Woman-Nature affinity in Desai’s Where Shall We Go This Summer: An Ecofeminist Analysis

This research paper focuses on the images extracted from natural phenomena in Anita Desai's WhereShall We Go This Summer? (1982), to illustrate the pros and cons of patriarchal society'smarginalization and alienation of women in today's world. The article exposes the deep hiddenmeanings of natural imagery through a feministic sensibility. Desai uses natural and animal elementsto create a metaphoric picture of an archetypal feminine figure that works on two levels at the sametime. At a primary level, this technique of inserting natural images at various points throughout thenovel aims to heighten the magnitude and intensity of the mental and spiritual agony of a victimizedwoman who faces domestic violence, male oppression, and female suppression while on a secondarylevel, the role of these images helps the women in the catharsis of that pain, distress, and anguish whichis the result of the rejection of her husband and society as a whole. Karen Warren’s theory ofEcofeminism which regards both women and nature as oppressed objects, is applied for the purpose ofresearch methodology. This research aims to overturn oppressive patriarchal practices by bringingwomen and ecology from the margins to the forefront

"DIONYSIAN RELIGION" OF VYACHESLAV IVANOV AS A SUBJECT OF THE STUDY OF RELIGION: SETTING OF THE PROBLEM

This article presents an attempt to reconstruct the so-called “Dionysian religion” of Vyacheslav Ivanov. Some original pre-religia, which was designated by Ivanov as a primitive “female monotheism” or telimonotheism, in its cult aspect, represents “female orgiasm” or the worship of an “invariably-residing female deity”. In the process of its historical evolution, it requires a “male correlate in the face of a periodically born and dying God” - and eventually finds it in the person of Dionysus, i.e., in the building up the Dionysian religion, which in its essence is still determined by the archetypal feminine principle. It is important that Ivanov's work is built on extremely extensive factual material, including a vast arsenal of documentary evidence and interpretive principles. At the same time, his innovation consisted in the rejection of positivistic methods and in the search for a way of more adequate penetration into the ancient religious consciousness. At the end of the proposed excursion it is noted that the Dionysian theory of Ivanov, already sufficiently well studied by philosophers and philologists, has not yet been awarded by the attention of religious scholars and historians of religion, and the more so theologians...