Papers by GNOSIS An International Journal of English Language and Literature
Gnosis Vol 4 Issue 1 October 2017
Please fInd all the abstracts in the attachment.
Students in this market driven world vie to learn English for its productive value or economic va... more Students in this market driven world vie to learn English for its productive value or economic value. If a language can get the learners better jobs or better pay or more mobility in life, it has to be pursued. The learners seek to learn that language which fulfills their demands. The language that is taught in schools and in most of the curriculum at higher levels, unfortunately is adapted, refined and so polished that it serves limited needs of the students. The students pursuing professional courses in higher education need to learn that variety of English which helps them in their academics, in the near future and in the long run, in their career or profession. The need of the hour is to teach them the variety of language that they are likely to encounter in their real lives, inside the classroom and outside. Using language which is authentic is the key to ensure learner engagement, motivation and involvement. Authentic materials are the materials written from a specialist for a specialist in the specific field of study (Tomlinson, Jordan). This paper tries to evaluate the usefulness of authentic materials and goes on to present how authentic materials can be selected for use in an EAP classroom.
KEYWORDS: Authentic Materials, Criteria, EAP, ESP
Today, there has been an increased concern among teachers, researchers, educationalists, and eval... more Today, there has been an increased concern among teachers, researchers, educationalists, and evaluators (TREE) on the pragmatic area and efficacy of English language teaching. The "how" of teaching is now being given as much weight as the "what" and the "why" in English language teaching. The ELT sphere has a range of methods, but the ELT teachers in India are unfledged in terms of theoretical insight and pragmatic ELT methods. Therefore, the present paper focuses on the three prime areas: (i) Searching the major ELT methods used internationally, (ii) Searching the methods used locally (at UG English major level in Veer Narmad South Gujarat State University, India), and (iii) Offering with an easily and apt ELT methods in terms of their theoretical and pragmatic bases, skill(s) to be mastered, projected activities, task of teachers and learners, and convenient methods as pare with the levels of learners. As for the technique of data collection, document analysis execute as a means of source and while analysis of data was prepared with content study.
Key Words: TREE, ELT, Methods, Theoretical Base, Levels, Activities and Role of T and L
Inter linguistic homonyms (ILH) are aural /visual puns, standing midway between two or more langu... more Inter linguistic homonyms (ILH) are aural /visual puns, standing midway between two or more languages and cultures. Pronounced exactly the same in the concerned Indian languages but with unmistakably different meanings, they are potential hazards in communication leading to misunderstanding of the text / utterance. The Indo European family of languages are scattered with a number of such words with identical spelling that are semantically different. But Indian languages possess a plethora of such words posing an even greater threat to interpretations, particularly in mixed language scenarios popularized by the electronic media. The word ‘Pani’/pΛni/for example, exists in Malayalam, Telugu and Tamil probably a few others with completely different meanings.
Certain rules ordained to identify such words can come in handy to explain the concept.
This article aims at identifying several such ILH that exist in many Indian languages and the challenges they pose to understanding in general and inter cultural communication in particular.
Key words: Inter Linguistic Homonyms, Indian English, mixed language, pronunciation and meaning, interpretations, cultural communication.
In the paper I have endeavoured to bring together the theories of ‘revenge’, two branches of the ... more In the paper I have endeavoured to bring together the theories of ‘revenge’, two branches of the monist philosophy – existence monism and priority monism, Pre-Socratic philosophy (especially their material monist outlook), and the politics of the historical skirmishes between the Roman Catholic Church and the Illuminati (as portrayed by Dan Brown in his fiction). The paper is divided into three parts; the first part is titled ‘The Elements of the Conflict’ in which I have foregrounded how the conflict between the Church and the Illuminati stems from an intrinsic philosophical difference beneath the tumultuous worldly veneer of politics and culture. The second part ‘The Essence of the Conflict’ focuses more on the violence of the Church directed against the Renaissance scientists and freethinkers in order to promote monopoly and absolute authority on ‘truth’, while on the other hand it also addresses the themes of punishment, revenge and justice for the Illuminati, and simultaneously their avant-garde codes, ethics and ideology deployed as a resistance to the Churches ubiquitous intervention. Finally, the third part ‘The Politics of the Conflict: The body of Camerlegno Carlo Ventresca’ is a study in paradox, camouflage, invention through impersonation, and Empedoclean metempsychosis. Apart from the core ideas the theme of dialectical conflict (not necessarily in the sense of Plato or Hegel) runs like a fine thread weaving the three distinct sections of the paper together.
Keywords: monism, Illuminati, Pre-Socratic philosophy, vengeance, conflict
In the year 1997 there arrived on the literary scene an orphan boy with a lightening shaped scar ... more In the year 1997 there arrived on the literary scene an orphan boy with a lightening shaped scar on his forehead. His name was Harry Potter, and over the next ten years this name would be associated with a brand which would have a monetary value of four million dollars. “Pottermania” would furnish Warner Bros. with a range of products, collectibles, and characters that would generate huge profits. The present paper attempts to explore brand Harry Potter. The paper focuses on the ‘culture industry’ generated through the brand, and how this ‘industry’ transforms a creative work into a consumer product.
Keywords: Brand, Culture Industry, consumer product, Pottermania, Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling.
It may seem really interesting to know that very recently, the honourable Prime Minister of India... more It may seem really interesting to know that very recently, the honourable Prime Minister of India, spoke out in a public statement, that in a country like India, no politician of repute has ever been an anarchist. The Gandhian spectacles that has been rampantly used by the government in justifying their own policies, by relating those to the Mahatma, appears to be misinterpretations. A major attempt to be taken in this paper is to interpret the Gandhian form of anarchy in the right manner. Beginning the discussion from Gandhi himself and then coming to our contemporary times to find its developments in the prose works of two popular thinkers of this country, one is Arvind Kejriwal – a civil servant turned into a social activist and then a politician, and Chetan Bhagat, a foreign investment banker turned into a novelist and screenplay writer, then finally into a member of the civil society having deep concerns about the future of India. In this paper I shall attempt a threadbare analysis of Arvind Kejriwal’s Swaraj vis-a-vis Chetan Bhagat’s What Young India Wants, referring back from time to time Gandhi and his followers and try to bring out that literature and politics/political philosophies are not detached from one another, but are complementary to each other. Politicians though radical and practical in their thought needs to be imaginative for the progress of the society, and thus starts dwelling in fiction. In the other hand creative writers like Bhagat cannot only dwell upon imaginative dreamlands. For the public acceptance, his fictions need to be grounded into reality and that can only be done by incorporation of the real political or social issues.
Keywords: Swaraj, Anarchy, Politics, Corruption, Development
Translation of a literary text is not only a transaction between two languages, but a kind of com... more Translation of a literary text is not only a transaction between two languages, but a kind of complex negotiation between two cultures. Problems of translation are the problems of languages and cultures as translation is both a linguistic and cultural activity and considered with the communication of meaning. No two languages are ever quite similar in representing the same social reality. Language is always culture-oriented, and each language has its own cultural specificities. So translating those cultural intricacies into a different language pose huge difficulties for a translator. Hence translators are to negotiate not only between the Source and Target languages, but also the cultures too. The translators are to sweat a lot in finding the equivalent words in the Target Language. And sometimes, the equivalents are not available too. At this point the translation depends solely on the creativity of the translator who has to negotiate in the act of recreating the Source Text for the target readers. As a result mistranslation, undertranslation and overtranslation leading to misrepresentations of the Source Text are sometimes noticed in the Target Text. In this paper, attempts have been made to analyse this complex act of translational negotiation in the act of translating Mahasweta Devi’s Bangla story “Rudali” into English by Anjum Katyal.
Key Words: Translation, negotiation, mistranslation, Mahasweta Devi.
When we talk about New Social Movements (NSMs) that evolved in the 1980s in Europe, the need to s... more When we talk about New Social Movements (NSMs) that evolved in the 1980s in Europe, the need to speculate the scope of Indian ‘art’ (or, ‘parallel’) cinema scholarship, that has its incipience as a remarkable treasure house of textual signification and that can today be scarcely differentiated from the domain of literary critical studies and concerned discursive practices, becomes essential. Film as a literary genre is a widely acknowledged interdisciplinary approach which is gradually gaining a lot of ground in the academic parlance today. It has immensely contributed to the advent of the present era of mass culture, where the distinction between ‘high’ culture and ‘low’ culture has gradually eroded. Critical theories of art, aesthetics and literature, when applied to this popular medium, it achieves a new height of novelty. The perception of a film as a text depends on the credulity of the viewers, in the manner in which a literary text is endearing to the readers for its own virtues. It is an art, and indeed a popular art form. Popularity, also readability, and hence reachability as a consequence, if not the sole criterion, may be considered as a reason behind its flourish. While achieving this, a chiaroscuro of a multiplicity of moving images is given birth to in a bid to convey meanings. The role of a film-maker is like that of an author who always looks for new possibilities of significance, either through artistic subtleties in the script or in the nuances of a scene or by way of several creative symbols, motifs, montage and detours.
The present study shall focus on bringing out the voice of the ‘New Woman’ of the East in Satyajit Ray’s Aranyer Din Ratri (‘Days and Nights in the Forest’), in sharp contrast to the ‘New Woman of the West’, a concept that has strongly sought to colonize the former by representing her as the ‘third-world woman’ who is generally categorized as, even if she is not, ‘ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domesticated, family-oriented, victimised’ as opposed to the more ‘educated, modern’ woman of the West who enjoys the ‘“freedom” to make her own decisions’. In an era when the post-colonial subject has had her/his position increasingly retrieved by the resurgent ‘third-world’ (a conventional epithet perhaps used in an attempt to differentiate the supposedly more privileged texts of the so-called ‘first world’) texts, both literary and cinematic, the contributions of film-makers, like Satyajit Ray, constitute a socio-cultural movement, that is intellectually profound, significantly novel and conspicuously marked by a plethora of possibilities of subtle interpretations, whereby all forms of social, political, economic, cultural and linguistic hegemony of the dominant nineteenth-century colonial powers and representatives of sovereignty have come under an indomitable form of resistance.
Key words: Cinema, Culture, Filmography, New Woman, Post-Coloniality, Interpretation.
In a literate society that we now live in, it is difficult in itself, to find out the “psychodyna... more In a literate society that we now live in, it is difficult in itself, to find out the “psychodynamics” of even a residual orality, as Ong has put it in his work, using conventional theoretical tools such as narratological reading practices that deal with the inherent ‘textuality’ of a work. Using Ong’s, Ruth Finnegan’s, and Jan Vansina’s general methodological apparatuses to read the phenomenon of orality closest to its most uncorrupted form, the following paper examines a few songs from the Mwindo Epic from the Banyaga (erstwhile Congo, now Zaire) as explications of orality in pre-modern societies. Finally, having identified three features, viz. repetition, digression and association that connect the peculiarities of the epic form to the pre-requisites of orality, this paper explores the ‘meta-narratological’ elements which connect the “text’s” inherent relationship to the immediacy of a performance- nexus.
Keywords: African Literature, Orality, Literacy, Epic
The paper proposes to make a socio- feminist study of Findley’s The Butterfly Plague. At the prel... more The paper proposes to make a socio- feminist study of Findley’s The Butterfly Plague. At the preliminary level it is proposed to analyze the women The Butterfly Plague. From the perspective of the sociological concept of role play. The twin aspects of fulfilling the roles assigned and playing role(s) for aspiration fulfillment form the ground analysis at this level. Attitudes ranging from unquestioning submissiveness of women to the demands of their counterparts, to their barrier-breaking manipulative play of situations will be the next plane of analysis. The implications inherent in such attitudes will be analyzed from the perspectives of social and interpersonal relationships. It is also proposed to examine how they repressed materials of the women in the novel seek outlet through indulgence in factual rigorousness and/or fantasy visions which take in historical and racial aspects. The paper also proposes to turn its focus on the dialectic between professional aspirations of women in the novel and the real world contingencies and the kind of resolution achieved in The Butterfly Plague from the perspective of the exterior and the interior in the conditions of existence.
Key Words : Twin-aspects, Aspiration-fulfillment, Repressed, Factual rigorousness, Fantasy Visions, World contingencies.
Marginalization refers to the reduction in power and importance of certain people in our country.... more Marginalization refers to the reduction in power and importance of certain people in our country. Marginalization entails segregation, division, exemption, exclusion, separation and declination. Marginality is an experience that affects millions of people throughout the world. People who are marginalized have relatively little control over their lives, and the resources available to them. This results in making them handicapped in delving contribution to society. A vicious circle is set up whereby their lack of positive and supportive relationships mean that they are prevented from participating in local life, which in turn leads to further isolation. Dalits does not refer to a caste, but suggests a group who are in a state of oppression, social disability and who are helpless and poor. Literacy rates among Dalits are very low. They have meager purchasing power and have poor housing conditions as well as have low access to resources and entitlements.
Basudev Sunani is an oriyan poet of growing reputation who has written 5 poems portraying dalit sensibilities. Sunani is very clear and strong in expressing the aspects of marginalization of dalits through his poems ‘SEEK HIM OUT’, and ‘SMELL OF UNTOUCHABILITY’. This paper envisages all the aspects that make a dalit feel marginalized through the roles they are supposed to play in the society. The poems of Sunani serves to be strong proof to the fact how the society views and treats them and also highlights how they are marginalized and prevented from becoming one among the mainstream.
Keywords : Marginalization, Dalits, power, reputation, expression.
The transnational context in migrant narratives depict the culture conflict deeply ingrained in d... more The transnational context in migrant narratives depict the culture conflict deeply ingrained in diasporic lives. BuchiEmecheta’sKehinde is a stark depiction of the male/female difference in occupying the liminal spaces in settler communities. The cultural adaptation and subsequent hybrid identities formed in such transnational lives become the focal point of this work by Emecheta. The African female subjectivity of the protagonist,fighting polygamy and the intervention of her ‘chi’ in guiding her to locate her autonomy is analysed in the paper.
Key Words: migration, race/class/gender, polygamy,dual identity, chi
Theories of Subjectivity have undergone a complete radical change since liberal Humanism, which f... more Theories of Subjectivity have undergone a complete radical change since liberal Humanism, which foregrounded the subject as a fixed all-knowing being in control of what they say or do. According to postmodern theorists of subjectivity, subject is by no means a coherent perceptive structure and is rather an effect of such forces as language, power and ideology. The present paper reads Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party(1958) in the light of thispostmodern view of the subject. Offering anew view of the function of language in Pinter’s play, it focuses on Stanley, the protagonist of the play, as an embodiment of the postmodern notion of the subject and, accordingly, suggests that the events of the play, as a whole, can be taken as a concrete dramatization of the abstract process of the subject-formation. The theoretical framework upon which the present essay is built owes a great deal to LouisAlthusser's post-Marxist notions of ideology, Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA), and interpellation, in the light of which Pinter's The Birthday Partyis read as an allegory of the birth of the subject of/to ideology.
Keywords:Subject, Ideology, Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA), Repressive State Apparatuses (RSA), Interpellation, Louis Althusser
The paper titled “‘Chronicles of a Young Woman in Wartime’: Women and Liberation in Tahmima Anam’... more The paper titled “‘Chronicles of a Young Woman in Wartime’: Women and Liberation in Tahmima Anam’s Works” engages in gynocriticism of the novels A Golden Age (2007) and The Good Muslim (2011). Anam’s novels differ from the existing ones in her effort to rewrite the history of the creation of Bangladesh from women’s perspective. Through the act of re-telling stories of women of her country, their contribution in the sustenance of the country and their unfortunate maltreatment, Anam has critiqued the whole concept of liberation. Anam depends upon memoirs, testimonials, oral narratives for her plot. She tries to create space for marginalized women and their heroism in the historical and nationalist narratives. The concept of home is also problematized and the subjects therefore seek comfort in transferring their anxieties for anchorage and control to their imaginary conceptions of home. Anam herself being a Bangladeshi born, U.S. educated, and London resident, suffers from a sense of ‘tri- country longing’. Through the act of scripting, she participates in the larger struggle for women’s liberation, and engages in forming a secular form of nationalism.
Key words: Bangladesh, Women’s heroism, Memories, Liberation, Nationalism
Uploads
Papers by GNOSIS An International Journal of English Language and Literature
KEYWORDS: Authentic Materials, Criteria, EAP, ESP
Key Words: TREE, ELT, Methods, Theoretical Base, Levels, Activities and Role of T and L
Certain rules ordained to identify such words can come in handy to explain the concept.
This article aims at identifying several such ILH that exist in many Indian languages and the challenges they pose to understanding in general and inter cultural communication in particular.
Key words: Inter Linguistic Homonyms, Indian English, mixed language, pronunciation and meaning, interpretations, cultural communication.
Keywords: monism, Illuminati, Pre-Socratic philosophy, vengeance, conflict
Keywords: Brand, Culture Industry, consumer product, Pottermania, Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling.
Keywords: Swaraj, Anarchy, Politics, Corruption, Development
Key Words: Translation, negotiation, mistranslation, Mahasweta Devi.
The present study shall focus on bringing out the voice of the ‘New Woman’ of the East in Satyajit Ray’s Aranyer Din Ratri (‘Days and Nights in the Forest’), in sharp contrast to the ‘New Woman of the West’, a concept that has strongly sought to colonize the former by representing her as the ‘third-world woman’ who is generally categorized as, even if she is not, ‘ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domesticated, family-oriented, victimised’ as opposed to the more ‘educated, modern’ woman of the West who enjoys the ‘“freedom” to make her own decisions’. In an era when the post-colonial subject has had her/his position increasingly retrieved by the resurgent ‘third-world’ (a conventional epithet perhaps used in an attempt to differentiate the supposedly more privileged texts of the so-called ‘first world’) texts, both literary and cinematic, the contributions of film-makers, like Satyajit Ray, constitute a socio-cultural movement, that is intellectually profound, significantly novel and conspicuously marked by a plethora of possibilities of subtle interpretations, whereby all forms of social, political, economic, cultural and linguistic hegemony of the dominant nineteenth-century colonial powers and representatives of sovereignty have come under an indomitable form of resistance.
Key words: Cinema, Culture, Filmography, New Woman, Post-Coloniality, Interpretation.
Keywords: African Literature, Orality, Literacy, Epic
Key Words : Twin-aspects, Aspiration-fulfillment, Repressed, Factual rigorousness, Fantasy Visions, World contingencies.
Basudev Sunani is an oriyan poet of growing reputation who has written 5 poems portraying dalit sensibilities. Sunani is very clear and strong in expressing the aspects of marginalization of dalits through his poems ‘SEEK HIM OUT’, and ‘SMELL OF UNTOUCHABILITY’. This paper envisages all the aspects that make a dalit feel marginalized through the roles they are supposed to play in the society. The poems of Sunani serves to be strong proof to the fact how the society views and treats them and also highlights how they are marginalized and prevented from becoming one among the mainstream.
Keywords : Marginalization, Dalits, power, reputation, expression.
Key Words: migration, race/class/gender, polygamy,dual identity, chi
Keywords:Subject, Ideology, Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA), Repressive State Apparatuses (RSA), Interpellation, Louis Althusser
Key words: Bangladesh, Women’s heroism, Memories, Liberation, Nationalism
KEYWORDS: Authentic Materials, Criteria, EAP, ESP
Key Words: TREE, ELT, Methods, Theoretical Base, Levels, Activities and Role of T and L
Certain rules ordained to identify such words can come in handy to explain the concept.
This article aims at identifying several such ILH that exist in many Indian languages and the challenges they pose to understanding in general and inter cultural communication in particular.
Key words: Inter Linguistic Homonyms, Indian English, mixed language, pronunciation and meaning, interpretations, cultural communication.
Keywords: monism, Illuminati, Pre-Socratic philosophy, vengeance, conflict
Keywords: Brand, Culture Industry, consumer product, Pottermania, Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling.
Keywords: Swaraj, Anarchy, Politics, Corruption, Development
Key Words: Translation, negotiation, mistranslation, Mahasweta Devi.
The present study shall focus on bringing out the voice of the ‘New Woman’ of the East in Satyajit Ray’s Aranyer Din Ratri (‘Days and Nights in the Forest’), in sharp contrast to the ‘New Woman of the West’, a concept that has strongly sought to colonize the former by representing her as the ‘third-world woman’ who is generally categorized as, even if she is not, ‘ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domesticated, family-oriented, victimised’ as opposed to the more ‘educated, modern’ woman of the West who enjoys the ‘“freedom” to make her own decisions’. In an era when the post-colonial subject has had her/his position increasingly retrieved by the resurgent ‘third-world’ (a conventional epithet perhaps used in an attempt to differentiate the supposedly more privileged texts of the so-called ‘first world’) texts, both literary and cinematic, the contributions of film-makers, like Satyajit Ray, constitute a socio-cultural movement, that is intellectually profound, significantly novel and conspicuously marked by a plethora of possibilities of subtle interpretations, whereby all forms of social, political, economic, cultural and linguistic hegemony of the dominant nineteenth-century colonial powers and representatives of sovereignty have come under an indomitable form of resistance.
Key words: Cinema, Culture, Filmography, New Woman, Post-Coloniality, Interpretation.
Keywords: African Literature, Orality, Literacy, Epic
Key Words : Twin-aspects, Aspiration-fulfillment, Repressed, Factual rigorousness, Fantasy Visions, World contingencies.
Basudev Sunani is an oriyan poet of growing reputation who has written 5 poems portraying dalit sensibilities. Sunani is very clear and strong in expressing the aspects of marginalization of dalits through his poems ‘SEEK HIM OUT’, and ‘SMELL OF UNTOUCHABILITY’. This paper envisages all the aspects that make a dalit feel marginalized through the roles they are supposed to play in the society. The poems of Sunani serves to be strong proof to the fact how the society views and treats them and also highlights how they are marginalized and prevented from becoming one among the mainstream.
Keywords : Marginalization, Dalits, power, reputation, expression.
Key Words: migration, race/class/gender, polygamy,dual identity, chi
Keywords:Subject, Ideology, Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA), Repressive State Apparatuses (RSA), Interpellation, Louis Althusser
Key words: Bangladesh, Women’s heroism, Memories, Liberation, Nationalism