Sagnik Yadaw | University of Kalyani (original) (raw)
Papers by Sagnik Yadaw
Consortium: An International Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies, 2023
J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) is not only one of the early celebrated works of British... more J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) is not only one of the early celebrated works of British New Wave science fiction but is often considered a precursor of climate fiction as well. The paper proposes re-reading this novel in the Anthropocene with a particular focus on its representation of masculinity. It seeks to make a connection between the masculinity of the Ballardian hero and the climate-changed world of the novel, arguing that the latter, by destabilising the Man/Nature dynamic, demands a restructuring of western hegemonic masculinity. The intention of this article is both to recognise the mutability of hegemonic masculinity in its relation to Nature and to invite more discussions of gender representation in reading climate fiction.
Vidyasagar University Journal of the Department of English, 2021
The paper considers the representations of masculinity in the protagonists of Lydia Millet's How ... more The paper considers the representations of masculinity in the protagonists of Lydia Millet's How the Dead Dream and Nathaniel Rich's Odds against Tomorrow, two contemporary cli-fi novels that critique neoliberal capitalism and it's accountability in exacerbating climate crisis. Using R. W. Connell's concept of transnational business masculinity which is considered to be the model for the current hegemonic masculinity of the globalised world, the paper seeks to explore the masculinities represented by the protagonists of these two novels to find a correlation between attempting to resist transnational business masculinity and a desire to question neoliberal capitalism, thus emphasising a careful practicing of gender for climate activists and including gender as yet another dimension from which to consider the climate change discourse.
http://inet.vidyasagar.ac.in:8080/jspui/handle/123456789/5768
Postcolonial Interventions, Vol. IV, Issue 2 , 2019
Since its emergence in the last half of the twentieth century, environmental discourse in connect... more Since its emergence in the last half of the twentieth century, environmental discourse in connection with the anthropogenic Climate change has always betrayed a steady adherence to the rhetoric of the apocalypse. Apocalyptic rhetoric, as Greg Garrard argues in his book on ecocriticism, polarizes people, engenders paranoia, and produces crisis as much as it responds to it. In literature, this proclivity of Western ecological thought becomes most apparent through the emergence of what Elizabeth Rosen calls neo-apocalyptic narratives that function as a cautionary tale while jettisoning the sense of a new beginning that characterized the traditional stories of the apocalypse. Whereas the spectacle of visual culture has calcified the presence of these narratives in the western genre of Climate fiction, Indian English literature has had far fewer confrontations with the question of the Anthropocene to have a decided shape. Such hope moulds the heart of this paper as it takes a critical eye to investigate the representation of ecological crises in Contemporary Indian English literature with particular attention to the treatment of the apocalypse – as a trope, as rhetoric, and as aesthetic. The paper takes four texts – Arun Joshi’s The City & the River (1990), Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), and Sarnath Banerjee’s All Quiet in Vikaspuri (2015) as examples of how the apocalypse has surfaced in Indian English literature of ecological crises and attempts to encourage and critique different aspects of that presence to cultivate a literature of the Anthropocene beyond spectacular visions of disaster.
Journal of the Post Graduate Department of English, Maulana Azad College, Kolkata, 2015
The article offers a reading of Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay's "Goynar Bakso" and Lila Majumdar's "Pod... more The article offers a reading of Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay's "Goynar Bakso" and Lila Majumdar's "Podipisir Bormibakso" to explore the subversive significance of the wealthy widow's Jewellery box. As an inverted image of the normative married woman, widows are constructed by Hindu brahmanical patriarchy through a politics of denial that divests the body of all ornaments and marginalises their presence in the family. Though an effective stratagem of oppression, it does, however, liberate them from the covert domination of an ornamented body and the equation of woman with the family. Consequently, the unworn ornaments of the widow allow for an exercise of their legal right of “Stridhan”, contradicting jewellery's traditional role as hegemonic agents. Such glitches of Patriarchy that stem from a conflict of discourses reveal the vulnerability of an imperfect system of power. While feminist critiques have sought to explore the politics of victim representation by making space for the subjectivity of the oppressed widows, this paper takes a different route of investigating the subversion of the structures of power to demystify Patriarchy and take away its mythic status of omnipotence.
Manipulating Geography: A Reading of Behn’s Oroonoko
The notion of literature as an instrument of ideology incited the critical world to “look back” a... more The notion of literature as an instrument of ideology incited the critical world to “look back” and “look between”. The lines that demarcated the colonial territory were in fact participating in the construction of space itself and the early colonial literature – preoccupied with the “Other world” – were part of that process. Published in 1688, Aphra Behn’s prose narrative 'Oroonoko', that explores the American colony of Surinam and the dubious African kingdom of Coramantien, can be accused of such ideological representation which is further complicated by the presence of a “Female Pen” and a woman narrator.
This paper attempts a critical evaluation of Behn’s 'Oroonoko' from a Postcolonial, and to a lesser extent, Feminist perspective to show how the author’s position in the domain of culture, gender and history manipulates our perception of reality and breaks down the notion of Geography as an objective discipline.
In his poststructuralist pioneering essay "The Death of the Author", Roland Barthes proposed the ... more In his poststructuralist pioneering essay "The Death of the Author", Roland Barthes proposed the new concept of writing that will "ceaselessly posit(s) meaning but always in order to evaporate it". With the emergence of modernism, the uncertainty felt by the war coupled with the existential outlook had to take its toll in literature (in many less than obvious ways) as we finally started to move away from criticism to interpretation. And for the new reader, that overshadowed pioneer of "New writing" Katherine Mansfield has shown herself to be more than capable. Edward Wagenknecht, the noted American critic, once congratulated Mansfield on carrying "the art of the short story to the highest point of perfection it has yet attained". "The Fly", her most critically explored short story is an instance of how the modernist desire for subtlety reached the point of perfection in her suggestive narrative style to form "meaning", but with all its ambiguity, from all its relativity, and in all its humility.
Consortium: An International Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies, 2023
J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) is not only one of the early celebrated works of British... more J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) is not only one of the early celebrated works of British New Wave science fiction but is often considered a precursor of climate fiction as well. The paper proposes re-reading this novel in the Anthropocene with a particular focus on its representation of masculinity. It seeks to make a connection between the masculinity of the Ballardian hero and the climate-changed world of the novel, arguing that the latter, by destabilising the Man/Nature dynamic, demands a restructuring of western hegemonic masculinity. The intention of this article is both to recognise the mutability of hegemonic masculinity in its relation to Nature and to invite more discussions of gender representation in reading climate fiction.
Vidyasagar University Journal of the Department of English, 2021
The paper considers the representations of masculinity in the protagonists of Lydia Millet's How ... more The paper considers the representations of masculinity in the protagonists of Lydia Millet's How the Dead Dream and Nathaniel Rich's Odds against Tomorrow, two contemporary cli-fi novels that critique neoliberal capitalism and it's accountability in exacerbating climate crisis. Using R. W. Connell's concept of transnational business masculinity which is considered to be the model for the current hegemonic masculinity of the globalised world, the paper seeks to explore the masculinities represented by the protagonists of these two novels to find a correlation between attempting to resist transnational business masculinity and a desire to question neoliberal capitalism, thus emphasising a careful practicing of gender for climate activists and including gender as yet another dimension from which to consider the climate change discourse.
http://inet.vidyasagar.ac.in:8080/jspui/handle/123456789/5768
Postcolonial Interventions, Vol. IV, Issue 2 , 2019
Since its emergence in the last half of the twentieth century, environmental discourse in connect... more Since its emergence in the last half of the twentieth century, environmental discourse in connection with the anthropogenic Climate change has always betrayed a steady adherence to the rhetoric of the apocalypse. Apocalyptic rhetoric, as Greg Garrard argues in his book on ecocriticism, polarizes people, engenders paranoia, and produces crisis as much as it responds to it. In literature, this proclivity of Western ecological thought becomes most apparent through the emergence of what Elizabeth Rosen calls neo-apocalyptic narratives that function as a cautionary tale while jettisoning the sense of a new beginning that characterized the traditional stories of the apocalypse. Whereas the spectacle of visual culture has calcified the presence of these narratives in the western genre of Climate fiction, Indian English literature has had far fewer confrontations with the question of the Anthropocene to have a decided shape. Such hope moulds the heart of this paper as it takes a critical eye to investigate the representation of ecological crises in Contemporary Indian English literature with particular attention to the treatment of the apocalypse – as a trope, as rhetoric, and as aesthetic. The paper takes four texts – Arun Joshi’s The City & the River (1990), Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), and Sarnath Banerjee’s All Quiet in Vikaspuri (2015) as examples of how the apocalypse has surfaced in Indian English literature of ecological crises and attempts to encourage and critique different aspects of that presence to cultivate a literature of the Anthropocene beyond spectacular visions of disaster.
Journal of the Post Graduate Department of English, Maulana Azad College, Kolkata, 2015
The article offers a reading of Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay's "Goynar Bakso" and Lila Majumdar's "Pod... more The article offers a reading of Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay's "Goynar Bakso" and Lila Majumdar's "Podipisir Bormibakso" to explore the subversive significance of the wealthy widow's Jewellery box. As an inverted image of the normative married woman, widows are constructed by Hindu brahmanical patriarchy through a politics of denial that divests the body of all ornaments and marginalises their presence in the family. Though an effective stratagem of oppression, it does, however, liberate them from the covert domination of an ornamented body and the equation of woman with the family. Consequently, the unworn ornaments of the widow allow for an exercise of their legal right of “Stridhan”, contradicting jewellery's traditional role as hegemonic agents. Such glitches of Patriarchy that stem from a conflict of discourses reveal the vulnerability of an imperfect system of power. While feminist critiques have sought to explore the politics of victim representation by making space for the subjectivity of the oppressed widows, this paper takes a different route of investigating the subversion of the structures of power to demystify Patriarchy and take away its mythic status of omnipotence.
Manipulating Geography: A Reading of Behn’s Oroonoko
The notion of literature as an instrument of ideology incited the critical world to “look back” a... more The notion of literature as an instrument of ideology incited the critical world to “look back” and “look between”. The lines that demarcated the colonial territory were in fact participating in the construction of space itself and the early colonial literature – preoccupied with the “Other world” – were part of that process. Published in 1688, Aphra Behn’s prose narrative 'Oroonoko', that explores the American colony of Surinam and the dubious African kingdom of Coramantien, can be accused of such ideological representation which is further complicated by the presence of a “Female Pen” and a woman narrator.
This paper attempts a critical evaluation of Behn’s 'Oroonoko' from a Postcolonial, and to a lesser extent, Feminist perspective to show how the author’s position in the domain of culture, gender and history manipulates our perception of reality and breaks down the notion of Geography as an objective discipline.
In his poststructuralist pioneering essay "The Death of the Author", Roland Barthes proposed the ... more In his poststructuralist pioneering essay "The Death of the Author", Roland Barthes proposed the new concept of writing that will "ceaselessly posit(s) meaning but always in order to evaporate it". With the emergence of modernism, the uncertainty felt by the war coupled with the existential outlook had to take its toll in literature (in many less than obvious ways) as we finally started to move away from criticism to interpretation. And for the new reader, that overshadowed pioneer of "New writing" Katherine Mansfield has shown herself to be more than capable. Edward Wagenknecht, the noted American critic, once congratulated Mansfield on carrying "the art of the short story to the highest point of perfection it has yet attained". "The Fly", her most critically explored short story is an instance of how the modernist desire for subtlety reached the point of perfection in her suggestive narrative style to form "meaning", but with all its ambiguity, from all its relativity, and in all its humility.