American? Black? “I realise that it is fashionable now to dismiss the traditional novel as something of an anachronism, but to me it is still a vital form. Not only does it allow for the kind of full-blown, richly detailed writing that I love… but it permits me to operate on many levels and to explore both the inner state of my characters as well as the worlds beyond them.” Paule Marshall The United States of America is a land deluged with immigrants. Its origins and development is accountable to the various floods of immigrants that have emerged to shores from century to century.
Abstract The present study is intended to illustrate the analogous concepts in two great American literary works, The Scarlet Letter a novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and "A Rose for Emily" a short story by William Faulkner with the help of deconstruction. Deconstruction is Jacque Derrida’s inventive strategy, which aims to subvert the traditional ideas and methodologies related to language and textual interpretations and put into question the entire history of Western metaphysics from Plato to the present time such as believing in “logocenterism” and “binary oppositions”. The fundamental concern of this study is to practice the elements of deconstruction in similar concepts of these literary works. In The Scarlet Letter, the letter A is the
Written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby was very instrumental in the change from traditionalism to modernism. In a time where people struggled with identity, Fitzgerald wrote of the women's rights movements and the animosity between whites and minorities (Huskey). Nick Carraway, the narrator of the story, also seems to find his own identity, as he helps his friend, Jay Gatsby, reestablish his own. Fitzgerald’s work is very obviously a piece of modernism when compared to the theme of fragmentation. The “valley of ashes” (Fitzgerald 27) is a fantastic example of fragmentation.
AMERICAN LITERATURE Though American literature is rooted from the traditional English literature, which has managed to take on a personality of its own. However, the question of how a literature borrowed from a tradition in the same language could turn into something new has been raised. The answer should be traced back to the time when European settlers came to the North American continent to establish colonies. With an aspiration towards freedom from the controls existing in European countries, Americans, thus were associated in their mind with a dream of freedom and a quest for their own identity. Therefore, a significant reflection of dreams of freedom and quests for identity in American short fictions has made American literature not merely different but somehow unique.
Freedom of Spirit in an Ambivalent Society – With Reference to Edith Wharton’s Select Novel K. Kalpana Karthi, Assistant Professor of English, PSG College of Arts & Science, Coimbatore Edith Wharton’s fiction which emerged during the period of Post-World War I is a social analysis, based on Culture, Class and Morality. Her characters reflect the ambivalences prevalent in the environment, sometimes as antimodernists and often as liberal cultural critics. They stand evident, acknowledging that the past was not utopian and the present and future are mired in unpredictable political and social follies. The paper is attempt to study how her female protagonists struggle in this unstable and oscillating society which evade ethics and responsibility to embrace the easy solutions of scapegoating, evasion, cynicism and denial of truths and facts. Her novels depict how women fit themselves into this society either by rejecting or by accepting the changes to construct their emancipated New Selves.
Abstract: The present research paper is an attempt to study and analyze Mohsin Hamid’s ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist ‘in the light of Identity Crisis, cultural discrimination, terrorism, political corruptions and inferiority complex in the socio-economic and cultural areas. The novel describes the positive and negative developments in the Pakistan and American relations. Hamid in The Reluctant Fundamentalist has attempted the issues of colonialism and the quest for identity on the part of people from the so called developing cultures in the present day context. Hamid has shown that America has assumed the status of neo-colonial power. In prevention, they espouse extremist ideas and assume extreme shades of indigenous identity.
Chains Of Racism Racism is something you learn, not something you born with. Through the time, many writers have implemented their books with the racism that the mankind has seen along it’s history. Joseph Conrad implements a heavy sense of racism in his masterpiece, Heart of Darkness, through the use of symbolism, setting and various other literary devices. “Things are not always as they seem; the first appearance deceives many”(Plato). The symbolism plays a vital role in the development of the racism, the colors white and black, or the words light and dark are the main columns of symbolism in Heart of Darkness.
By the end of 20th century Postmodernism is a term widely used in literature and arts by the writers / artists and critics. In fact the D term is rather vague. For John Barth "Postmodernism" is a literature of i<:plenishment. For Charles Newmen, it is a literature of an inflammatory economy, for Jean Francis Lyolard, it is general condition of knowledge in the contemporary information regime; for Ihab Hassan, it is a stage in the road of spiritual unification of human kind. Terry Eagleton; Douwe Fokkema.
This ‘magic realism’ not only represents the disturbed post colonial situations of India but also marks their echoes of national consciousness. Novelist like Bapsi Sidhwa, Kamla Markandeya, Anita Desai, Manohar Malgaonkar, Nayantara Sehgal struggled hard to establish a separate identity unlabelled of British or Indian cultures and thus paved way for a new era of Indian English
The concept of otherness in American literature The concept of otherness can take numerous forms; it may be somebody who is of a dissimilar race, gender, culture, religion, class or sexual orientation as Meriem Webster-Online defines otherness as the quality or the state of being other or different. The reactions to those forms differs from a country to another taking as an example the American canon because it fits the study we are doing. In addressing this matter, writers often lean toward using binary oppositions to better highlight this theme. What makes the American Canon striking and exceptional is its rich history and diversity. Nevertheless, many writers risked alienation in writing about otherness but without their contributions on