The Ethical Subject of The God of Small Things

Thormann, Janet

doi:10.1353/psy.2003.0048

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…They are equal to men. Thormann (2003) explored that the Indian women novelists have described the feminine subjectivity and applied the different themes starting from the childhood to the womanhood. Through the novels, the Indian women writers like Shashi Deshpande, Anita Desai, Anita Nair along with Arundhati Roy have presented the concept of "feminism" in a detailed manner.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…"A Married Woman" has presented a feminist tone and made the readers aware of the need of self-control power among the women. Thormann (2003) mentioned that she has portrayed that the women need to be strong, rational and self-reliant while keeping faith in their inner strengths of womanhood. Women become trapped in the male-dominated society for which they need to struggle to free themselves from all sorts of bonding and make their own identity.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Feministic Reading of Arundhati Roy’s the God of Small Things in an Indian Perspective.

Khan¹

2018

IJAR

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confidence: 99%

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Feministic Reading of Arundhati Roy’s the God of Small Things in an Indian Perspective.

Khan¹

2018

IJAR

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“…Continuing the tradition of Blake's poem "A Poison Tree" (1794), Roy presents the biblical prohibition itself, rather than violation of it, as the cause of evil. The implications of this stance are many, and the so-called "Love Laws" (33) and their attendant psychological, ethical, social, and political repercussions in the novel have generated some excellent scholarly work (see Thormann 2003;Outka 2011;Basu 2014). Therefore, instead of focusing upon the tragic love between Ammu and Velutha, the Romeo and Juliet of Kerala, and the explicit treatment of sensuality and sexuality their romance affords, I will focus upon Ammu's children, Rahel and Estha, through whom Roy explores the advantages of other forms of bodily receptiveness.…”

Section: Eden = Unitary Existencementioning

confidence: 99%

Goosebumps, Shivers, Visualization, and Embodied Resonance in the Reading Experience: The God of Small Things

Rokotnitz

2017

Poetics Today

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This article contributes to studies of the heuristic, metacognitive, and social values of literary works by interrogating ways literary description can induce experiential involvement in the reading process through mobilizing what the neuropsychologists Maria Vandekerckhove and Jaak Panksepp call our “affective consciousness,” a form of prereflective reception that arises from bodily experience. Focusing upon Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, the article proposes a theoretical framework for interrogating the forms of priming, bias, and insight gained via these physical dimensions of reading. In particular, it examines a narrative technique termed “embodied anchors,” by which Roy conveys her characters' experiences and their interpretations of those experiences through image clusters that function both as metaphors and as physical cues, simultaneously affecting both “basic” and “moral” emotions (as differentiated by the clinical psychologists Bunmi O. Olatunji and Jorge Moll). The article analyzes how these embodied prompts activate readers' preconscious modes of perception, modify cognitive skills, and intensify the effects of reading by anchoring ideational content in readers' bodies, rendering abstract concepts physically tangible, thus providing alternative and parallel means of communicating and manipulating knowledge. This knowledge, it is argued, can be integrated into readers' range of experiences in ways that parallel “real-life” encounters, potentially facilitating profound learning.

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“…Her absence, along with her status as the long-awaited white child, allows her to stand in for the idealised child who is the twins' opposite: the imagined Sophie Mol represents everything that the twins are not, and Sophie Mol becomes the inverse of the negative child subjects as whom Estha and Rahel imagine themselves. Testing their identities against those of the white child by imagining their insertion into the ideal family of the von Trapps, Estha and Rahel find themselves lacking, but imagine Sophie Mol's adherence to the ideal (Thormann, 2003).…”

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‘What Will Sophie Mol Think?’: Thinking Critically about the Figure of the White Child in Arundhati Roy's the God of Small Things

Hopkins

2011

Global Studies of Childhood

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This article explores the ways in which discourses of whiteness and childhood intersect in Arundhati Roy's novel The God of Small Things to position the Indian children in the novel in inferior relation to the figure of the white child. Drawing the novel into discussions of the ideal of the universal child that shapes hegemonic educational and international development responses to children, the author suggests that the discursive dominance of such a child figure is radically disempowering for the child who is not contained within its boundaries. In The God of Small Things the Indian twins' experiences of ontology are consistently rendered invalid and inauthentic by the spectre of the white child, who appears as their British cousin, Sophie Mol. The author argues that the figuration of the child in this novel highlights the ways in which the universalism of the white child can work to exclude childhoods that exist outside this normative position. At the same time as it draws out the politics of exclusion, the novel can be seen to posit an alternative way of performing/enacting childhood subjectivity, which allows for multiplicity and the privileging of difference.

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The Ethical Subject of The God of Small Things

Cited by 8 publications

References 4 publications

Feministic Reading of Arundhati Roy’s the God of Small Things in an Indian Perspective.

Feministic Reading of Arundhati Roy’s the God of Small Things in an Indian Perspective.

Goosebumps, Shivers, Visualization, and Embodied Resonance in the Reading Experience: The God of Small Things

‘What Will Sophie Mol Think?’: Thinking Critically about the Figure of the White Child in Arundhati Roy's the God of Small Things

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