Bringing A Sense of Optimism to the World of Despair in the Postmodernist Portrayal of Humanity: A Study of Sexually Obsessed Characters in Cakra Waruga ( … (original) (raw)
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Hamid's novels exhibit preoccupations with the issues of vulnerabilities and disorientations leading to subsequent displacement, decadence and alienation of the characters. The individual and collective trauma crumbles characters' sense of individuality and cognition leading to their cultural dislocation, fragmentation and social isolation. In the tumult of the postmodern world, they suffer invariably from cultural displacement, language barriers, disenfranchisement, identity loss, nostalgia, tyranny and marginalisation. Using complex forms and contents, Hamid insinuates the probability of recovery, realisation of difference and surmounting crisis in the shared world. His novels discreetly advocate strategies for living an unruffled life. However, he tends to leave his novels open-ended anticipating the readers to assume the future events. He subtly relates the intricate events of the world speculating the readers to form links to the present turmoil of the country. Hamid has earned the distinction of a free, fierce and vehement post-modernist novelist in Pakistani English literature. His are the worlds of tinsel towns, celluloid screens, glamorous ads, yellow journalism, the clouds of smoke, the tinkling of glasses, the loud pop music, social and political unrest, technological innovations, xenophobia, late-capitalism etc. The high and low, elite and popular, the creative and vulgar, the glamorous and cheap, the heights and depths of social culture are mixed in various combinations in the presentation of his novels. The world of images assumes the role of reality and the distinction between what is real and what is imagined is blurred. In his fiction, he intersects the traditional genre conventions and differences between fact and fiction, poetry and prose and real and imaginary. Hamid's postmodern fiction abundantly invites and facilitates the study of vulnerability and disorientation which till date has escaped the attention of the researchers. The thesis is divided into four chapters with an introduction and a conclusion. A list of works cited is also added. The thesis is developed as per the following pattern.
Syed Manzoorul Islam's Postmodern Tales: A Study
The paper brings into focus how Syed Manzoorul Islam, in his three-decade-long literary career, has mastered a narrative style that sets him apart from many of his Bengali contemporaries. It demonstrates all the traits unique to his storytelling: blurring of boundaries between dream and reality, self-reflexivity, irony, and humor. The research also encapsulates how Syed Islam is different from his contemporary short story writers in terms of constructing plot and character. It foregrounds the author's capability of developing a diction which is completely his own. The paper discusses the postmodern features prevailing in his stories. It shows us how the author invites the readers to be a part of his discourses. It summarizes the author's surrealist imagination which creates a world that is strangely familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Overall, the research analyzes how the postmodern elements relate to the major themes of Syed Manzoorul Islam's short stories.
2016
Mohsin Hamid is an exponent of postcolonial characterization and possesses a specific touch of today’s hero in local Asian context. His pen is fluent on social fiction portraying Indo-Pak culture. Few writers could rise to the height of fame right with only a couple of preliminary works. Hamid secured it through his first novel Moth Smoke and the second one The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Both these novels depict contemporary Pakistani mindset with a fine transparency of reflection. His treatment of characters, especially the heroes, in these novels is masterful. The objective of this study is to explore the character of both heroes (Darashikoh in Moth Smoke and Changez in The Reluctant Fundamentalist). Both heroes undergo critical scheme of events and transform into non-heroic pitiable men.This study encircles the outer incidents that happen to the heroes and their inner responses to those situations. This study also attempts to uncover those complexes which are ensnaring the youth o...
Games of Identity and Alterity in the Novels of Salman Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul
2019
The present book treats, from the perspective of Postcolonial literature, in a comparatist manner, several novels of the Indian born writers of English expression, Salman Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul from the point of view of what has been called ’les règles de je/jeu’ (Marc Augé), approaching the relationship between the I and the self, the self and the Other, the self and the world, the relation being, through its structure, similar to a game. The analysis has two levels (a general one of Postcolonial literature and its elements, and an individual one, of the world of the novels approached) and focuses on three major elements of the analysed texts: time (which includes memory), space and journey. These aspects, necessary for the affirmation and maintenance of an identity, either collective or individual, favour the appearance and performance of the story, that which, through memory and narration, ensures the existence of an identity, but also the possibility of relating to the Other, the only one who, listening to the story, can confirm it and thus enable the transgression from Memini ergo sum to Scribo ergo sum. By analysing three major segments necessary both for the affirmation and the maintenance of an identity, the research addresses the novelistic universes of the two writers, and through the game-like relationship with the Self or with the Other which are shaped by the three elements time, space and journey, it illustrates the story that needs to be told. The novel aspect of the research resides in its multidisciplinary approach and in the multi-layered analysis of the texts seen in a comparative perspective, thus offering a view both of the main traits of Postcolonial literature powerfully marked by the works of Salman Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul, and a very deep understanding of the relation between a character and his/her self, between the self and the other and/or the self and the world.
Postmodernism and its Reflection on Understanding Islam
Journal of the Punjab University Historical Society, 2018
Postmodernism is defined by an attitude of skepticism or distrust toward metanarratives, ideologies, the existence of objective reality and absolute truth. It apt to deconstruct all of those elements in the current intellectuals, arts and cultural processes. Postmodernism allows multiplicity of views, thus enhances the possibility to know and understand one another. Islam is a universal religion that approves some injunctions as absolute and eternal. It encourages to use reason to understand the revelation but like postmodernism does not accept reason as supreme authority. This paper is important because it attempts to show that how the universal religion Islam, the worldview, can communicate with the society that is nurtured by the skeptic and nihilistic thought. This study shows that Islam could be understood by some aspects of postmodernism that are not contrary to Islamic faith.]
IJRSI, 2019
This study aims to describe and explain the form of prophetic humanism in the PesantrenImpian novel by Asma Nadia and its relevance in the study of literary theory. The method used in this research uses the descriptive qualitative method. The object of his research was the Dream Pesantren novel. Data collection techniques in this research are reading and note-taking techniques. Data analysis techniques in this study used content analysis. The results of this study indicate that the prophetic form of humanism in the novel, namely, maintaining brotherhood, looking at someone totally, and throwing away the nature of hatred. The results of these studies can be used in literary theory courses, especially in enrichment programs by instilling human values in the nation's next generation.
World Journal of Education and Humanities, 2024
One of the most striking outcomes, one can see through the run of Nawal El Saadawi's The Fall Of The Imam, is that the feminine reflexive consciousness within the feminine self becomes at the same time, the subject and the object of her inner being, and her straight apperception. Therefore, by moving away from the phallocentric traditional nominalism, the notion of equity that sustains the feminine reflexive consciousness involves a new method of politico-theological discourse and defines a neo-politico-fiction and scientific perception. In this realm, the feminine focus on the essence of al-ta'aruf and al-tafakhur exhibits a feminine psycho-affective that involves itself in the long-male reserved Tawhidic sphere, in perspective to embody the performativity and the ethic of Khalifah. Correspondingly, throughout psychobiological and psychodynamic interoperability, the feminine reflexive consciousness opens the sphere of familiarizing the feminine-self progressive intellectualization of sensation and the reflexive production of values and rhythms with the meta-cultural and moral interpretation of the Islamic texts. In effect, by accentuating their phallocentric-designated avatar of fitna, the feminine reflexive consciousness disperses the Muslim conservative object-relation normativism.
Hegemonic Culture and Subaltern: A Compromised Veil in Indonesian Islamic Popular Novel
Lingua Cultura
This research was based on the powerful function of the aesthetics in the society. Novel as an art work also functioned as an arena in which ideologies contest and negotiate. The research intended to show a mechanism underlining novel to have a significant hegemonic role. The material object was taken from Islamic popular novel namely “Ketika Mas Gagah Pergi dan Kembali”. The formal object was the negotiation of ideology which focused on the contact between intellectual and subaltern leading to the formation of a new compromised cultural practice. By applying the theory of hegemony in discussing the contestation and negotiation of ideologies in the novel, it is found that the contestation and negotiation between hegemonic and subaltern ideology lead to the occurrence of a compromise between the interest of the intellectual and the subaltern. The interest of the subaltern is based on the nostalgia of the past and fear or uncertain condition of future which lay in the domain of imagin...
SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH
P. Sivakami and Nawal El Saadawiare bureaucrats-turned writers who espouse the cause of women who are victims of patriarchy and display remarkable agency and purpose in subverting the systems of oppression prevalent in their respective local settings. The protagonists of the novels selected for the study ultimately succumb to the system, but they do not give up without a fight. The novels chosen for analysis in this paper are P. Sivakami’s Author’s Notes and Nawal El Saadawi’s The Fall of the Imam. This paper analyses the novels from a postmodern perspective and attempts to bring out the elements of intertextuality, multiple voices and ambiguity in these two novels.