. . . and in his warmth I slept, by Salman (2025)

Construction of the Theme, the Form and the Mode of Narration through ‘Pessoptimistic Divide’: A Deconstruction of First Four Chapters of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

International Journal of English Literature and Culture , 2018

“O Ireland my first and only love / Where Christ and Caesar are hand and glove?” (48) – These are the lines, Sadik-J-Al-Azm quotes from an early poem of Joyce to express Salman Rushdie’s position in the literary world. This is more so, as Rushdie employs ‘pessoptimistic divide’ (Ball 110) in his novels to embrace the polarities of post-colonial and postmodern era and celebrate them, without denying or transcending them. He uses it as an artistic method to construct it as the theme, the form and the mode of narration in his novels. This paper aims to analyse this artistic method through microcosmic deconstruction of the first four chapters of Midnight’s Children under the limelight of the concepts expounded by deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida and Hillis Miller and also modern theologians and existentialists like Soren Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich and Jean Paul Sartre. Sentences like 'the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement' (MC 3) to describe Saleem’s birth and emergence of India as an independent country, that point towards intricate fissure of Hope and Despair, are taken for scrutiny to study the nature of the ‘pessoptimistic’ tone (Ball 110), their significations and the third spheres that pop up from the interplays of Hope and Despair. Keywords: ‘pessoptimistic divide’; ‘absolute faith’, ‘courage of despair’; ‘creative despair’; ‘free play’; ‘strange opposition’; ‘intimate kinship’ ‘hymeneal bonding’; and ‘osmotic mixing’.

Sexual Politics in Ian McEwan's The Innocent

2020

Rape and sexual abuse as a global conflict has always been an inevitable part of war, used as a tactic both for humiliation and domination. Recent studies show that despite several attempts to stop sexual torture as the consequences of war it is an ongoing process in every part of the world. This necessitates an urgent solution for this epidemic problem. As a contemporary author, in his The Innocent, McEwan reflects this universal problem and presents the sexual relationships within war circumstances. His well known novel is set in the middle of Cold War and portrays sexual relationship between Leonard and Maria. Leonard's process of transformation from an ordinary person to a real conqueror of the Second World War is investigated to show how war can change individual's attitude toward human. This study is a critical analysis of The Innocent in the light of Kate Millett's theory of sexual politics. Millett explicates that sex has political implications, and that it is...

Morality of Literature (Conclusion)

In the last chapter, I argued that Smith's and Díaz's treatment of the problems of history and modern globalization and of the relation these have to storytelling is in synch with moral fiction's emphasis on process. This is a key point because, as I discussed earlier, Gardner and I value process as the locus for literature's engagement with the moral; for us, the process of exploration and discovery enabled by a literary text's rhetorical and literary devices, narrative structures, and formal approaches provides the context for literature's moral dimension. Morality in literature is not a lesson deducible from thematic content (Gardner, OMF 14, 108).While White Teeth and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao tackle a range of vexatious moral, social, and political problems that persist in the era of modern globalization, such as how reenacting past history can circumscribe moral agency in the present, I argued that their novels' process, their "morality," was located more in their handling of their thematic content than in the material itself. As per the definition I developed in this study, Smith's and Díaz's novels are "moral" not because they illustrate particular moral concepts, questions, or problems, but are "moral" because their deployment of distinctive and innovative literary devices and techniques enables a nuanced, sophisticated examination of moral concepts, questions, and problems, relevant at this juncture in our age of accelerating globalization. 337 Accordingly, my sustained focus on process and narrative, on literary technique, style, and formal approaches is central to articulating what is distinctive about my overarching aim in this project---to rehabilitate the moral as a serious literary and critical category. In what follows, I briefly sum up my major points to offer indications of how other literary critics might find the method of inquiry I have demonstrated in this study useful for their projects, too. As I asserted in my Introduction, I have conceived this project as an intervention in several scholarly debates. For example, my project addresses questions regarding what constitutes a genre, whether texts should be grouped by similar thematic content or by shared literary techniques and devices. One reason this is important is because we literary critics are moving away from categorizing fiction by geographical location or by period. Although I focused mainly on British and US novellength narratives, my approach can be applied to a considerable range of literary texts, from virtually any geographical location or historical period, including much poetry and drama. Though I would not term it "moral poetry," I identify similar kinds of processes in the work of many modernist poets: instead of confronting particular moral paradoxes per se, modernist poets often manifest significant moral impulses in their efforts to revitalize slack language and to represent the overlooked, the commonplace, and the everyday (Olson 22).

Review of Susan Abulhawa's Against the Loveless World

The Markaz Review, 2021

Deconstruction Of Morality In God's Novel, Allow Me To Be A Bitch! Muhidin M Dahlan's Work

International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation, 2022

The novel God Allow Me to Be a Prostitute by Muhidin M. Dahlan tells the story of the heartache of a Muslim woman who then decides to become a prostitute. This study was conducted to determine the forms of deconstruction carried out by Nidah Kirani as the main character. This research is examined using a radical feminism approach. The method used in this research is the content analysis method. In this study, there are several resistances made by the main character Nidah Kirani against Islamic law and the position of women in Islam, including resistance to the love of God, resistance to the obligation to wear the hijab, and hijab for Muslim women, resistance to male power. Nidah Kirani's resistance was a deconstruction effort because there were attempts to shake break into.

PROCEEDINGS OF NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE

PROCEEDINGS OF NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENGLISH LITERATURE: Contemporary Issues in Islam and English Literature, 2019

This paper explores how Malaysian literature in English has always gestured towards religion or religiosity in its narratives, including Islam in noir fiction. Noir fiction that is evolved from crime fiction and is associated with stories of darkness, criminality and violence is found to incorporate Islam in KL Noir (2013-2014)—noir anthologies published in Malaysia. In the Western noir tradition, noir fiction is employed to capture the aftermath of the wars with their chaos, gloom, and absurdity. Moving away from such tradition, KL Noir is distinctively constructed by darkness that stems from the failure of embracing Islam and the violation of Islamic rules. Therefore, this paper examines how KL Noir anthologies incorporate Islam to demonstrate their distinction from the Western noir tradition. Portrayals of Islam as the underlying religious principle imposed in the family shown in “The Runner” and “Victims of Society” are found to be the source of the darkness as they depict violation of Islamic rules and laws. When Islam is not faithfully embraced, it brings consequences that severely affect the noir characters and thus darken atmosphere and ambugity of the stories, yet at the same time such circumstance sheds the light of how life has been perfectly guided by Islam. Finally, this is how the incorporation of Islam in KL Noir functions to be noir yet enlightening. Keyword: Islam, noir fiction, noir tradition, Malaysia

Ethical Responsibility in ​Midnight's Children​

2021

The present essay discusses the bioethical concern in the narration of Salman Rushdie's ​Midnight's Children (1981). The multiple Booker Prize winning novel has been acknowledged as one of the prominent literary works of the past century, and a major source of critical inquiry, especially for Postmodern and Postcolonial criticism. Yet, not much has been said about the interpretative strategies on which narration relies to convey its meanings, especially with regard to the novel's ethical and moral concern for the transmission of knowledge, be it biological or cultural. The present paper tackles this aspect of Rushdie's masterful work by discussing how the literary connection between Saleem's fictional world and the history of India represents a strategic confusion of different narrative and historical planes. Among the effects of this literary operation is the overlapping of Saleem's family with his siblings of the midnight, which results in Saleem's prog...

MASCULINE INNOCENCE IN ARUN JOSHI'S, THE STRANGE CASE OF BILLY BISWAS

International Journal of Linguistics and Literature (IJLL) ISSN (P), 2018

Women are considered as soft-natured and innocent creatures in human kind, as we taught so far in Indian society. So, our society offers complete freedom and protection to them. In ancient India, women are treated as superiors. So, they have been given all sorts of sophistications such as education, warships, arts, etc. When the wars started to emerge for the sake of women, it had become adequacy to protect women. So, women are hidden into their houses. Time rolled on. But, the practice remained as the same with metamorphosis reasons that, women were inferior to men and so they had to be controlled and ruled by men. After few centuries, due to the British colonization, Indian revolutionist like Bharathiyar, had taken women out from their slavery. In contemporary society, women are completely away from their suppressions; in some extremes cases women suppress men. Though, men have dominating mind outwardly, they are actually soft-natured and innocent inwardly. Men tend to protect women economically, sociologically and all kinds. Women are enjoying all kinds of sophistications and liberation from men but women attack men's innocent inner-self. Each and every man, in the contemporary Indian society, fell into unexpressed suppressions into their heart. These unexpressed and suppressed emotions cause for frustration and stress. These suppressions created not only by women but the entire society which has deviated from the ancient way of living, detachment from nature, society cultivation in unreasonable rituals which were deviated from the ancient reasons along with women's hurting attitude. I do not indicate all women are wrong but insisting that not all women are correct. These problems mostly occur in the marriage bonding. Women can achieve in all fields which have been proved transparently without any doubt. My interrogation is where women's tolerance has flown away amidst all kinds of sophistications and liberty. This paper is focusing on, the protagonist, Billy Biswas and his variable marriage concepts, due to his innocent side of his inner mind in Arun Joshi's The Strange Case of Billy Biswas. Though Billy is born with silver spoon and receiving red-carpet welcome at everywhere, his mind thirsts for other missing element. He could stand neither his outward world nor his inner self. Respectively, it is resembled in the lives of Billy with Meena and Rima. Finally, his masculine innocency is discovered, when he started to live together with Bilasia, the daughter of mother-nature. His archetypal and anthropological mind finds comfortable, with aesthetic pleasure and feels the satisfaction, from unexpected love that attracts his innocent inner self. It tends him to give up all kind of worldly sophistications and his fame.

1 Love with Improper Strangers-Prologue.pdf

“Beware of Children”: Representation of Childhood in Khalid Jawed’s (Nematkhana) The Paradise of Food

Urdu Studies, 2022