This paper attempts to look at Margret Atwood's Surfacing (1972) which happens to be one of her widely read works via one of the concept of sense of place. In Surfacing, the narration was divided into three parts: firstly, the home coming that is returning back to the place she was born in; secondly, the camping on the island in the cabin and searching for her missing father; and finally, the selfrediscovery via her stay on the Island. The underlying issue, therefore, focuses on the unnamed narrator's life transformation on the Island which gives her the privilege to see things from a different perspective. This vividly revealed the protagonist identification with life on the island, putting on a new identity and refusing to be a victim. This was made possible via her absorption to the island which helps to speed-up her revived self.
This paper explores women inheritance as a cultural paradigm of the intersection between modernity and tradition in Francis Imbuga’s Aminata. It pinpoints such intersection through the lens of post-colonialism. The Kenyan native tradition is influenced by the British imperial modernity. Therefore, it demonstrates the cultural dichotomy between modernity and traditions because the natives reject any foreign interference in their cultural affairs, which is not sufficiently tackled in previous studies. The native characters’ opposition to women inheritance will be scrutinized to unravel Imbuga’s depiction of the natives’ rejection of the colonizers’ modernity. The interpretation of tradition is going to be pursued as a derisory response to the postcolonial persecutory culture regarding women inheritance in the aboriginal Kenyan society. By opposing the postcolonial modernity, the native Kenyans could preserve their ancestors’ cultural traditions i.e., their cultural identity is empowered by hindering women inheritance. The play approaches common themes regarding modernity and tradition; and it deals with the Kenyan aboriginal nations that were formed according to British cultural imperialism. As such, Imbuga offers a new literary insight on the drastic cultural changes in Kenyan in the ensuing years of post-colonialism. The study unravels his perception of the natives’ rejection of the postcolonial modernity in order to accentuate the supremacy of the native traditions over the foreign culture. Thus, the significance of the study lies in its original reading of modernity and tradition and how they enhance the Kenyan natives’ reaction to the emergence of women inheritance in their society.
The present essay focuses on the grotesque elements in Edgar Allan Poe's the "Black Cat" and Horace Scudder's "The White Cat". Poe's story is highly embedded with a lot of grotesque elements from the beginning to the end. These elements were presented through strange characters, mysterious happenings, and degradation through death. Poe represents the struggle between the supernatural and the natural which he reinforces through the narrator who struggles to commit wrongdoings. Even in the mist of trying to restrict himself, the narrator still does not know what he did. In "The White Cat," Scudder employs grotesque elements as well but his application is subtly done unlike Poe whose application is more pronounced. The underlying meaning of this short story is on the spell of enchantment. However, Scudder, like Poe, displays the supernatural events through the characters of the "fairies" who has magical power to change the once a beautiful princess to a white cat. Grotesque includes absurd and bizarre elements and pierces the conventional version of reality. However, in its ability to shock or offend, grotesque helps to expose the vulnerability in human depicted via these absurd elements which will be explained in details in the present study.
This article explores Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse- Five (1969) as a postmodern critique of modern literary modes. As a novel recapitulating within itself a postmodern relative perspective of reality, it elucidates one aspect of postmodernism, that of literary experimentation. Vonnegut experiments with the narrator, setting and characters of the novel to provide a fictional critique of the literary exhaustion prevailing in modern literary modes. Experimentation is thus remedial replenishment for such exhaustion through authorial metafictional intrusion into the text. Accordingly, the article uses Patricia Waugh, Geŕard Genette and Mikhail Bakhtin's narrative theory to examine the experimental technique in the novel. What makes the majority of metafictional style unique is not only its presence in the novel, but also its conflated depiction of the American individual's suffering after the Second World War. For this later style, the self-justifying manner in the novel extrapolates textual dialogic relations to accentuate the author's critical voice. Such voice originates in the main narrative point of view in the text and is known as focalization.
This article examines African binarism in Ama Ata Aidoo’s play, The Dilemma of a Ghost. The concept of binarism encompasses the nostalgic predilection for the homeland yet, the preconception of home depends on the way in which colonial hegemony appears. The purpose of this study is, therefore, to shed light on the latent circumstances which project onto this play, the inherent impetus of this binarism. The focus will be on Aidoo’s conceptualization of the African diaspora and how it has affected the cultural aspects of the Africans’ ways of life. To analyze these cultural issues, the methodology of this study utilizes the concept of transculturation. In essence, the concept of transculturation emphasizes a mix of two discrepant cultures. These cultures are different from each other yet similar in their sense of belonging to the homeland. This sense of belonging forges the reconciliation of two opposite ethnic races that belong to the same culture. As such, the study highlights the African diaspora depicted in The Dilemma of a Ghost as the primal cause of this transculturation. Consequently, it explores the African diaspora that resulted from forced migration imposed upon diverse national ethnicities that chose to live together in one place - They mingle with each other in the host country, which exemplifies an utterly different cultural facet. To cope with cultural differences, they co-exist with each other by dint of transculturation.
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