Journal Literary Aesthetics

Archives Volume-2, Issue-1 (January-June)

Paper Title:: Interrogating Communalism and Parochial Nationalism in Taslima Nasrin’s LAJJA
Author Name:: Kiran Arora
Country:: India
Page No.:: 1-4

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Interrogating Communalism and Parochial Nationalism in Taslima Nasrin’s LAJJA

Author: Kiran Arora

Abstract: The novel Lajja is an attempt to delve deep into the question of religious fanaticism and how it impacts the life of the minorities and the fair sex. The novelist has tried to unravel the nasty blend of fundamentalism with nationalism. It has made to sincere effort to highlight how extremism breeds parochial nationalism. The novel is an attempt to prick the consciousness of those who inflict pain on their brethren simply because of the fact that they belong to a different faith.
Keywords: Extremism, parochial nationalism, fundamentalism etc.

Paper Title:: Disillusionment, Alienation and Frustration
Author Name:: Parkash Verma
Country:: India
Page No.:: 5-9

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Disillusionment, Alienation and Frustration

Author: Parkash Verma

A great writer while writing, inevitably incorporates the trends, values, general beliefs and in fact the very essence of his age. T.S. Eliot is not an exception. His writings, more especially his poetic works remain unintelligible without reference to the age of which he was a part and factors and forces which prompted his literary works of everlasting value. Eliot himself said, “A great poet, in writing of himself, writes his age”. His “The Waste Land” invariably presents the vast panorama of futility and anarchy and is hence known the epic of the modern age.
Eliot‟s main aim of writing poetry was to communicate through presentation the frustration, alienation and anxiety prevalent in the consciousness of the inhabitants of the lost generation .Eliot knew that the inner state of mind of man is very complex; it can only be presented either symbolically or in an indirect manner. To articulate the “agonies of the inarticulate”, he had to make use of various kinds of allusions, symbols and images. His early poetry abounds with the imagery of sickness, disease and death. His concept of Objective Correlative helped him to transmit personal emotions into fused ideas and images which possess a quality of universality.

Paper Title:: A Study of Amitav Ghosh’s ‘The Hungry Tide’ from on Eco-Critical Perspective
Author Name:: Girija Menon
Country:: India
Page No.:: 10-13

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A Study of Amitav Ghosh’s ‘The Hungry Tide’ from on Eco-Critical Perspective

Author: Girija Menon

Over the last three decades, Amitav Ghosh has established himself as a writer of uncommon talent who combines literary flair with a rare seriousness of purpose. Ghosh’s writing spans a variety of genres. From the publication of his first novel The Circle of Reason in 1986 to the Flood of Fire which is to be released shortly, it has been an illustrious and rewarding journey. The Hungry Tide which was published in 2004 won him the Hutch Crossword Book prize in 2006 and the Grinzane Cavour prize in Turin, Italy. Each of his works is unique and personal and his appeal lies in his ability to weave Indo-nostalgic elements into more serious themes.
The Hungry Tide is a whirlwind work of the imagination, epic in scope and ambition. The backdrop of the novel is that immense archipelago of islands, the Sunderbans. These islands have lasted centuries through various periods of history. Here there are no borders to divide fresh water from salt, river from sea, even land from water. They are situated in that area between the plains of Bengal and the mighty ocean. The tides reach more than two hundred miles inland and everyday thousands of acres of mangrove forest disappear only to reemerge hours later. For hundreds of years, only the truly dispossessed and the hopeless dreamers of the world have braved the man-eaters and the crocodiles who rule there to eke out a precarious existence from the unyielding mud.

Paper Title:: The Confessional Hero in William Styron’s
Author Name:: Sohan Singh
Country:: India
Page No.:: 14-24

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The Confessional Hero in William Styron’s

Author: Sohan Singh

Confession is regarded as necessary for attaining divine/social forgiveness or appeasing the burdened conscience. In the Old Testament, the Lord, God said to Amram‟s son, Moses: “Say to the people of Israel, when a man or a woman commits any of the sins that men commit by breaking faith with the Lord, that person is guilty, he shall confess his sin which he has committed” (Num V.6). If in the ecclesiastical terms, it is “breaking faith with the Lord”, then it is necessitated by “breaking faith” with the society.
Encyclopedia Brittanica(Vol.6) cites another interpretation of confession- “an extra-judicial statement acknowledging guilt of an offence”. The voluntary confession, in most jurisdictions, must be corroborated by other evidence before a defendant may be convicted, which can relate to the authenticity of the occurrence of the crime. It also means ”self-humiliation and abusement by the acknowledgement of sin”, and immediately the image presented to the mind is of a forlorn individual struggling to appease not only the deity and society but also his own conscience. Self-accusation appeases the personal and the collective conscience.

Paper Title:: Nissim Ezekiel’s Quest for Poetic Idiom
Author Name:: Gagneetpal Kaur
Country:: India
Page No.:: 25-27

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Nissim Ezekiel’s Quest for Poetic Idiom

Author: Gagneetpal Kaur

Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004), a Bene-Israelite settled in India was educated in Mumbai and London. He took up teaching and retired as ‘Professor of English’ at the University of Bombay. A major-minor Indian English poet of the post-independence era, Ezekiel’s A Time to Change (1952) heralded the modern, realistic and critical poetry of intellectualism. His poetry is chiefly introspective and self-analytical and he expresses modern concerns in contemporary voice and manner. Death, loneliness, alienation, the Indian scene, love, sex, urban life and spiritual values are some of the themes of his poetry. His poems are remarkable and are appreciated for their irony and intellectualism and they are noted for the absence of images.
Some of the qualities which go to make Ezekiel a vitally meaningful poet include his mastery over a variety of styles, poetic modes, his exquisite craftsmanship resulting in the poise and precision of language, rich supply of rhythm capable of subtle modulation and wry irony which come in handy at crucial junctures. Ezekiel’s various achievements make him one of the most mature and ‘consistently meaningful poets’ in Indian writing in English.

Paper Title:: The Philosophical, Poetic and Transcendental Puran Singh
Author Name:: Sushminderjeet kaur
Country:: India
Page No.:: 28-34

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The Philosophical, Poetic and Transcendental Puran Singh

Author: Sushminderjeet kaur

Abstracting life’s vital suggestions, and isolating them apart from life, and constructing out of mere philosophical principles so made, the theories of life and death, and then to think that we will be able to generate life-sparks out of such dead heaps of cerebral products, is human vanity and self-deception, which the Guru dismisses as puerile fatuity. It is life which gives subtle suggestions for the working out of a hundred philosophies and we ought to be concerned how to generate and advance the purposes of life and not keep hugging for centuries mere concepts and pet theories.

Paper Title:: Journalistic Fiction: What it is?
Author Name:: Gurpreet Kaur
Country:: India
Page No.:: 35-42

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Journalistic Fiction: What it is?

Author: Gurpreet Kaur

In the field of journalism, facts are not always appealing. They complicate plenty of great pieces. Background details can weigh down graceful copy. Clarifications may crowd out the heart of a story. It is a lot of work to settle a point that most readers don‟t care about anyway. But somehow, even in this magnificentage of commentary, for people who do still care about facts, journalistic fiction is a field of concern.
In the frontline of the new journalists are some interesting writers and their writings: Hiroshima (1946) by John Hersey; In Cold Blood: A True Account of Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (1966) by Truman Capote; Armies of the Night: History as a novel/History as Novel (1968), Of a Fire on the Moon (1970) and The Executioner’s Song (1979) by Norman Mailer; The Dreams of Ada (1987) by Dennis Fritz; Libra (1988), Underworld (1997) and Falling Man (2007) by Don DeLillo; and The Innocent Man (2006) by John Grisham. Some texts in the Indian context which can be put under this category are Sonia Faleiro‟s The Beautiful Thing, Katherine Boo‟s Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2012), and Payal Shah Karwa‟s The Bad Touch dealing with the penetrating subjects like life of bar dancers, trash collectors, and child sex abuse, respectively. Though the style of all these writers may not be similar, but their approach is. All of these texts have been regarded as journalistic fiction, being based on rich research.

Paper Title:: Transcending socio-cultural construction of Gender in Urmila Pawar’s Select Short Stories
Author Name:: Seema Rani
Country:: India
Page No.:: 43-45

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Transcending socio-cultural construction of Gender in Urmila Pawar’s Select Short Stories

Author: Seema Rani

Urmila Pawar has carved a niche for as a dalit feminist writer. Her short stories are one of its kind in portraying the dalit women’s sensibilities in a remarkably forceful, revolutionary, effective and surprising manner. She weaves her tales revolving around strong, resilient and powerful women who can be called as the ‘new women’, possessing masculine traits. Pawar amuses the readers with her surprise endings which can be called as ‘sting-in-tail’ endings. Where the ‘new woman’ braves all the odds and refuses to be suppressed, repressed and oppressed by the patriarchal society. She creates an altogether new world of women that transcends the boundaries of gender. For eg women protagonists in the stories ‘Aaye’ and ‘Nyay’ are presented by the writer as possessing extraordinary courage which helps them fight with the unjust society. Pawar’s protagonists are defiant, tough and hard. They are complete and independent individuals before whom their male counterparts seem trivial and unimportant. To quote Pawar, they do back breaking labour. The Writer generally presents them as the sole bread earners for the entire family as their husbands are either not alive or are generally drunkards.

Paper Title:: Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana: An Archetype of Experiential
Author Name:: Manpreet Kaur
Country:: India
Page No.:: 46-53

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Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana: An Archetype of Experiential

Author: Manpreet Kaur

The term Existentialism was applied to the work of certain late 19th and 20th century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject- not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual. In existentialism, the individual's starting point is characterized by what has been called "the existential attitude" or a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world. Soren Kierkegaard proposed that 'each individual- not society or religion- is solely responsible for giving meaning to life and living it passionately and sincerely.

Paper Title:: Rendering of Indian Sensibility in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura
Author Name:: Archana Srivastava
Country:: India
Page No.:: 54-57

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Rendering of Indian Sensibility in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura

Author: Archana Srivastava

India is one of the ancient civilizations in the world with its rich cultural heritage, classical traditions, idealizing a god like hero, the list is endless. It has achieved multi faceted socio-economic progress during the last five decades. It has moved forward displaying remarkable progress in the field of agriculture, industry, technology and above all literature. Though Indians like Ram Mohan Roy started writing in English way back since the Indian Renaissance of the 19th Century. This legacy got full bloom during the 20th Century with the writings of pioneers like Sarojini Naidu, Rabindranath Tagore and Aurobindo Ghosh. While English prose for social and political purposes was written by Indians from earliest times, the excellence in the writing of creative prose could be achieved much later than the verse. But despite its late start the Indo Anglian novel has gone far ahead and it was only with the Gandhian struggle for freedom, the Indo Anglian novel came of its own. The ideas of the struggle are reflected in the masterpieces like K.S.Venkataramani’s Murugan. The Tiller (1972) Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936) and Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938).

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