Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism: Redefining Fundamentalism in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007)

This article is based on a study of The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), a novel by a Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid. The novel is based on the story of transformation of an expat Pakistani living in New York from a true cosmopolitan to a nationalist. The article will explore the crisis of identity suffered by the protagonist in a new land where he reached as an immigrant student and worker. However, he experienced a resurgence of nationalist and patriotic sentiments within him as 9/ 11 happened in 2001. The force of American nationalism that was imperial in nature, resulting in the invasion of Afghanistan and Iran, triggered resentment in the protagonist who decided to leave America and went back to the country of his origin, Pakistan. During his stay in America, the protagonist redefined fundamentalism as an imperial tendency in the American system while rejecting the accusations hurled towards him of an Islamic fundamentalist. The article will explain that there is a loss of cosmopolitan virtue in the post 9/11 era and the dream of universal peace and harmony is shattered due to unbridled state ambitions to invade foreign territories. The article will conclude with the assertion that the loss of cosmopolitanism and reassertion of national identities give way to confrontation and intolerance destroying the prospects of peace and harmony in a globalized world.

The potentialities of corpus-based techniques for analyzing literature

This paper presents an attempt to explore the analytical potential of five corpus-based techniques: concordances, frequency lists, keyword lists, collocate lists, and dispersion plots. The basic question addressed is related to the contribution that these techniques make to gain more objective and insightful knowledge of the way literary meanings are encoded and of the way the literary language is organized. Three sizable English novels (Joyc's Ulysses, Woolf's The Waves, and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying) are laid to corpus linguistic analysis. It is only by virtue of corpus-based techniques that huge amounts of literary data are analyzable. Otherwise, the data will keep on to be not more than several lines of poetry or short excerpts of narrative. The corpus-based techniques presented throughout this paper contribute more or less to a sort of rigorous interpretation of literary texts far from the intuitive approaches usually utilized in traditional stylistics.

Spatial Aesthetics: Art as Transformative Experience in Thomas Hardy's “Poems of 1912-13”

Landscape, is something to be perceived with eyes, to be dwelled upon and to experience happiness. Getting an eyeful of places give a seasoning and spatial joie de vivre. There is more than eyes can espy, more than ears can detect. Settings and views are waiting to be explored. Things are in relation to surroundings, the sequences of events lead up the experiences and memories. The kind of vision appears in Thomas Hardy’s “Poems of 1912-13.” “Poems of 1912-13” are a series of elegies that Hardy composed after his wife Emma Gilford’s eternal rest. Although the couple had long been set at odds, howbeit, Hardy embarked on his writing adventure about Emma. He unexpectedly made a hit with the memories of their love; wherefore, the “Poems 1912-13” are personification and reproduction of Hardy’s mind. He defined the two real physical places where Emma and he used to live, id est, Cornwall and Dorset, not only as social but also psychological spaces. He inwardly overhauled and restored the spaces once familiar to him. Over and above, he dreamed up and brought his imaginary into existence with his late wife. As Hardy waved through the mental space and moved over the space of time, he also made the spaces emblematic and figurative like memorials. Like the idea of Gestalt’s theory, the couple’s life experiences are “essences or shapes of an entity's complete form.” Both the poet and the phantom (Emma) become flâneur, the stroller in Walter Benjamin's meditation on nineteenth-century Paris, who is a characteristic and exemplary figure of freshness modernity.

Pluralism and Hybridity in instant poems: Taxonomizing Indonesian students' degree of nationalism through their creative process

Poetry can be a device that is rich in meaning in responding to any issues, including pluralism issue. The aim of this research is to elaborate students’ attitudes expressed in their poem on pluralism issues in Indonesia. This research is also conducted to identify and group the responses into three attitudes: positive, negative, and neutral, and into five hybrid categories proposed by Steven G. Yao: Cross-fertilization, Mimicry, Grafting, Transplantation, and Mutation. The research is conducted in five private universities in Jakarta and Tangerang: Bina Nusantara University, Pamulang University, Nasional University, Indonesian Christian University, and Indonesian Al-Azhar University. The result of the research shows that out of 153 poems, most students (65%) have positive attitude toward pluralism. While 16 % of them have negative attitude and only 19% of the respondents have neutral or ambiguous attitude. Interestingly, 36 students (23.52%) use the word “tunngal/one” as a metaphoric medium to express their response, while 33 (21.56%) students use colors to represent their thoughts, 28 students (18.30%) use “bhinneka / diversity” to show their responses, and there are 10 students (6.53%) use “rainbow” to signify pluralism issues. There are strong metaphors found effective in reflecting the students’ ideas such as garden, music, jar, batik, Garuda, salad, and sandals. The strong metaphors, studied in Yao’s hybridization, show all the five degrees of hybrid interaction: two cross-fertilizations, one mimicry, three graftings, three transplantations, and three mutations. It is concluded that the students have positively owned a high degree sense of nationalism in responding to Indonesian plural realities.