This study sheds light on a previously unexplored dimension of R. K. Narayan's novel The Guide (1958), focusing on the life journey of the protagonist, Raju. It examines his passage through the phases of childhood, adulthood, and Swami-hood, interpreting his evolution as a metaphorical progression that embodies the tripartite existential structure - the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious - as delineated by the nineteenth century Danish philosopher S & oslash;ren Kierkegaard. By tracing Raju's development along these lines, the study argues that his ultimate metamorphosis, characterized by transcendental faith and self-sacrifice for the welfare of the villagers of Mangal, elevates him to the highest level of human attainment. The study concludes by positioning Raju alongside celebrated spiritual seekers like Dante Alighieri's pilgrim, John Bunyan's Christian, and Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha so as to underscore the universal relevance of Narayan's narrative in addressing the complexities of human existence.
Susan Rosenbaum analyses Elizabeth Bishop's association with the miniature in a number of ways. She sees Bishop's perception of the miniature as a "small-scale copy"1 of nature or art and aligns Bishop's thematic concerns and poetic collections with the twentieth-century American and French artists Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp's "pocket museums"2 against the large-scale museum industry in America. I agree with Rosanbaum's perception of Bishop's small and vividly detailed poems as mobile artworks like those of Cornell and Duchamp. However, I do not see Bishop's poetry as "small-scale copy." Rather, I see Bishop's small art form as her perception of an inadequately shaped Baroque pearl, which serves to be a subordinate part, or section, of an ever-receding space. Although critics have said much about Bishop's attachment with the small, I here refresh this connection in Bishop's poetic life and art through her literal association with the word Baroque. I argue that Bishop adopted the Baroque style not only because of its diverse connotative meanings, but also because of its denotative value.
Isekai ( sic) narratives have become increasingly popular in contemporary Japanese media. Isekai narratives typically follow a protagonist entering another world, and often involve the accomplishment and success of these characters that reflect and respond to personal, cultural and social concerns of both the authors and audiences. This article addresses the socio-cultural and religious concerns frameworks of isekai narratives, and how these factors affect the exploration and presentation of gender and romance in these narratives. Moreover, it seeks to examine the relationship between the real and the fantastical representations of gender and gender roles within the narratives of two case studies, Seijo no Maryoku wa Bann & omacr; Desu and Arifureta Shokugy & omacr; de Sekai Saiky & omacr;. While isekai narratives are typically more fantastical in nature, reflecting the protagonist's desire to reject their previous lives, such as their bodies, even pushing the constraints of their new reality, these narratives of these case studies reflect and reinforce pre-existing gender stereotypes and roles in both the protagonist's bodies and their interpersonal relationships.
This article provides a new look at conducting family history research from the perspective of historical materialism (Marxism). Instead of typical family histories isolating and atomizing the individual and family oral accounts which center the "great man" of the past, this work provides an analysis firmly rooted in class conflict and how individuals directly receive their conditions as mediated by the past. This specifically takes family history in the American western migration as a way to reconceptualize conducting this type of historical research, and using family stories, legends, and oral traditions as a window into the class ideologies present both in the present and the past moderating how they were shaped and transmitted, and what stories were regarded as important (especially in erasing the memory of indigenous peoples who had lived in the originally settled areas).
Taiwan's Second New Wave cinema enacts sacred creativity through the Confucian concept of zh & igrave;ch & eacute;ng (utmost sincerity) and Daoist understandings of the d & agrave;o, negotiating the pressures of globalised postmodernity. Shaped by migration, colonial violence, and rapid modernisation, Taiwan provides a cultural landscape in which self-cultivation unfolds amid the deterritorialising forces of late twentieth-century Taipei. Films by Ang Lee, Tsai Ming-liang, and Edward Yang engage inherited Confucian and Daoist traditions while responding to the fractured temporalities and urban aesthetics of contemporary life. Close readings of Eat Drink wandering, photographing, drifting-operate as gestures of reterritorialisation within Taipei's deterritorialised spaces. Rather than dramatising the disappearance of tradition, these films reconceptualise ritual, filial piety, and aesthetic perception as sites of creative becoming. The city emerges not merely as a space of alienation but as a terrain where sincerity, relationality, and spiritual cultivation endure. Second Wave cinema models a creative ethics grounded in zh & igrave;ch & eacute;ng: a sacred creativity that neither nostalgically restores tradition nor succumbs to postmodern cynicism but cultivates new forms of sincerity within the luminous debris of the globalised city.
Ibrahim Simabua gelar Datuk Tan Malaka (1897-1949) is one of the marginalised but legendary anti-imperialist figures of the Indonesian revolution. In this role, he can be easily regarded as a significant modern Southeast Asian thinker. His thinking is captured in a range of philosophical literature he wrote, sometimes under incarceration and on the run from various authorities. This article focuses on the final pages of Tan Malaka's Madilog (1943), his magnum opus. In this concluding section, he imagines a possible future for Indonesia. In this future, Malaka pictures Indonesia as a Communist state within the Federation of Aslia (AsiaAustralia). It is an image that stems from his pan-Malayan concept of "aslia" first adumbrated in his half-completed but lost work Gabungan Aslia (1943). Using the literary device of a "Great Telescope" Malaka invites us to gaze at the galaxy and the planets. He then brings us to "Nature's Garden" and asks us to appreciate the advanced machineries and factories before finally taking us on a tour around Indonesia's Taman Manusia (Garden of Humanity). This is a memorial park located on two summits which pays tribute to great historical figures from both the East and the West. In this way, the last pages of Madilog offers us a playful, creative and inspiring thought experiment as to what the essence of Indonesia might be for both Malaka and future Indonesia. This creative vision reveals the deeply humanistic, internationalistic, environmentalist, scientific and philosophical basis of Tan Malaka's brand of Indonesian nationalist philosophy. Here I examine how the literary tropes of this "imagining" elevate the grander vision of his political philosophy.
This study analyzes Mircea Eliade's autobiographical novel Bengal Nights (1933) to shed light on the orientalisation and eroticization of its character Devi as an emblem of colonial India. Drawing on Spivak's subaltern studies and Mohanty's critique of Western feminism, the article interrogates how British imperialist ideologies exploited the knowledge-power nexus to deny voice and agency to colonized women. Eliade's depiction of Devi, closely modeled on his real-life encounter with a famous Indian author whose name he does not even disguise, presents the imperialist hierarchies that portray colonised cultures as backward, irrational, and inferior. It is further argued that Bengal Nights features what Spivak calls the imperialist mission of 'worlding,' i.e., defining colonized nations as blank spots requiring European intervention to acquire cultural and historical legitimacy. By juxtaposing Devi's portrayal in the novel with that of her European foil, Jenny, the study demonstrates how imperialist discourses homogenize third-world women as a monolithic category, perpetuating racial, gendered, and cultural hierarchies. The analysis calls for a reconsideration of imperialist literature to address its role in sustaining colonial oppression and silencing since it highlights the enduring impact of British imperialism in India on the representation of the latter's women.
This text provides an overview of various themes related to the desire for nothingness and how this desire manifests in the protagonist of The Winter's Tale, as interpreted by Stanley Cavell. A particularly novel interpretation proposed by Cavell emphasizes Leontes' desire for nothingness. In Cavell's reading, this desire for nothingness is the central problem of the drama. This formulation allows Cavell to identify a new aspect of Leontes' narcissistic skepticism: a nihilistic dimension linked to the metaphysical problem of existential debt. In this way Cavell's formulation places Leontes alongside other Shakespearean skeptics that he has examined in his other essays included in the Disowning Knowledge, revealing a new epistemological dimension of Leontes' attitude, which has often been overlooked in traditional interpretations of The Winter's Tale. In the last part of the text I'm also dealing with strictly epistemological consequences of Leontes' nihilism for his attitude toward language. The most important aspect of this is his rejection of shared linguistic norms and commonly accepted criteria of meaning. This is one more aspect of is nihilism.
This article argues that women are frequently reduced to objects rather than recognised as autonomous individuals even in posthuman spaces. Such representations not only reflect patriarchal norms but also actively sustain them by embedding gendered roles and expectations within digitally mediated spaces. Drawing on insights from posthuman feminism and Foucauldian discourse analysis, my research claims that the Hideaway Foyer, an online virtual space, reinforces gendered hierarchies, primarily through the objectification and consumption of female-coded avatars in Jennifer Haley's play, The Nether (2014). This virtual space functions as a digital panopticon in which surveillance and discipline regulate female subjectivity. The depiction of this simulated world reveals how discourse, surveillance, and algorithmic governance shape posthuman identities of the female-coded avatars. By situating The Nether (2014) in posthuman feminist discourse, the article suggests that virtual reality does not liberate the female subject from gendered power but instead reaffirms it in a new form. I argue that The Nether challenges the illusion of a posthuman utopia by revealing the ongoing regulation of female-coded avatars within the virtual realm.
What people say is inextricably linked to the place where they say it. Jayanta Mahapatra is a poet renowned for his obsessive engagement with his native land, Odisha. Scholarly works have established this relation as a topophilic one, which is a simplistic way of understanding his poetry. By problematising this relation, this article disproves topophilic affiliations and delineates elements of topophrenia in select poems of Mahapatra in which geographical, natural, religious, and psychological imagery recur. By means of a spatial inquiry into the poems, this article produces a literary geography and a literary cartography of Odisha and reveals how the personal history of the poet and that of his land inform the spatial aspects of the poems. It discerns the use of and deciphers the role of imagery as spatial signifiers that superimpose the mindscape of Mahapatra onto the landscape of Odisha in his poetry. It shows how space can allegorise, in complex ways, equally complex identities in the postmodern world.
This article links the thought of Antonin Artaud's 'Theatre of Cruelty' with Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophical concepts in order to conduct a hermeneutic exploration of the 'cult-classic' videogame Pathologic 2. Released in 2019 by the studio Ice-Pick Lodge, Pathologic 2 takes place in a bizarre steppe town ravaged by superstition and plague. The experience of gameplay in Pathologic 2 is suggested as an essentially shamanic artform, leveraging existing literature on the linkage of Artaud, videogames, and altered consciousness to theorise gameplay as a technobiological and profoundly theatrical 's & eacute;ance.' Pathologic 2 can be considered an authentically Artaudian interactive experience and perhaps an exemplar case of digitality's potential for implementing the Theatre of Cruelty's artistic principles of virtuality and mythic experience; furthermore, Pathologic 2 is a work which takes considerable inspiration by real-world shamanic traditions. The article begins by framing both Artaud and Pathologic 2 in relation to one another, then progresses by clarifying and interweaving numerous methodological elements into a multileveled analysis. The central body of the argument then proceeds by recounting the relevant aspects of Pathologic 2s'rhizomatic plot-structure and explicating said elements through an interlinkage of shamanic concepts combined with classically Artaudian and Deleuzo-Guattarian ideas, as well as prominent thinking in the fields of videogame studies and digital theatrics.
In the 1960s, literary critic Julia Kristeva proposed that intertextual relationships could be found in diverse forms of literature, emphasising that the production of a text is inseparable from the cultural and discursive contexts in which it is written. The creation of an artist's work is inseparable from the cultural context in which he/she writes, making it impossible for him/her to produce it independently and in isolation. The notion of intertextuality posits that every literary text has some form of influence or borrowing from literary works of the past. Drawing upon this, Agha Shahid Ali, a poet cherishing hybridity and holding allegiance to multiple centres and traditions - emerges as a transnational and transcultural poet resisting fixity and acknowledging diversity. This diversity of Ali is the chief concern of this article as it analyses Ali's poem "Bones" as a site of cultural and literary convergence by looking at the intertextual associations it shares with T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922). With intertextuality as its theoretical framework, the article first considers the development of the concept, using Julia Kristeva as the prominent theorist, and then analyses the poems within this framework. It also demonstrates how Ali reworks and recontextualises modernist wasteland imagery.
Contributing to current speculations on embodied cognition and consciousness in cognitive humanities, this article examines the nature of cognitive agency in a disrupted cognitive model associated with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Drawing on Marco Bernini's concepts of the 'interpretive cognition' framework and mental transparencies, it postulates that trauma instigates cognitive opacity, causing a subject's interpretive process to fail, eventually leading to disruption of cognition and loss of agency. It interrogates whether there is an alternate possibility for the subject to reclaim her agency over an opacity, instead of succumbing to the destructive behaviours that Bernini highlights in his study of opacity in Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Applying a hybrid theoretical framework derived from the Bayesian aspect of embodied cognition and the predictive-processing model, this article contends that cognitive agency can be retrieved through a revised model of interpretation, in which the opacity is assimilated into cognition through sheer acknowledgement instead of being ignored and denied. The arguments of this article are developed through an analysis of the fictional mind of Tookie, the PTSD-affected protagonist of Louise Erdrich's The Sentence, whose cognitive process demonstrates the possibility of traversing cognitive opacity and restoring agency.
Adolescent identity formation has been a central concern in the literary arena for the last two centuries, since the inception of the bildungsroman genre. Its recent exposition in popular media has been completely unexplored from a theoretical lens. Such narratives not only discuss the formation of individual identity but also inherently critique society that serves as the fundamental condition for identity to emerge, thereby providing a psychosocial understanding of individuals, cultures, and societies in close relation with one another. The article analyzes the Japanese anime Naruto (2002-2007), including its extended story arc, Naruto: Shippuden (2009-2017), by Masashi Kishimoto, with a focus on the eponymous character's identity formation. It examines how Naruto's liminal body, while rendering him vulnerable and socially unacceptable, serves as a site for his personal identity formation, challenging conventional societal forms of warriorship, bravery, and humanity. To this end, the study employs Victor Turner's theory of liminality and liminoidality to highlight how discursive and deviant spaces, bodies, and temporalities can be proven as sites of inclusivity, revolution, and individuality for marginalized groups and individuals, Erik Erikson's psychosocial identity developmental theory, and a brief commentary on the existential aspects of the text. In this way, the article addresses the following questions: a) How does liminality function as a site of identity formation in Naruto? b) How does liminality problematize the existential search for meaning for protagonists in contemporary anime series like Naruto?
The 1970 Bhola Cyclone, referred to as the deadliest tropical cyclone on record, triggered a crisis that precipitated the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. This article explores how select literary narratives, namely, Sorayya Khan's Noor (2003), Arif Anwar's The Storm (2018), Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island (2019) and The Vortex (2022) by Scott Carney and Jason Miklian, depict the cataclysmic devastation wrought by the cyclone, a natural disaster grotesquely compounded by institutional inertia and calloused human indifference. Drawing from Doreen Massey's space-time concepts, Joni Adamson's vernacular landscapes and a postcolonial socio-environmental lens encompassing Rob Nixon's environmentalism of the poor, the analysis lays bare how the imposition of official landscapes onto vernacular ones exacerbated the cyclone's devastation and fueled erstwhile East Pakistan's desire for independence. These literary depictions serve as ominous harbingers by underscoring how climate crises disproportionately impact marginalized populations. Mapping the transformative arc from cyclonic cataclysm to the ensuing struggle for liberation, this study issues an urgent call to confront climate vulnerabilities and subvert hegemonic environmental narratives that marginalize vernacular landscapes and their inhabitants.
The movement of Indian children's literature into digital environments has intensified critical interest in the aesthetic capacities of young readers. This shift demands a rethinking of how young readers engage aesthetically. Existing reader-response models, grounded in cognitive interpretation and developmental sequencing, struggle to account for the sensory saturation and affective immediacy characteristic of Indian digital narratives. Classical Indian aesthetics offer an alternative genealogy of reception, foregrounding sensory attunement and emotional universality as primary modes of readerly participation. Building on Sherry Turkle's critiques of hyper-stimulating digital environments and Nel Noddings' ethics of care, and in line with UNESCO's emphasis on Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), this article compares readerly frameworks through a cross-textual reading of South Asian and Eastern European narratives in digital adaptation. Through the figure of the sahrdaya and its child-specific extension, b & amacr;lasahrdaya, this research unites global literature through aesthetic engagement - achieving universality not through generalization but through deep, localized aesthetic expression.
A close reading of The Great Gatsby (1925) shows that not only is Gatsby an emblematic novel, but it is also closer to Carl Van Vechten's model for this genre, The Blind Bow-Boy (1923), than to other instances of the emblematic novel. The differences between the coded works of the ancient alchemists and the modernist, Van Vechten-Oragean novelists is that while the modernist texts never offer a transparent surface, they do contain a key. The novel is an assemblage of materials that must be decompiled to appreciate the complexity of what has been brought together. The characters are at certain points identified with specific Tarot cards. The Great Gatsby is a roman & agrave; clef. The Great Gatsby was written by laying out Tarot cards and alchemical emblems in the design that P. D. Ouspensky shows in The Symbolism of the Tarot (1976). The novel traces the traditional stages of the alchemical process using colors: black (nigredo), white (albedo), yellow (citrinitas), and red (rubedo), representing various stages of purification and transformation.
The purpose of this article is to examine the rejection of Falstaff by Prince Hal in William Shakespeare's Henry IV Part II in part through an esoteric lens, and to offer the view that this external action, political as it is on one level, can also be seen as pointing out a path toward the internal; if you will, the spiritual evolution and transformation of a man.
Peter Brook's seminal text The Empty Space envisioned theatre as a vehicle for spiritual transformation where presence, silence and symbolic embodiment worked cohesively together. Deeply influenced by the work of G. I. Gurdjieff, Brook's Holy Theatre positioned the actor as a living symbol. His pioneering work at the Centre International de Recherche Th & eacute;& acirc;trale (CIRT) fostered profound engagements between performers and audiences, seeking to create mythopoetic states of consciousness. Famously, Brook's epic production The Mahabharata was a vibrant manifestation of what could occur when the Rough and Holy Theatres were juxtaposed together: creating a transformative space for audiences. Throughout his life Brook challenged traditional theatrical conventions and worked to transcend cultural boundaries, renewing theatre's role as a space for shared symbolic revelation.
This article examines the often-overlooked influence of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff on Samael Aun Weor and the Gnostic Movement, the largest self-described Gnostic religion today. While previous scholarship has emphasized the role of Arnoldo Krumm-Heller and esoteric traditions such as the OTO and Tantra in shaping Weor's teachings, this study argues that the Gurdjieff Work provides the structural foundation for the Gnosis. Drawing on fieldwork conducted during a 23-week introductory course with a Gnostic group in Edinburgh, the article demonstrates that core practices-including division of attention, self-remembering, and the creation of subtle bodies- are directly traceable to Gurdjieff's system. Moreover, the article proposes that, although seminal retention can attributed to Tantric sources, the use of sexual energy to create subtle bodies is unique to the Work and the Gnosis. Moreover, this shows that Gurdjieffian elements are the foundational structural core of the Gnosis. By reassessing the lineage of the Gnosis, this study contributes to a more nuanced re-evaluation of Gurdjieff's legacy in contemporary global spiritual discourse.
