual approach to analyze the three speeches. Keywords: Prose, blank verse, patricians, plebeians, Aristotelian rhetoric, republican politics.

Class, Crime, and Cannibalism in The String of Pearls; or, The Demon Barber as Bourgeois Bogeyman

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-131
Author(s):  
Leah Richards
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Cultural Resonance ◽  
String Of Pearls

Although the tale of Sweeney Todd is one with significant cultural resonance, little has been written about the text itself, The String of Pearls. This article argues that the text engages with anxieties about class conflict through a narrative that enacts exaggerated versions of various interactions. In the nineteenth century, critics objected to the cheap fiction pejoratively known as penny dreadfuls, asserting that the genre’s exciting tales of bloodshed, villainy, and mayhem would seduce readers to lives of debauchery and crime, but I argue that this concern about cheap fiction was not for the preservation of the souls of the poor and working classes but rather for the preservation of the middle classes' own corporeal bodies and the system that privileged and protected them. While there is no question that the narrative enacts extreme manifestations of problems facing the urban poor—among them, contaminated or even poisonous foodstuffs and the perils of urban anonymity—it also features an intractable and rapacious lower class and a subversion of the master-servant dynamic on which the comforts of the middle class were constructed, and so, in addition to adventure, detection, and young love, The String of Pearls offers a dark revenge fantasy of class-based violence that the middle-class critics of the penny dreadful were perhaps justified in fearing. tl;dr: Eat the Rich!

scholarly journals “Madwoman in the Post-Colonial Era” A Study of the Female Voice in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (7) ◽  
pp. 236
Author(s):  
Nushrat Azam
Keyword(s):  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Female Voice ◽  
Female Character ◽  
Sargasso Sea ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Written Text ◽  
Wide Sargasso Sea ◽  
Voice And Silence

This paper seeks to analyze the mediums and effects of voice and silence in the life of a female character of the re-written post-colonial text Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. The analysis shows how a re-written text can give a new meaning to a character and story of a novel, where the character of Antoinette tells the untold story of Bertha in Jane Eyre. The method of investigation for this research is analytical and descriptive; the research was completed by analyzing the events, actions and the interactions of the female character, Antoinette with the other major characters in the novel in order to identify how the character of Antoinette was portrayed throughout the novel. It is understood through the study of the text, that the post-colonial novel gave the female voice much more importance than its previous counterpart. This represents the early post-colonial times during which women were starting to gain liberation but had still not completely moved on from the notions of patriarchal societies that they had grown up in.

scholarly journals The Social Implications of Metaphor in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-116
Author(s):  
Alireza Farahbakhsh ◽  
Ramtin Ebrahimi
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Comprehensive Analysis ◽  
Capitalist Society ◽  
Social Implications ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Capitalistic Society

The purpose of the present article is to study the social implications of repetitive metaphors in the film and of the word Parasite (2019) and to observe what makes the life of a lower-class family parasitic within a typical capitalistic society. In the mainstream discussion, the metaphorical functions of such words as ‘smell,’ ‘insects,’ ‘the rock,’ and ‘the party’ are assessed within the context of the film. The central questions of the article, therefore, are: What are the recurrent and metaphorical motifs in the plotline and how can their implications be related to the overall theme of the film? How does Parasite exhibit the clash of classes in a capitalist society? To answer the questions, the present study offers a comprehensive analysis of its recurring metaphors as well as its treatment of the characters who visibly belong to two completely different classes. Through a complex story of two families whose fate gets intermingled, Bong Joon-ho masterfully presents a metaphoric picture of a society where inequality is rampant and the poor can only experience temporary happiness in the shadow of the rich (represented by the Park family).

Cannibalism and cultural manipulation: How Morier is received in the Persian literary canon

Human Affairs ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-159
Author(s):  
Moslem Fatollahi
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Persian Literature ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Post Colonialism ◽  
Persian Translation

Abstract Post-colonialism and orientalism have inspired literary scholars to study various aspects of literature and literary translation in the post-colonial era. One of the implications of post-colonialism for literature as a discipline is the idea of cannibalism and cultural manipulation. This corpus-based study aims to analyze the notions of “cultural manipulation” or “cannibalism” in the Persian translation of Haji Baba by Mirza Habib Isfahani, to explore the translator’s strategy, as an intercultural mediator, in modulating the source novel’s colonial stance and adapting it to the religious, literary and cultural tastes of the Iranians. Our findings reveal that two main techniques—of omission and euphemism—have been applied in rendering the novel into Persian. Using these techniques, the translator has attempted to challenge the imperial stance of the main writer and come up with a version of the source novel which is much less insulting to Iranians’ cultural values. That is why this translation has been widely received as a literary masterpiece in Persian literature. One implication is that it might be claimed that cannibalism and cultural manipulation can be used to explain the trend of manipulating western literature in countries which have never been colonized, but that have suffered from the colonial stance of colonial writers.

scholarly journals Social Class Conflict Presented In “The Kite Runner” Novel Based On Marxism Theory

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 125
Author(s):  
Yohanes Eko Rubiyanto ◽  
Restu Arini
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Qualitative Method ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Library Research ◽  
Large Groups ◽  
Descriptive Qualitative

The writer conducts the research related to class conflict which is presented in Khaled Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner” novel. This qualitative research is written to analyze the conflicts that happen in Afghan society which is mainly caused by difference of social class. The research is conducted by using library research. The method used in this research is descriptive qualitative method as the data are described in the form of sentences. The steps of collecting the data in this research are reading both the novel and the supporting theories related, analyzing, organizing and displaying the data to allow conclusions to be drawn. The results show that the society in the twentieth is fundamentally separated by two large groups namely Pashtun and Hazara. They are inhabit Afghanistan as told in The Kite Runner. The Pashtuns act as the dominant upper class and the Hazaras fill the society of the lower class which fits the theory of Marxism.

Neo-Colonialism in India as Represented in Aravind Adiga’s The Last Man in Tower

Think India ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 836-842
Author(s):  
P.MICHAEL AROKIASAMY ◽  
DR. M. MARY JAYANTHI
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
School Teacher ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Metropolitan Cities ◽  
Last Man ◽  
The Developed Countries ◽  
Middle Class People

The term ‘neo-colonialism’ generally represents the indirect involvement of the developed countries in the developing world. Post-colonial studies show in detail that in spite of attaining independence, the influence of colonialism and its representatives are still very present in the lives of most former colonies in different forms. These influences constitute the subject matter of neo-colonialism. Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower abounds with incidences that represent neo-colonialism in India. The novel portrays how Mumbai, one of the metropolitan cities and an important commercial centre has developed a place of multiple opportunities. To have a decent house in a commercial city like Mumbai therefore remains only a dream for the middle class people. The residents of Tower-A are ordinary middle class people of Mumbai who try to live their both ends in the globalised India. The novel spins around two opposing forces: the retired school teacher Masterji, trying to fight for his rights and Dharmen Shah, the greedy real estate developer. This paper therefore is an attempt to identify the elements of neo-colonialism in India as represented in Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower.

Urban Areas and Colonies

2018 ◽  
pp. 47-96
Author(s):  
Pilar Maria Guerrieri
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Interesting Aspect ◽  
Government Employees ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Level Government

This chapter analyses local transformations and adaptations on the more restricted scale of single colonies. The colonies, through which the megalopolis grew, especially after Independence, are part British and part American in heritage, with local reinterpretations and certain Japanese influences. The study discusses how these colonies were established in the first place by the British in the nineteenth century and were home to the rich upper class or aristocratic English, who wished to move out of Shahjahanabad. Later on, towards the end of the colonial era, Indians and lower level government employees lived in neighbourhoods such as Jangpura, Karol Bagh and Lodi Colony. Finally, after independence, colonies became the main way of building the megalopolis. An interesting aspect in post- Independence colonies such as Malviya Nagar is that residence and industrial plots are kept within the same colony, becoming bulwarks to the concept of zoning imported by the Americans.

scholarly journals Resistance and Identity in The God of Small Things Written by Arundhati Roy

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-75
Author(s):  
Saman A. Dizayi
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Arundhati Roy ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Complex Concept ◽  
Colonial Legacy ◽  
New Community ◽  
Small Things ◽  
Identity Suppression

This paper presents an analysis of the novel "The God of the Small Things" written by Arundhati Roy. The primary purpose of this paper is to evaluate the idea of resistance and identity that have been described in the novel by the novelist. It will be demonstrated in this novel that how the resistance against the traditions and norms of post-colonial era is related to the self-realisation. There are different kinds of resistance that have been depicted in the novel at various circumstances. In Postcolonial context identity is a complex concept to be located in just a simple definition or to be investigated throughout a single theoretical approach.  Resistance as a concept linked to the identity question. The Novel handles this notion and throughout its plot, besides the burden that is left from the colonial legacy, gender identity comes to the surface. Though women resistance appears as a reaction with identity suppression; yet it is a reflection of self-identification of gender inequality under patriarchal traditions inherited from long dominant masculine power. This paper elaborates on each type of resistance and activism that arises against the feudal and patriarchal forces structured by the economic and politically influential people in the new community as a sample in India after postcolonialism. Consequently, one of the points that the research ends with is that the act of resistance validates the pursuit for self-identity, which is an attempt to renown, reclaim and rename the world.

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