Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.3126/litstud.v36i1.52091
Shiva Rijal
One of the major characteristics of politic al and social change is the shift that takes place in the perceptions about polity and identity of people. During such shifting times, writers and artists dare to articulate public aspirations through aesthetic expressions of new order. Like political leaders and social activities, creative writers and artists too own up the responsibility of talking about the presentism by taking a stand about the methodology of looking at the history of both the nation as well as of the modes of expression. Evoking such shifting nature of aesthetic forms and expressions, the famous twentieth century English theatre and culture critic Raymond Williams writes:
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Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.3126/litstud.v36i1.52087
P. Poudel
Rehabilitation of prison inmates is a major discourse these days. The situation of rehabilitation services for the improvement of criminals in prison is a major issue among academics, counselors, educators, psychologists, security personnel, legal practitioners, medical doctors, and so on in recent times. Our society has some kind of preconception about ex-criminals, which is mostly negative and hostile, and the stigma and labeling attached to them can hardly be erased. And this is not only limited to ex-criminals but also their family members and even the next generation as well. This makes social adjustment difficult for the ex-criminals. On the other hand, after serving a fixed term in jail, ex-criminals carry the prison trauma that hunts them back again and again even after they try to lead their normal life in society. They reflect back on their criminal activities and the harsh treatment meted out to them in prison. This makes it difficult to adjust to mainstream society, and the chance of repeat offenses becomes high. Jails are not to be taken as a means of torturing the offenders; instead, they should be called penitentiaries where the prisoners are treated compassionately so they would not feel degenerated and get some chances to reform themselves. If rehabilitation programs conducted in prisons are the central part of truly reforming the inmates, they can live crime-free life after they are released from prison. These reformative programs will have to be aimed at changing the lives of inmates so that they can restart life with self-respect and confidence. This paper explores the present system of Central Jail (NAKHU JAIL), need and importance of rehabilitation programs, the challenges faced by them, and methods to enhance their effectiveness.
{"title":"Rehabilitation Programs in Prison: Helping the Self wounded to Heal","authors":"P. Poudel","doi":"10.3126/litstud.v36i1.52087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3126/litstud.v36i1.52087","url":null,"abstract":"Rehabilitation of prison inmates is a major discourse these days. The situation of rehabilitation services for the improvement of criminals in prison is a major issue among academics, counselors, educators, psychologists, security personnel, legal practitioners, medical doctors, and so on in recent times. Our society has some kind of preconception about ex-criminals, which is mostly negative and hostile, and the stigma and labeling attached to them can hardly be erased. And this is not only limited to ex-criminals but also their family members and even the next generation as well. This makes social adjustment difficult for the ex-criminals. On the other hand, after serving a fixed term in jail, ex-criminals carry the prison trauma that hunts them back again and again even after they try to lead their normal life in society. They reflect back on their criminal activities and the harsh treatment meted out to them in prison. This makes it difficult to adjust to mainstream society, and the chance of repeat offenses becomes high. Jails are not to be taken as a means of torturing the offenders; instead, they should be called penitentiaries where the prisoners are treated compassionately so they would not feel degenerated and get some chances to reform themselves. If rehabilitation programs conducted in prisons are the central part of truly reforming the inmates, they can live crime-free life after they are released from prison. These reformative programs will have to be aimed at changing the lives of inmates so that they can restart life with self-respect and confidence. This paper explores the present system of Central Jail (NAKHU JAIL), need and importance of rehabilitation programs, the challenges faced by them, and methods to enhance their effectiveness.","PeriodicalId":40903,"journal":{"name":"Interdisciplinary Literary Studies","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84069198","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.5325/intelitestud.25.1.0142
Isabelle Wentworth
{"title":"A Review of Neurocognitive Interpretations of Australian Literature: Criticism in the Age of Neuroawareness by Jean-François Vernay (review)","authors":"Isabelle Wentworth","doi":"10.5325/intelitestud.25.1.0142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/intelitestud.25.1.0142","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40903,"journal":{"name":"Interdisciplinary Literary Studies","volume":"302 1","pages":"142 - 147"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79751843","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.3126/litstud.v36i1.52076
A. Karki
In Habiburahman’s historical novel First, They Erased Our Name: A Rohingya Speaks and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, a semi-historical novel with elements of magical realism, I argue that refugees’ dream of global village or cosmopolis is constantly frustrated or deferred in a tribally oriented roadblocks of borders due to the nation-state’s sovereignty and its routine use of the state of exception; yet, these refugees do not give up their hope of founding a global village of sorts through the political space. To rephrase my claim, in these novels, the nation-state’s sovereignty, which exclusively reserves the prerogative of the state of exception, biopolitically forces a certain section of its people into bare life, in Agamben’s sense, forcing the refugees to flee their homelands and suffer during and after their numerous border crossings, denuding the presence of tribalism within the global village. Yet, largely owing to the occasional reception of individual hospitality, these refugees are able to keep alive their hope of belonging to a community through seeking the political, a space where they can negotiate and renegotiate their rights. I argue that their persecution is due to Myanmar’s military government’s biopolitics in that it has reinscribed the nation on the basis of religion and Sino-Tibetan race (tribalism) and rendered stateless the Rohingya Muslim of Indo-Aryan race. Nearly the same could be said about Hamid’s protagonists, Nadia and Saeed, as they face a similarly tribalistic predicament in London, where the city is divided between the dark and light zones, occupied by migrants and nativists, again the state siding with the nativist. Despite facing state brutality or state’s abdication of its responsibility and the absence of right to have rights, these refugees keep alive the hope of global village, and they are able to persevere because they do occasionally receive hospitality from a few good Samaritans; therefore, there remains some glimmering hope of cosmopolis or global village in an excessively tribalistic world they are forced to live, and it is this hope provides them energy to fight for their rights.
{"title":"Refugees in Tribal Global Village in Habiburahman and Mohsin Hamid","authors":"A. Karki","doi":"10.3126/litstud.v36i1.52076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3126/litstud.v36i1.52076","url":null,"abstract":"In Habiburahman’s historical novel First, They Erased Our Name: A Rohingya Speaks and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, a semi-historical novel with elements of magical realism, I argue that refugees’ dream of global village or cosmopolis is constantly frustrated or deferred in a tribally oriented roadblocks of borders due to the nation-state’s sovereignty and its routine use of the state of exception; yet, these refugees do not give up their hope of founding a global village of sorts through the political space. To rephrase my claim, in these novels, the nation-state’s sovereignty, which exclusively reserves the prerogative of the state of exception, biopolitically forces a certain section of its people into bare life, in Agamben’s sense, forcing the refugees to flee their homelands and suffer during and after their numerous border crossings, denuding the presence of tribalism within the global village. Yet, largely owing to the occasional reception of individual hospitality, these refugees are able to keep alive their hope of belonging to a community through seeking the political, a space where they can negotiate and renegotiate their rights. I argue that their persecution is due to Myanmar’s military government’s biopolitics in that it has reinscribed the nation on the basis of religion and Sino-Tibetan race (tribalism) and rendered stateless the Rohingya Muslim of Indo-Aryan race. Nearly the same could be said about Hamid’s protagonists, Nadia and Saeed, as they face a similarly tribalistic predicament in London, where the city is divided between the dark and light zones, occupied by migrants and nativists, again the state siding with the nativist. Despite facing state brutality or state’s abdication of its responsibility and the absence of right to have rights, these refugees keep alive the hope of global village, and they are able to persevere because they do occasionally receive hospitality from a few good Samaritans; therefore, there remains some glimmering hope of cosmopolis or global village in an excessively tribalistic world they are forced to live, and it is this hope provides them energy to fight for their rights.","PeriodicalId":40903,"journal":{"name":"Interdisciplinary Literary Studies","volume":"274 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74375006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.3126/litstud.v36i1.52089
Sadat Zaman Khan
Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy As You Like It abounds with references to nature. This play portrays his bent towards nature, its (nature’s) protection and preservation. In his days, the concept of environmental degradation was not there because the evils of industrial pollution had not been realized the way it is now been. “Greenhouse Gas Emission” (EPA.gov., 2021) and the “carbon footprint” (N. Eckley, 2010) are some of the recent indicators of climate change, ponderously talked about and heavily weighed in scientific world, and in the academies. However, it is surprising that even in the sixteenth century Shakespeare had thought about ecology, nature as home for the animals and its protection. Was he eco-conscious? This might be an important question to Shakespeare enthusiast. This essay explores his concerns for ecology as the play focuses on the killing of the animals’ – deer as representative – in their “native dwelling places” (2.1.175)”, that is, the forest, and the “usurpation” (2.1.26) of the human being on its green spaces. Hence the essay re-reads Shakespeare’s As You Like It through the lens of ecocritical studies, inclusive of natural world and animals, in relation to the human world.
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Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.5325/intelitestud.25.1.0124
Artis Ostups
abstract:This article engages with two third-generation narratives of totalitarian trauma—Latvian writer Andra Manfelde’s prose work Zemnīcas bērni (The children of the bunker, 2010) and German writer Katja Petrowskaja’s autobiographical novel Maybe Esther (Vielleicht Esther, 2014)—to demonstrate the substantial role of metonymy in postmemorial writing where it serves the function of reactivating the troubling past. The author’s theoretical departure point is the observation that metonymy has been overlooked within the emphasis on the archive as the empirical basis of postmemorial prose. Metonymical connections between the past and the present are implied in Marianne Hirsch’s (2012) concept “points of memory.” However, her concept seems suited more for explaining the affective power of family photographs, while postmemorial texts are full of all kinds of metonymies: not just images, but also names, dates, and objects, able to enforce the presence of the past. In order to account for these metonymical signs encountered by autobiographical narrators in their storyworlds and made present on the level of narrative discourse, the article suggests turning to Eelco Runia’s (2014) philosophical conception of metonymy as a transfer of presence. The final aspect discussed here is the way metonymy enables ethical imagination.
{"title":"Metonymy, Presence, and the Ethics of Imagination in Postmemorial Writing: Andra Manfelde’s Zemnīcas bērni and Katja Petrowskaja’s Maybe Esther","authors":"Artis Ostups","doi":"10.5325/intelitestud.25.1.0124","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/intelitestud.25.1.0124","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article engages with two third-generation narratives of totalitarian trauma—Latvian writer Andra Manfelde’s prose work Zemnīcas bērni (The children of the bunker, 2010) and German writer Katja Petrowskaja’s autobiographical novel Maybe Esther (Vielleicht Esther, 2014)—to demonstrate the substantial role of metonymy in postmemorial writing where it serves the function of reactivating the troubling past. The author’s theoretical departure point is the observation that metonymy has been overlooked within the emphasis on the archive as the empirical basis of postmemorial prose. Metonymical connections between the past and the present are implied in Marianne Hirsch’s (2012) concept “points of memory.” However, her concept seems suited more for explaining the affective power of family photographs, while postmemorial texts are full of all kinds of metonymies: not just images, but also names, dates, and objects, able to enforce the presence of the past. In order to account for these metonymical signs encountered by autobiographical narrators in their storyworlds and made present on the level of narrative discourse, the article suggests turning to Eelco Runia’s (2014) philosophical conception of metonymy as a transfer of presence. The final aspect discussed here is the way metonymy enables ethical imagination.","PeriodicalId":40903,"journal":{"name":"Interdisciplinary Literary Studies","volume":"19 1","pages":"124 - 141"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82747153","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.3126/litstud.v36i1.52077
Damaru Chandra Bhatta
This article attempts to posit that modern people are alienated and so feel sad though they are equipped with modern means of comfort. This is ironical. In this connection, this article also attempts to define the concept of "a global village," discuss the psychological problems of alienation and loneliness, created ironically by globalization, and suggest some measures to cope with them from the perspective of the ancient wisdoms of the Hindu scriptural texts such as the Upanishad, the Bhagavad Gītā, the Pātanjali Yoga Sutras, and others. Unlimited, uncontrolled, and selfish desires are the main causes of modern alienation, triggered by the ideas of individualism, capitalism, consumerism, sexism, classicism, hedonism, and narcissism. Since the problems of alienation and loneliness are psychological ones, they can be best treated with the help of spiritual ideas propounded by ancient sages and seers. The permanent solution to these problems cannot be found outside in our external world. Their solutions can be found only inside our body, mind, and intellect with our inner journey to the Self ("Ātmā"). We can practice having vegetarian food, yoga, meditation, self-control over one's body and mind, mutual help, philanthropic activities, and non-violence by minimizing worldly desires, anger, and avarice to facilitate our journey to the Self. The less desires, the more happiness. This knowledge can inspire us avoid running after the temporary happiness attained by materialistic things. By being desireless and detached, we can remain still in the center of the inner Self inside our heart. This is the process of discovering permanent peace and happiness within ourselves to avoid the state of alienation.
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Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.5325/intelitestud.25.1.0099
Ian E. J. Hill
abstract:This article engages in an ecocritical-spatial reading of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace focused on the narrator’s conscientious and equitable treatment of nature and animals. Where traditional historical-temporal readings tend to break the book into constituent elements, typically emphasizing Tolstoy’s historiography, this article offers a synthetic reading made possible by an often-overlooked ecological through-line. The author argues that the narrator formulates the biosphere, not just humans, as his object of interest and defines war as a result of humans acting unnaturally and failing to think ecologically. The author also employs close readings to show that war and nature emerge simultaneously in War and Peace and appear intentionally fused throughout, and that the book locates the practicability of war in soldiers subordinating each other as animals, which they deem inferior. The article concludes that the narrator’s thoughtful depiction of nature and sympathy for animals are core to the book’s rhetoric and form. To overlook these features is to overlook War and Peace.
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Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.3126/litstud.v36i1.52079
Greeshma C P
With the onset of covid-19 in India, the digital and the memory associated with the digital-visual reached yet another perplexing phase. Visual complexity (Jay 95) and ‘tacit knowing’ (Polanyi 34) that we seem to have transcended-crystallised into digital chaos, reinforcing and restructuring ‘the macula’ especially with the onset of Covid 19 in India. The "bio-bubble" fundamentally warped and validated our perception of reality in relation to digital screen time- shifting ‘meaning- making’ immediately online. The pandemic further condensed what Shoshana Zuboff calls the ‘behavioural surplus’, where our already broadcasted privacy into the global data ecosystem determining our ‘everyday’ transformed into inevitable structures of security and sustenance. This ‘architecture of oppression’ nullifies the chaos and deconstructs ‘event-oriented sense of time’, essentially locating us in a historical ‘moment of danger’ where we are trapped in a targeted, polarized, manipulated, pandemic-reconfigured urban digital space. This sudden and induced economies of isolation(s) further question the boundaries and reception of individual digital space in the global village. The "eventful" that happened outside of the digital world swiftly dissolved into a series of "unprecedented happenings" that we had to access online, gradually liquefying into numerous far-off "unevents." The paper therefore intends a textual study of these isolation(s) through a few journalistic photographs and digital archives of the pandemic in India and enquire into the possibilities of utilizing them as tools of ‘microhistory’ in ‘the uneventful’ digital milieu. An attempt to examine the mediation between individual digital mobility, digital archives, and collective prosthetic memory in reclaiming ‘the oppressed past’ from ‘homogenous empty time’ is also being made.
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Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.3126/litstud.v36i1.52080
Jay Singh
Developments in the field of science and technology revolutionized the field of information technology that culminated in the superhighways of internet that enabled not only the fasted transfer of information but also the cyberspace, a virtual world parallel to the physical world. However it is not a neutral space the same power struggles, hierarchies, and hegemonies which are present in the physical world also contaminate the virtual space. This parallel universe though owned by transnational capitalists provides a space and means to register dissenting voices which is central to diaspora narratives along with many other dissenting groups. It provides an opportunity to the otherwise dispersed diaspora groups to meet each other, unite as a comprehensive community, and constitute a virtual nations in the cyberspace. Though it provides a platform to the dissenting voices, it is not neutral and completely benign. According to some scholars it is the strongest tool of neo-colonialism. Despite its negative aspects the cyberspace has emerged as an alternative space alongside physical space and its physical and ideological dimensions are felt across all spheres of life ranging from economic, political, and socio-cultural to innumerable other spheres. To understand this complex relationship between citizens, nation states, indigenous communities, and diaspora in the cyberspace this research paper brings in Benedict Anderson’s idea of imagined communities along with Michael Foucault’s idea of knowledge and power and foregrounds the complexities of the diaspora’s relationship with it.
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