DIALOGIST: International Journal of Literary Studies and Interdisciplinary Research, 2020
Drawing on Umberto Eco’s analysis of fascism in his essay “Ur-Fascism”, the article is an attempt... more Drawing on Umberto Eco’s analysis of fascism in his essay “Ur-Fascism”, the article is an attempt to critique Anand Patwardhan’s latest documentary Reason in the context of the emergent right-wing Hindutva politics in India. The article enumerates how Reason, as a bold attempt and a daring filmic venture, traverses through the blood-laden right-wing history of India’s contemporary polity. By foregrounding Patwardhan’s signature style of documentary filmmaking, which is often poignant and optimistic, the article explores how his film registers the rising tide of fascist forces in India that manufacture a Hindu nation.
The terms colonialism and imperialism are interrelated. Imperialism is a system of governance in ... more The terms colonialism and imperialism are interrelated. Imperialism is a system of governance in which a strong metropolitan centre rules distant territories. Imperialism is maintained with a mixture of power, tyranny and desire for a make belief just world. Colonialism is a political and historical reality in which a country is subjugated and politically controlled by a more powerful country, exercising exploitation, hegemony and violence, both physical and epistemic. Colonialism is an outcome of imperialism in which an imperial nation implants colonies in distant continents or territories and rule them by proxies or representatives. It is a politically turbulent system which divides the world into the binary opposites: the colonizer and the colonized. Culture is appropriated to validate the supremacy of the colonizers in colonial political structures. This is accomplished through constructing the colonized as the cultural Other of the colonizer in discourses. Thus, colonialism was...
Rae Joyce (Rachel Fenton) is a working-class graphic poet from Yorkshire, UK, currently living in... more Rae Joyce (Rachel Fenton) is a working-class graphic poet from Yorkshire, UK, currently living in Aotearoa New Zealand. After winning the Auckland University of Technology Graphic Fiction Prize, sh...
The invention of the Internet has revolutionized the information and communication systems. This ... more The invention of the Internet has revolutionized the information and communication systems. This results in several innovations in all domains of life including teaching and learning, reading and writing, both creative and critical. This article is an attempt to familiarize the readers with electronic literature especially different genres of e-fiction. In this attempt the author explains concepts like writing space, writing self, writing subject, hypertext fiction, collaborative fiction, interactive fiction and so on. The interconnectedness of space and Internet is also explained at the beginning of the article.
Christopher Nolan’s films are narratives of alternative realities and metamorphosing multiple sub... more Christopher Nolan’s films are narratives of alternative realities and metamorphosing multiple subjectivities. His films include Following (1998), Memento (2000), Insomnia (2002), Batman Begins (2005), The Prestige (2006), The Dark Knight (2008), Inception (2010), The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and Interstellar (2014). Nonlinear narrative structure, flashbacks, existential angst and sociological ideas, identity crisis and fragmented subjectivity, self deception, unreliability of the human memory, metafictive elements, ambiguous endings and morally ambiguous characters are the major characteristics of his films. The line between reality and fantasy is blurred in Nolan’s films which puts his protagonists in difficult situations. Nolan’s filmmaking style is influenced by the film genres like noir, sci-fi, psychological thriller and crime drama. Nolan’s films Memento and Inception explore the wide range of possibilities of postmodern filmic narratives. Memento tells the story of Leonard Shelby, a man suffering from anterograde amnesia, searching for his wife’s murderer. Inception tells the story of Dom Cobb, a corporate espionage and estranged father who can steal valuable information from persons’ psyche by entering into their dreams, trying to return home to his children. The action of these films is related to the reliability of the memory/dream of the narrator and the protagonist-narrators’ inability to differentiate between reality and illusion.
The relation between feminism and psychoanalysis began with Kate Millett's Sexual Politics which ... more The relation between feminism and psychoanalysis began with Kate Millett's Sexual Politics which critiques Freud for his conviction in the inequality of sexes, his practice of sexualizing human relationships and his style of explaining aberrations in terms of complexes and envies. The feminist critique of Freud is continued in The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar who locate the concept of social castration in the novels of nineteenth century women writers. By social castration, they mean lack of social power for women. They argue that these female writers identified themselves with the characters they detest. A combination of feminism and psychoanalysis is explored in Jacqueline Rose's work The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. Feminist exploration of Lacanian psychoanalysis began with Feminine Sexuality co-edited by Juliette Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose. They argue that subjectivity is assigned to a child at the moment of symbolic castration, the division between the Self and the other. It follows therefore that gendered subjectivity is constituted through castration with the phallus as the transcendental signifier, enabling the division. Mitchell and Rose argue that psychoanalysis offers feminism a theory of gendered subjectivity: a concept of the subject's resistance to rigid gender identities. In Sexuality in the Field of Vision, Rose emphasizes the unstable nature of gender identity and argues that femininity is neither simply achieved nor is ever complete. Both Mitchell and Rose focus on Lacanian re-reading of Freud where penis envy is referred not to the male sex organ, but to its symbolic and cultural meaning: the authority and power associated with the masculine. Lacan's term phallus symbolizes the privileges, power and authority entitled by the male in a patriarchal society.
Cyber culture is the most recent signifying system through which
essentially novel experiences ar... more Cyber culture is the most recent signifying system through which essentially novel experiences are constructed and communicated, accessed and reproduced. Cyber culture emerges from the pervasive impact of the Internet on computer technologies. Several radical innovations in information and communication systems have changed human life beyond imagination. The conventional dichotomy between the real and the virtual has become redundant with the evolution of cyber culture. The article is a moderate attempt to theorize cyber culture as a discourse where epistemological and ideological structures intersect. Cyber culture has transformed the concepts of subjectivity and identity on the one hand and epistemology and pedagogy on the other. The author explains key words like cyber space, cyber culture, virtual reality, the technosocial, virtual community, online identity, cyber subjectivity, cyber power, virtual politics and so on.
Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is the quintessential magical realist novel which ... more Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is the quintessential magical realist novel which displays the transgressive mode of fiction associated with Marquez. This mode arises out of a need to challenge fixed boundaries, making itself a new craft of fiction writing. Myth, history, tragedy, politics, family and more fill the kaleidoscopic hybrid space of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The transgressive act of the novel functions at three levels: consciousness, characters and reality.
Heart of Darkness is an 1899 novella about a voyage up the Congo River into the Congo Free State.... more Heart of Darkness is an 1899 novella about a voyage up the Congo River into the Congo Free State. The plot centers round Charles Marlow, an English sailor, whose journey up the Congo River to meet Kurtz, an ivory trader who went mad. Marlow is appointed as the captain of a steamboat for an ivory trading organization called Company. While travelling up the river he encounters inefficiency and brutality at the Company’s native stations. He also witnesses the exploitation and oppression of the natives under the Company’s agents. The novel is a white man’s imaginative narrative of Africa, at once repulsive and desirable. Africa is a stereotypical landscape evolved from white man’s ambiguous attitude to it. Conrad’s Africa is a land of impregnable forests, throbbing drums, primitive customs, sudden sunsets, vultures and black water fever. He describes an Africa without meaning, coherence and order where rational human beings end up confused, overcome with obscurity and wilderness. The physicality of Africa is incomprehensible and maddening, creating a “heart of darkness” which is a site for various kinds of conflicts.
The invention of the Internet has revolutionized the information and communication systems. This ... more The invention of the Internet has revolutionized the information and communication systems. This results in several innovations in all domains of life including teaching and learning, reading and writing, both creative and critical. This article is an attempt to familiarize the readers with electronic literature especially different genres of e-fiction. In this attempt the author explains concepts like writing space, writing self, writing subject, hypertext fiction, collaborative fiction, interactive fiction and so on. The interconnectedness of space and Internet is also explained at the beginning of the article.
Charles Lamb is generally considered the master of personal essays of which Montaigne is the grea... more Charles Lamb is generally considered the master of personal essays of which Montaigne is the greatest exponent. His essays are collected in Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia. In literary history he is remembered as the Prince of English essayists. His essays are marked by self- revelation, humour and pathos, and a conversational style. Lamb delights the reader with his personal details, genial humour, amiable personality and sweetness of disposition. His range of subject matter is amazingly diverse.
Ecological concerns have been the content of literature since the beginning of man's creativity. ... more Ecological concerns have been the content of literature since the beginning of man's creativity. Ecology deals with the relations between nature and the natural. In literature, ecology illustrates the relation between nature and human nature. In ecological writing, nature has been granted the status of the great Mother by indigenous communities. Literature and nature are interlinked; nature is the outer world often portrayed in literature. Therefore it is obvious that literature and ecology are interrelated. Nature writing is self reflexive. It reveals at once the complexities of nature as well as the creative psyche.
Julian Peters is a comic book artist and illustrator living in Montreal, Canada. In the last few ... more Julian Peters is a comic book artist and illustrator living in Montreal, Canada. In the last few years, he has focused on adapting classic works of English, French and Italian literature into comic...
DIALOGIST: International Journal of Literary Studies and Interdisciplinary Research, 2020
Drawing on Umberto Eco’s analysis of fascism in his essay “Ur-Fascism”, the article is an attempt... more Drawing on Umberto Eco’s analysis of fascism in his essay “Ur-Fascism”, the article is an attempt to critique Anand Patwardhan’s latest documentary Reason in the context of the emergent right-wing Hindutva politics in India. The article enumerates how Reason, as a bold attempt and a daring filmic venture, traverses through the blood-laden right-wing history of India’s contemporary polity. By foregrounding Patwardhan’s signature style of documentary filmmaking, which is often poignant and optimistic, the article explores how his film registers the rising tide of fascist forces in India that manufacture a Hindu nation.
The terms colonialism and imperialism are interrelated. Imperialism is a system of governance in ... more The terms colonialism and imperialism are interrelated. Imperialism is a system of governance in which a strong metropolitan centre rules distant territories. Imperialism is maintained with a mixture of power, tyranny and desire for a make belief just world. Colonialism is a political and historical reality in which a country is subjugated and politically controlled by a more powerful country, exercising exploitation, hegemony and violence, both physical and epistemic. Colonialism is an outcome of imperialism in which an imperial nation implants colonies in distant continents or territories and rule them by proxies or representatives. It is a politically turbulent system which divides the world into the binary opposites: the colonizer and the colonized. Culture is appropriated to validate the supremacy of the colonizers in colonial political structures. This is accomplished through constructing the colonized as the cultural Other of the colonizer in discourses. Thus, colonialism was...
Rae Joyce (Rachel Fenton) is a working-class graphic poet from Yorkshire, UK, currently living in... more Rae Joyce (Rachel Fenton) is a working-class graphic poet from Yorkshire, UK, currently living in Aotearoa New Zealand. After winning the Auckland University of Technology Graphic Fiction Prize, sh...
The invention of the Internet has revolutionized the information and communication systems. This ... more The invention of the Internet has revolutionized the information and communication systems. This results in several innovations in all domains of life including teaching and learning, reading and writing, both creative and critical. This article is an attempt to familiarize the readers with electronic literature especially different genres of e-fiction. In this attempt the author explains concepts like writing space, writing self, writing subject, hypertext fiction, collaborative fiction, interactive fiction and so on. The interconnectedness of space and Internet is also explained at the beginning of the article.
Christopher Nolan’s films are narratives of alternative realities and metamorphosing multiple sub... more Christopher Nolan’s films are narratives of alternative realities and metamorphosing multiple subjectivities. His films include Following (1998), Memento (2000), Insomnia (2002), Batman Begins (2005), The Prestige (2006), The Dark Knight (2008), Inception (2010), The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and Interstellar (2014). Nonlinear narrative structure, flashbacks, existential angst and sociological ideas, identity crisis and fragmented subjectivity, self deception, unreliability of the human memory, metafictive elements, ambiguous endings and morally ambiguous characters are the major characteristics of his films. The line between reality and fantasy is blurred in Nolan’s films which puts his protagonists in difficult situations. Nolan’s filmmaking style is influenced by the film genres like noir, sci-fi, psychological thriller and crime drama. Nolan’s films Memento and Inception explore the wide range of possibilities of postmodern filmic narratives. Memento tells the story of Leonard Shelby, a man suffering from anterograde amnesia, searching for his wife’s murderer. Inception tells the story of Dom Cobb, a corporate espionage and estranged father who can steal valuable information from persons’ psyche by entering into their dreams, trying to return home to his children. The action of these films is related to the reliability of the memory/dream of the narrator and the protagonist-narrators’ inability to differentiate between reality and illusion.
The relation between feminism and psychoanalysis began with Kate Millett's Sexual Politics which ... more The relation between feminism and psychoanalysis began with Kate Millett's Sexual Politics which critiques Freud for his conviction in the inequality of sexes, his practice of sexualizing human relationships and his style of explaining aberrations in terms of complexes and envies. The feminist critique of Freud is continued in The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar who locate the concept of social castration in the novels of nineteenth century women writers. By social castration, they mean lack of social power for women. They argue that these female writers identified themselves with the characters they detest. A combination of feminism and psychoanalysis is explored in Jacqueline Rose's work The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. Feminist exploration of Lacanian psychoanalysis began with Feminine Sexuality co-edited by Juliette Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose. They argue that subjectivity is assigned to a child at the moment of symbolic castration, the division between the Self and the other. It follows therefore that gendered subjectivity is constituted through castration with the phallus as the transcendental signifier, enabling the division. Mitchell and Rose argue that psychoanalysis offers feminism a theory of gendered subjectivity: a concept of the subject's resistance to rigid gender identities. In Sexuality in the Field of Vision, Rose emphasizes the unstable nature of gender identity and argues that femininity is neither simply achieved nor is ever complete. Both Mitchell and Rose focus on Lacanian re-reading of Freud where penis envy is referred not to the male sex organ, but to its symbolic and cultural meaning: the authority and power associated with the masculine. Lacan's term phallus symbolizes the privileges, power and authority entitled by the male in a patriarchal society.
Cyber culture is the most recent signifying system through which
essentially novel experiences ar... more Cyber culture is the most recent signifying system through which essentially novel experiences are constructed and communicated, accessed and reproduced. Cyber culture emerges from the pervasive impact of the Internet on computer technologies. Several radical innovations in information and communication systems have changed human life beyond imagination. The conventional dichotomy between the real and the virtual has become redundant with the evolution of cyber culture. The article is a moderate attempt to theorize cyber culture as a discourse where epistemological and ideological structures intersect. Cyber culture has transformed the concepts of subjectivity and identity on the one hand and epistemology and pedagogy on the other. The author explains key words like cyber space, cyber culture, virtual reality, the technosocial, virtual community, online identity, cyber subjectivity, cyber power, virtual politics and so on.
Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is the quintessential magical realist novel which ... more Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is the quintessential magical realist novel which displays the transgressive mode of fiction associated with Marquez. This mode arises out of a need to challenge fixed boundaries, making itself a new craft of fiction writing. Myth, history, tragedy, politics, family and more fill the kaleidoscopic hybrid space of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The transgressive act of the novel functions at three levels: consciousness, characters and reality.
Heart of Darkness is an 1899 novella about a voyage up the Congo River into the Congo Free State.... more Heart of Darkness is an 1899 novella about a voyage up the Congo River into the Congo Free State. The plot centers round Charles Marlow, an English sailor, whose journey up the Congo River to meet Kurtz, an ivory trader who went mad. Marlow is appointed as the captain of a steamboat for an ivory trading organization called Company. While travelling up the river he encounters inefficiency and brutality at the Company’s native stations. He also witnesses the exploitation and oppression of the natives under the Company’s agents. The novel is a white man’s imaginative narrative of Africa, at once repulsive and desirable. Africa is a stereotypical landscape evolved from white man’s ambiguous attitude to it. Conrad’s Africa is a land of impregnable forests, throbbing drums, primitive customs, sudden sunsets, vultures and black water fever. He describes an Africa without meaning, coherence and order where rational human beings end up confused, overcome with obscurity and wilderness. The physicality of Africa is incomprehensible and maddening, creating a “heart of darkness” which is a site for various kinds of conflicts.
The invention of the Internet has revolutionized the information and communication systems. This ... more The invention of the Internet has revolutionized the information and communication systems. This results in several innovations in all domains of life including teaching and learning, reading and writing, both creative and critical. This article is an attempt to familiarize the readers with electronic literature especially different genres of e-fiction. In this attempt the author explains concepts like writing space, writing self, writing subject, hypertext fiction, collaborative fiction, interactive fiction and so on. The interconnectedness of space and Internet is also explained at the beginning of the article.
Charles Lamb is generally considered the master of personal essays of which Montaigne is the grea... more Charles Lamb is generally considered the master of personal essays of which Montaigne is the greatest exponent. His essays are collected in Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia. In literary history he is remembered as the Prince of English essayists. His essays are marked by self- revelation, humour and pathos, and a conversational style. Lamb delights the reader with his personal details, genial humour, amiable personality and sweetness of disposition. His range of subject matter is amazingly diverse.
Ecological concerns have been the content of literature since the beginning of man's creativity. ... more Ecological concerns have been the content of literature since the beginning of man's creativity. Ecology deals with the relations between nature and the natural. In literature, ecology illustrates the relation between nature and human nature. In ecological writing, nature has been granted the status of the great Mother by indigenous communities. Literature and nature are interlinked; nature is the outer world often portrayed in literature. Therefore it is obvious that literature and ecology are interrelated. Nature writing is self reflexive. It reveals at once the complexities of nature as well as the creative psyche.
Julian Peters is a comic book artist and illustrator living in Montreal, Canada. In the last few ... more Julian Peters is a comic book artist and illustrator living in Montreal, Canada. In the last few years, he has focused on adapting classic works of English, French and Italian literature into comic...
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fragmented subjectivity, self deception, unreliability of the human memory, metafictive elements, ambiguous endings and morally ambiguous characters are the major characteristics of his films. The line between reality and fantasy is blurred in Nolan’s films which puts his protagonists in difficult situations. Nolan’s filmmaking style is influenced by the film genres like noir, sci-fi, psychological thriller and crime drama. Nolan’s films Memento and Inception explore the wide range of possibilities of postmodern filmic narratives. Memento tells the story of Leonard Shelby, a man suffering from anterograde amnesia, searching for his wife’s murderer. Inception tells the story of Dom Cobb, a corporate espionage and estranged father who can steal valuable information from persons’ psyche by entering into their dreams, trying to return home to his children. The action of these films is related to the reliability of the memory/dream of the narrator and the protagonist-narrators’ inability to differentiate between reality and illusion.
essentially novel experiences are constructed and communicated, accessed and reproduced. Cyber culture emerges from the pervasive impact of the Internet on computer technologies. Several radical innovations in information and communication systems have changed human life beyond imagination. The conventional dichotomy between the real and the virtual has become redundant with the evolution of cyber culture. The article is a moderate attempt to theorize cyber culture as a discourse where epistemological and ideological structures intersect. Cyber culture has transformed the concepts of subjectivity and identity on the one hand and epistemology and pedagogy on the other. The author explains key words like cyber space, cyber culture, virtual reality, the technosocial, virtual community, online identity, cyber subjectivity, cyber power, virtual politics and so on.
fragmented subjectivity, self deception, unreliability of the human memory, metafictive elements, ambiguous endings and morally ambiguous characters are the major characteristics of his films. The line between reality and fantasy is blurred in Nolan’s films which puts his protagonists in difficult situations. Nolan’s filmmaking style is influenced by the film genres like noir, sci-fi, psychological thriller and crime drama. Nolan’s films Memento and Inception explore the wide range of possibilities of postmodern filmic narratives. Memento tells the story of Leonard Shelby, a man suffering from anterograde amnesia, searching for his wife’s murderer. Inception tells the story of Dom Cobb, a corporate espionage and estranged father who can steal valuable information from persons’ psyche by entering into their dreams, trying to return home to his children. The action of these films is related to the reliability of the memory/dream of the narrator and the protagonist-narrators’ inability to differentiate between reality and illusion.
essentially novel experiences are constructed and communicated, accessed and reproduced. Cyber culture emerges from the pervasive impact of the Internet on computer technologies. Several radical innovations in information and communication systems have changed human life beyond imagination. The conventional dichotomy between the real and the virtual has become redundant with the evolution of cyber culture. The article is a moderate attempt to theorize cyber culture as a discourse where epistemological and ideological structures intersect. Cyber culture has transformed the concepts of subjectivity and identity on the one hand and epistemology and pedagogy on the other. The author explains key words like cyber space, cyber culture, virtual reality, the technosocial, virtual community, online identity, cyber subjectivity, cyber power, virtual politics and so on.