Journal: IAFOR Journal of Literature & Librarianship [ISSN: 2187-0608] | Volume: 9; Issue: 2 | Pages: 26-39 | Publisher: The International Academic Forum (IAFOR)

URL: https://doi.org/10.22492/ijl.9.2.01

This article attempts to contextualize how the idea of geography plays a significant role in speculative fiction. The resultant contention is that the gender dynamics of space and place, regarded in the setting of literary anthropology, can be studied through a close examination of lexical and semantic patterns. Stemming from this line of enquiry, the article revisits Ursula K. Le Guin’s novelette ‘Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight’ and discusses the striking co-relations that emerge when reading into the underlying intersections of gender geography and cultural geography.

International Conference: ACAH2020 Virtual Presentations [54796]

Research Archive: IAFOR: https://vimeo.com/421368146

The research paper attempts to examine as to how the idea of ‘space’ when regarded as a literary construct, is mapped in a given text: first in terms of the literal and obvious elemental descriptions of ‘cartographic geography’ available to a casual reader-aka-somnambulist at a cursory glance; and second, in terms of its logical extension to the abstraction of ‘cultural geography’ that is revealed by one mining a labyrinth of lexical structures. The resultant contention is, the dynamics of ‘space’ in a stipulated context can be studied as a comprehensive ‘sign system’, devoid of extrinsic support. Stemming from this line of enquiry, the proposition is to establish the theoretical connection between ‘Lexical Semantics’ and ‘Cultural Geography’ using Ursula K. Le Guin’s ethnographic fiction as a potential case study. While Cultural Geography correlates the natural environment with the human organization of space, its conceptual base branches into three discursive figments: ‘traditional’ cultural geography (where signs for intervention in the natural landscape are studied – e.g. buildings, dams, technology), ‘new’ cultural geography (where signs for non-material culture are studied – e.g. identity, power, ideology), and ‘more-than-representational’ geographies (where signs expand unto the enactment or performance of the more-than-human, more-than-textual aspects)(Lorimer, 2005). Similarly, Lexical Semantics as an approach to reading a text seeks to assign meanings to words, phrases, expressions or idioms by emphasizing a lush nexus of semantic relations.

International Conference: ACCS2020 Virtual Presentations [54737]

Research Archive: IAFOR: https://vimeo.com/422691372

Given the compass of literary anthropology, the formulaic predilection for a male ‘culture hero’, charging at or circumventing obstacles while being engaged in a quest of epic proportions, has long dominated the narrative-scape in fantasy novels traditionally penned by male authors such as J. R. R. Tolkien, George MacDonald, and C. S. Lewis amongst others. However, this ontological propensity for a preposterously masculinist narrative where the solitary male hero seemingly penetrates and ultimately achieves dominion over the anthropocene trope of the wilderness, i.e. a long-drawn action consummated in the orgasmic ‘climax’ effected in the narrative – has received much criticism by post-modern feminist scholars, notably for the regressive phallocentric approach that these texts propound. While till recently, fighting or slaying dragons either real or metaphoric, mapped in desolate lands and pegged in a far past or a far future, has often taken center stage in fantasy narratives, a novel approach to the very subject has been sparked by eminent writers and critics, such as the likes of Ursula Le Guin who for one deemed it necessary to redesign narrative structures to suit a new-fangled ethic of creative expression. As such, the current research paper seeks to explore Le Guin’s conceptualization of a culture hero encapsulated in the narrative cosmology of The Earthsea Cycle, viewed predominantly from a gynocentric perspective.

 Journal: The International Journal of Literary Humanities [ISSN: 2327-7912 (Print); 2327-8676 (Online) | Volume 22 | Issue 2 | Pages 81-97 | Publisher CGRN:  https://doi.org/10.18848/2327-7912/CGP/v22i02/81-97 |                                                         

If we are to reckon Ursula K. Le Guin as the architect of several liminal ecotopian landscapes, what is most noticeable is her pervasive attitude toward the evolutionary ethic of speculative fiction, which clearly encompasses experimentation on several mind-bending ideas, such as the veracity of accessing other-than-human contexts and models of communication, as well as the examination of complex multisensorial modalities backing such phenomena. As a result, it is evident that Le Guin passionately pronounced the ecocultural imperative as the yardstick of her creative sorties, while she explored radical possibilities for networking life and relationships in fictional geographies. On these lines, the three short stories chosen for discussion—Direction of the Road, The Author of the Acacia Seeds, and Texts—are based on the premise of one perceiving and interpreting what otherwise cannot be easily shaped in words. Can a rhizomatic entity claim sentience and chronicle its saga of psycho-ambulatory movement? Can the eusocial ant be deemed an authentic antiquarian scribe on par with a human? Can the ocean’s spatial language of ebb and flow be adequately deciphered? These are earth-centered thematic questions raised and answered by Le Guin in the vein of imaginative realism. So too, we observe, the distinctive feature that characterizes the author’s narratives is her emphasis on the subject of geo-linguistics and eco-historicism, whereupon every rock, tree, bird, and insect is deemed the hero of one’s own story.

Journal: TULUVA [ISSN-2347-3452] | Volume: 10 | Issue: 1 & 2 | Pages: 41-44 | Publisher: Rashtrakavi Govind Pai Samshodhana Kendra, MAHE, Manipal

This article is a review of Dr. N T Bhat’s momentous work of impeccable scholarship – Poles Apart, Roles Alike – which at the very outset, with a great deal of synchronicity, deems to compare and contrast two eminent stalwarts in history – M K Gandhi and Heinrich Böll. On one hand, we are presented with the apothecary of national conscience – the Mahatma – Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who being a lawyer by vocation, remained a devout political ethicist, displaying an anti-colonialist bearing, one who seamlessly nurtured the path of non-violent resistance, which found its ultimate mien in India's Independence from the British Raj, a gentle victory, which in turn progressively inspired several noteworthy endemic movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. On the other hand, we are stridently greeted by Heinrich Theodor Böll’s chronicles of exemplary resilience in the face of Nazi turmoil and repression, whereupon one avails the rare opportunity to get acquainted with the sinewy grit of one of Germany's foremost post-World-War-II writers, who championed the cause of socialism – to the point that he is laudably greeted today as one who did not buckle under the sardonic autocratic lathe of iron, muscle, powder and fury; thereof, he was aptly awarded with the Georg Büchner Prize in 1967, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972, amongst an entourage of other enterprising accolades.

Journal: PEOPLE: International Journal of Social Sciences [ISSN: 2394-7926] | Volume: 4 | Issue: 1 | Pages: 330-342 | Publisher: Global Research and Development Services, India

URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.20319/pijss.2018.41.330342

The current age in its placid reckoning of rib-tickling political spectacle staged on a global scale has been unanimously dubbed the ‘post-truth era’, an adjectival term which has of late gained wide currency and critical sanction in academic spheres of cultural studies, denoting especially a lambasting incline in titillating media buzz, which is blatantly and consciously churned into the inimical language of caustic ‘kitsch’. As such, the paper at hand as its objective, attempts to theorize and review the petulant phenomenon of kitsch in the post-truth era, by inspecting its varied avatars and inherent complexities from a polemical perspective. In accord, the paper furthermore deems to predicate the cultural bearing of kitsch in the realm of art, aesthetics, politics, media, language, and literature, whereupon the historical origins of the term kitsch has been delineated

Journal: PEOPLE: International Journal of Social Sciences [ISSN 2454-5899] | Volume: 2 | Issue: 1 | Pages: 339-354 | Publisher: Global Research and Development Services, India

URL: https://doi.org/10.20319/pijss.2016.s21.339354

The paper at hand is an attempt to lend perspective to the rhetorical construction of the ‘xeno’ in Gabriel García Márquez’s short stories. In this relation, the notion of the ‘xeno’ is discussed based on the application of diverse theoretical precepts: William Empson’s categories of ‘ambiguity’, Claude Levi Strauss’s concept of ‘bricolage’, Bakhtin’s premise of the ‘carnivalesque-grotesque’ contextualised by the principle of binary opposition, Viktor Shklovsky’s technique of ‘defamiliarization’, and Vladimir Propp’s impression of ‘archetypes’. In continuum, the trope of ‘ambiguity’ is identified as pivotal to the analysis.