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This paper presents English YouTube Stories and Google Forms as an assessment tool to evaluate vocabulary using storytelling techniques, and examines its advantages in the English classroom. The paper explores the current use of Google Forms as an online vocabulary evaluation in English instruction and compares control and experimental group student scores to fill in the gaps that are currently present. A sample of 40 low socioeconomic tertiary level female students (in the age group of 18 to 20 years) with low proficiency in English from Telangana, India, participated in the study. They were all multilingual and multicultural students. The control group, which consisted of 20 students, received no experimental treatment, while the experimental group, which also had 20 students, was given 10 YouTube stories to watch and read the text. The scores for vocabulary knowledge for each story in the form of an assessment were recorded for both groups using Google Forms and compared. The results reveal that YouTube Stories enhance vocabulary development, and Google Forms serve as an ESL assessment tool, which has many advantages like timesaving for teachers, convenience, cost reduction, automatic and accurate score generation and reduced paper waste. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthony Ellis (2011, 13) examines an excerpt from Thomas Elyot's Castel of Health (1541) in which he observes a doctor's conception about growing old: "old age equals the inception of 'bad humor' and calls for professional intervention." The depiction of senescence or biological aging in literature can be analyzed from the perspective of the abovementioned doctor who attaches negative attributes to senescence. This paper focuses on the effects of aging and ageism on Amanda Wingfield from The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams and Ephraim Cabot from Desire Under the Elms by Eugene O'Neill. Both these aging characters are inclined to stick to their habits, lifestyles and preferences they have developed in their earlier years. Their fixation with their earlier lifestyle gives rise to hatred or indifferent attitude of the younger people around them. The paper examines the detachment and disengagement of the two characters from society and their loved ones due to ageism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existential maneuver is a core element of literature. The focus of the paper pertains to the cultural context, notably specific communities endeavoring to embrace new ideologies and the obstacles they face. The paper examines and explains the increasing urgency of confined existential maneuvers and the problems of adapting to a new culture. Mukherjee has authored a medieval metanarrative, The Holder of the World, centered around the character of Hannah Easton, who assumes various roles and personas, including an understanding of American lineage and adherence to Indian customs, and undergoes transformation. The paper analyzes the existential maneuver concept as a transformative motif. It examines how immigrants in literature integrate their identities into a foreign culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the evolution of the postmodern novel in Indian writings in English, with a specific focus on The Great Indian Novel by Shashi Tharoor. Through a close analysis of the novel's themes, structures, and techniques, the paper argues that The Great Indian Novel represents a significant shift in the trajectory of Indian literature, moving beyond the constraints of colonial and nationalist narratives. Drawing on the theories of postmodernism and postcolonialism, the authors examine how Tharoor's novel challenges traditional notions of history, identity and power, and instead offers a complex and nuanced vision of India's past and present. The study also considers the reception of The Great Indian Novel, both within India and abroad, and discusses its impact on the broader field of Indian literature. Overall, the paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the postmodern novel in India and its role in shaping contemporary literary discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines how Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide and Indra Sinha's Animal's People register the sense of vulnerability and precarity of ecocatastrophic experiences and place these experiences in the collective memory of people. The paper explores the interrelation between detrimental human actions and their impact on both human and nonhuman lives and the dimensions which these narratives construct, adapt, and respond to. The paper discusses the ways in which the authors imagine the calamity, its representation, and narration, portraying the slow, unnoticed, unmeasured, and cumulative disaster. It shows how literary texts, in their cultural bearing, enable the reader to realize that human activity is the common link between environmental disasters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes the novel The Circle by Dave Eggers from 'reverse spectacle' perspective, which is an inherent mechanism of panopticism. Foucault elaborates on Bentham's panopticism and associates its function with reverse spectacle. Reverse spectacle is a mechanism by which a few people have complete surveillance over a majority, whereas in spectacle, a majority of people have surveillance over a few people. This mechanism is at work in the dystopian novel The Circle. The Circle, a reputed company, conducts surveillance of almost all people around the world with its digital dominance. The company gains supremacy due to its virtual dominance, and uses it to reverse the power structure in the real world. All this is made possible via constant surveillance by the small company over a larger community, i.e., the world. The modus operandi of the company is shown in the paper as an instance of reverse spectacle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to critically analyze the deployment of 'gay man' as an identity category in Sharif D Rangnekar's autobiographical account Straight to Normal: My Life as a Gay Man (2019). The frequent usage of sexual identities in 'coming out' narratives often tends to reiterate and reify sexuality as a well-defined concept. Using Queer Theory's approach to identity and Akshay Khanna's postcolonial critique of categorical identities, it situates the multilayered nuances of 'gayness' and foregrounds how the hegemony of the sexual identity framework in India engenders psychological and moral dilemmas. It explores spaces like family, school, and workplace, which discursively enforce the culturally dominant images of gay men as effeminate, and unnatural, and treat them as social outcasts. And simultaneously, it probes into the problematics of negotiating the subjective experiences within the emergent collective gay community spaces, which are often dynamic and characterized by the specific community codes of socialization and intimate behavior. The paper highlights this dichotomy as it results in the psychological ambivalence of the narrator, which gets manifested in the alternating tone of the autobiographical voice, and argues how it offers a different approach to identity politics in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sense of home and belonging plays a fundamental role in an individual's existence. In any society's collective consciousness, this idea of home is frequently attached to nationality by birth. This complexity of home and nationality is quite analogous to that in the discourses on motherhood. National identity transcends geopolitical boundaries and is constituted by an individual's subjective sense of home and belonging. Likewise, motherhood cannot be evaluated by the mere presence or absence of biological capacities through the hegemonic framework of pro-natal discourses. In Kunal Basu's Sarojini's Mother (2020), the eponymous protagonist returns to her birthplace in search of her biological mother, which leads to numerous questions about her belonging, nationality, and how motherhood is popularly perceived. This paper debunks the normative ideas about nationality and motherhood through the protagonist's quest. It conceptualizes the novel as a revelation of the pure essence of home and motherhood and clarifies that neither the mother's identity is dependent on the capacity to give birth nor does the idea of a nation depend on the boundaries arbitrarily drawn on the maps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Removed (2021), a novel by Brandon Hobson, a well-known American author from the Cherokee--Native American tribe of the Iroquoian lineage--depicts how the indigenous people are consumed by their family's past, its influence on the present, and the way the present (re)constructs the past with regard to their experiences. The paper investigates the experiences of trauma, memory, and recovery among Native Americans through a critical analysis of the novel, which thematizes the Trail of Tears, a series of forced displacements of five tribes between 1830 and 1850. The paper explores the effect of the past events and the development of hyperarousal, flashback, sense of loss, intrusive conflict, trauma, and healing in the four main characters of the novel, with a focus on the author's use of myth, supernatural, and indigenous knowledge to depict the past. It also shows, by applying Judith Herman, Cathy Caruth, Kai T Erikson, and Ann E Kaplan's theory of trauma and recovery, how the novel depicts the four stages one generally goes through during the process of healing from trauma, viz., remembering what happened, feeling sad about what was lost, reconnecting with people, and understanding what went wrong and how to fix it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper, through a critical analysis of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2014) by Haruki Murakami, addresses the impact of spaces on human perception and consequently, human relations through a phenomenological lens. Henri Lefebvre's idea of the spatial triad informs an understanding of urban space. Besides, the dream space conjured up by Murakami is also probed in detail. The surreal elements in the novel are scrutinized to unravel the suppressed human desire, subconscious guilt, and enduring trauma. Lacanian psychoanalysis, particularly the idea of the three registers and the concept of jouissance, is employed to understand the protagonist Tsukuru Tazaki's mental state. The paper also investigates how the novel reinforces the suburban-urban dichotomy of innocence and experience, of good and bad and represents them through symbols and imagery. Further, it is evident that the narrative strategies employed in Murakami's novel disrupt the idea of time as a linear entity and even transform time into a spatial construct. Lastly, the paper studies how Murakami's novel blurs the line between dream and reality to the extent that dreams become more real than the physical world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper partly discusses Sigmund Freud's seminal work, The Interpretation of Dreams, and interrogates the underlying thesis that literary works operate like dreams and the unconscious by not making explicit statements. The paper relates Freud's thoughts on dreams to Marcel Proust's involuntary explicit memory in order to explain how creative writers recreate historical events by triggering Proustian effect in their characters, not through somatosensory system but through dream motifs. The paper reiterates the functionality of dream mechanism and how dreaming helps to exhume past experiences and memories stored in the unconscious, which cannot be accessed through conscious efforts, yet influence human agency. Antonio Olinto's The King of Ketu (1987) and Prince Justice's Tutuoba: Salem's Black Shango Slave Queen (2007) are critically examined to demonstrate the operationalization of dream processes, especially how the writers leverage dream mechanism to explore repressed experiences of their characters. While Olinto's characters manifest instances of oneirism, déjà vu, trance, and reverie, Justice's characters exhibit the same dream motifs. Both writers use the motifs to intensify the plots of their narratives and teach Afro-Atlantic history and spirituality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a case study documenting the journey of a novice test designer involved in creating a proficiency test for B.Ed. students within a group setting. The study delves into the multifaceted process of test development, administration, score interpretation, item analysis, and quality evaluation. Organized into four sections, the paper offers a comprehensive exploration of each stage of the test creation process. The initial section outlines the process of test creation, highlighting the various considerations and decisions involved. The second section discusses the test scores obtained and their interpretation, shedding light on insights gained from test takers' performance. The third section examines item analysis and strategies for item improvement, which is crucial for refining the test's effectiveness. Lastly, the paper concludes with an evaluation of the test quality, utilizing the five principles of assessment as a framework for analysis. Thus, the case study provides a deeper understanding of the complexities inherent in test development and assessment practices, ultimately fostering growth and proficiency in test design skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses the irreverence and disregard towards the ma(d)isabled bodies in Indian texts and contexts. It focuses on the relation between notions of disability and madness to examine the constructed nature of such terms. The basic proposition is that persons with disability are examined as bodies on the boundary: It is the boundary that defines normalcy. However, it is the same boundary that brings together those elements that challenge the boundary. What defines disability or madness is not its nature, but its relation to what has been institutionalized. The paper examines Jerry Pinto's Em and the Big Hoom (2013) to analyze what terms like 'disability' and 'madness' are invested within the Indian context. It is interesting to note the multivalent meanings that ensue and how they are peculiar to a culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The environmental uncanny, as Amitav Ghosh proclaims in The Great Derangement, is the statistically improbable weather phenomena observed across the globe. The recent unprecedented increase in the occurrence of such events presents an onto-epistemological challenge to the global capitalist superstructure. Taking a cue from this, the paper investigates Ghosh's two powerful works, Gun Island and The Great Derangement, within the theoretical paradigm of eco-cosmopolitanism and the onto-epistemological system of Advaita. By synthesizing elements of eco-cosmopolitanism--an evolving paradigm that posits a global, interconnected approach to environmental concerns--and the ancient non-dualist philosophical system of Advaita, this paper seeks to unravel layers of ecological consciousness, resilience, and transformative potential of religious faiths and indigenous knowledge traditions inherent in Ghosh's literary tapestry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fairy tales, despite having occupied an important place in one's childhood, were not given their due importance in the literary world until recently. The dangers in the ideologies propagated through the traditional fairy tales, especially concerning women, were not realized or acknowledged on account of various reasons, which form the basis of the analysis in this paper. The paper also gives an overview of the changes the literary fairy tale has gone through right up to the twentieth century, with a focus on the re-visioned tales that exude feminist empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marriage is a socially approved relationship between a man and a woman that binds each other into a permanent, official relation of husband and wife. In a patriarchal culture, the husbands personify dominance and liberty, whereas the wives are expected to be the epitome of fidelity, fecundity and chastity. In the Indian context, the intense devotion of wives towards their husbands defines married women as pativratas. The present study intends to analyze the various aspects that contribute to and shape the formation of the identity of a wife in a marital space through Ponna and Singarevva, the female protagonists of the novels One Part Woman and Singarevva and the Palace, respectively. The paper demonstrates how these female protagonists' identity as wives gets suppressed over a period of time and how they succeed in reconstructing their identities, sailing against all odds stacked against them. The paper views these issues through the feminist theoretical lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Revisionist writing has gained critical acclaim in recent times. Apart from being a literary and creative endeavor that attracts a wide range of readership, it also brings in new avenues of interpretation to the existing narrative by often postulating relational and critical inquiry into certain pertinent issues of the present times. This paper critically interprets Popuri Lalita Kumari's (popularly known as Volga) seminal novel The Liberation of Sita (2016) from a feminist revisionist stance. Using the tool of revisionism, the paper analyzes not only how the writer gives voice and space to the marginalized characters of the epic, subverting the grand narrative, but also depicts 'sisterhood' as an emblem of collective consciousness, defining the essence of human relationships on the one hand, and advocating women empowerment through the process of liberalization on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is part of a larger study examining the effects of Computer- Assisted Language Learning (CALL) on secondary school students' achievement in learning English pronunciation, which was carried out in December 2016 in Kenya. The paper seeks to determine the difference in English language pronunciation achievement between two groups of secondary school students in Gucha subcounty, Kenya: those taught using CALL and those taught using the traditional method. The content taught was the same, and while the experimental group was exposed to CALL method, the control group was taught through the traditional method. The two groups were tested prior to the implementation of CALL treatment. The findings revealed that CALL positively affects students' achievement in English pronunciation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subversion of Sanskrit literature is a trope in Dalit literature that allows the exploration of Dalit identities in territories of discourse that were forbidden to them. The 2021 Kerala Sahitya Academy Award-winning novel Moustache by S Hareesh inverts the epic Ramayana by writing an immoral, ignoble, and superhuman Dalit man as its protagonist. This novel critiques the classical tropes by satirizing glorious happy endings of classical Sanskrit literatures. It presents the reality of casteism as a folly to the epic. This novel is also a commentary on the inglorious nature of masculinity in intersection with caste to deride the failings of masculinities as a hegemonical structure. But the language of this criticism has derivatives from colonial tropes of caste communities written into the memory of Indian society through sociopolitical institutions for governance in colonial India. This hampers the criticism of Indian social structure by intercepting the language of criticism. This paper is a study of language used to describe masculinities in the novel Moustache, with the purpose tracing the tropes and oriental constructs of Asian men in the novel to reveal the overlap between a colonial criticism of Oriental society and intersectional criticism of caste and gender in Moustache. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials through a Deleuze and Guattarian lens, reading it as a utopian imaginary that attempts to provide an alternate vision of the world. Acclaimed to be a path-breaking work, the trilogy transcends traditional genre classification by addressing some existential, philosophical, and metaphysical questions while romancing the young-adult literature genre. It moves effortlessly across the boundaries between past and present, reality and fantasy, and the eminence of the works lie in the conflicts that emerge at these meeting points. Through his iconic work, Pullman attempts to displace the power of the Western metanarrative and suggests his own democratic version of identity formation. He displaces the metanarrative of the 'Kingdom of Heaven' and replaces it with the notion of 'The Republic of Heaven' placing its roots in a utopian scheme that envisages a society ungoverned by any religious institution, where sexual pleasure, gaining knowledge, and living to the fullest form the basis of good living--a reterritorialized world of freedom and agency. The works have a trenchant poignance in the post-pandemic dystopia and provide solace with their life-affirming alternate vision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graphic novels can be integral to enhancing curriculum standards. However, comic books, as educational material, still remain controversial in certain education systems, as this medium is regarded by some as sheer entertainment, thereby hindering students' motivation to seek out informal, picture-based literature to read. Graphic adaptation being of great interest to many students, this literary medium may well increase the motivation of young readers to engage in reading and literacy. This paper shows how graphic adaptation can prove to be an effective way to introduce students to classic works of literature, with an analysis of Anne Frank's Diary: The Graphic Adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a connection between human beings and their physical environment. Any disruption to this connection as a result of changes in the environment affects the individual. Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World focuses on the underlying melancholic feeling of an individual in relation to the changes in the external environment or, in other words, solastalgia. Through the characterization of an old painter named Masuji Ono, the novel makes the readers contemplate on the significance of the connection between human beings and the external physical world. This paper, using the idea of solastalgia by Glenn Albrecht, scrutinizes the different kinds of spatialities in Ishiguro's work. Simultaneously, it also delineates the inherent pain in the mind of the central character, Ono, by mapping the connections between him and the external landscape, uncovering in the process, the numerous spaces seen in the narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of a nation is nebulous as a construct to be restricted within the confines of a definition and is relived and revisited through the chronicles of history across time and space (and not only academic spaces). The epistemological and ontological configurations of the construct of a nation depicts it as a liquefied narrative to be construed from diverse angles. In his work, The Renaissance in India and Other Essays on Indian Culture, Sri Aurobindo talks about India as a nation in the face of Western incursions and posits the concept of an Indian renaissance in the mode of a reawakening or revival of the original spirit of the nation along with its ideals. He refers to a new India trying to recover herself to arrive at a healthy revival by returning to the spiritual motif which is the basic foundation of her culture, but she must apply the same procedure to every aspect of the nation's life--art, literature, poetry, polity, and religion. She is the Bharata Shakti operating on the basis of her spiritual energy, trying to sustain a balance between the mind, body and spirit. This paper explores the diverse interpretations of the concept of nation as represented by Sri Aurobindo (2019). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to evaluate the ESL student-teachers' English proficiency levels and analyze the associated test instrument's quality features such as reliability, validity, practicality, authenticity, and washback. The study was conducted at EFL University with a cohort of 18 student-teachers from diverse mother tongue backgrounds. The proficiency test comprised four sections, i.e., reading, vocabulary, grammar, and writing, each contributing to a total score of 50 marks. Multiple choice questions (MCQs) were employed to ensure objectivity in scoring and evaluation. The analysis of the proficiency test instrument focused on its practicality, construction, administration, scoring, and ease of interpreting results. Data obtained from the test were analyzed using the mean scores of each test-taker, with particular reference to the performance in each section. The findings indicated that the test-takers performed uniformly as a group. They further demonstrated a uniform level of performance among the student-teachers, with the proficiency test fulfilling its intended purpose. The test appears to meet all established criteria for a standard assessment instrument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women’s bodies become the sites of confrontation during times of communal crisis. When violence is unleashed on a woman’s body, the body performs two roles: ensuring physical and mental compliance to refrain from exercising their agency and safeguarding the domination of the patriarchal structure and practices of their respective social group. The second function is to perform the desire of the instigator of violence. The current paper proposes to undertake a comparative study of the representation of violence against women during the communal riots that followed the Malabar Rebellion in 1921 and the Partition of India in 1947. To substantiate the above argument, the paper cross-examines two movies, 1921 and Pinjar, and two literary texts, This Is Not That Dawn and “Duravastha,” to display violence on a woman’s body to reinforce the symbolic and physical marginalization across multiple social groups. The paper explains the commonality in treating women’s bodies as a measuring unit for society’s wellbeing across southern and northern parts of the Indian subcontinent. The comparative study of both the films and novels expounds on the precarious location of women characters placed within the gambit of a specific social group during the turbulent political climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Animal studies is a flourishing field of scholarship that focuses on human-animal interactions, representations of those interactions, and their ethical, social and political implications. Nonhuman animals are much more than a binary opposite to human animals. The animals that figure in literary works are quite often sidelined in our critical studies. This paper delves deep into the treatment of animals in the Borgesean oeuvre. At the outset, the theoretical framework is formulated, and the textual politics of animals in the works of Borges is analyzed in the ensuing part. The paper is predicated on the premise that Borges imparts complex philosophical ideas by recounting the animalia in his works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study investigates the role of context builders in meaningful formation of Dogri folktales. Context determines meaning, and when language users employ it in folktales, the meaning is understood through intuition, native knowledge, and interpretation, further supported by grammatical structures. The traditional folklorists study tales--they provide interpretation or analyze their grammatical structures, but in the process one of them is compromised. However, this paper endeavors to strike a balance between the two when it analyzes Dogri folktales. The focus is to analyze folktales and their narrative structure while closely studying the interrelated events that lead to the formation of their discourse. For that, contextual information comes to the forefront, and the roles of cohesive units like discourse markers, topic words, creativity, and others become quite important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the centrality of autobiographical memory in the construction of self and the experience of cultural trauma through the narrative of Thomas McNulty in the novel Days Without End. The character recalls the gruesome wars and cruel famine, which caused much agony and suffering throughout his life. The study attempts to make a textual analysis by employing the framework of autobiographical memory to interpret the complex relationship between the personal and collective selves. The novel adopts a unique form of autobiographical narrative to represent a personal and social history, thus functioning as a cultural narrative. The memory of the famine trauma is embodied in the personal story of Thomas McNulty, who recalls the national crisis that occurred during the 1840s. Trauma occupies a substantially large portion of the autobiographical narrative. He relays his experiences of painful existence in his native land and struggles to establish his cultural identity in a foreign land. Hence, the paper aims to analyze the characteristics of personal memory and trauma manifested in the narrative for the representations of Irish collective memory and cultural trauma of the Great Famine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indra Sinha's Animal's People (2007) offers a closer look at the aftermath of a toxic disaster through a disabled teenager who calls himself Animal. Inspired by the Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984 and its repercussions, Sinha's fictional city of Khaufpur is a site of environmental injustice and corporate violence. This analysis tries to understand the material manifestations of the disaster in the novel through the framework of material ecocriticism. Material ecocriticism is one of the latest developments in the field of ecocriticism. Ecocriticism, which aims to understand the relationship between literature and environment, studies the material and discursive interconnections and interactions through material ecocritical scholarship. The paper tries to see how the material representations work throughout the novel to depict the environmental violence and marginalization. The novel provides what this paper calls as a 'fragmented materiality,' which needs to be 'pieced together' in order to understand the reality of Khaufpur. Using the idea of transcorporeality, put forth by Stacy Alaimo which has deeply influenced material ecocriticism, this paper attempts to understand the nuanced portrayal of life, disease and damage in a toxic landscape through Animal and his story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies and Rishi Jheengun's Untangling the Knot: Tribulations and Legacy of a Coolie to critically study the lives of the people who migrated from India to Mauritius as indentured laborers, alternatively known as 'coolies' or 'girmitiya.' The two works heavily draw from archival record and anthropological data, while also portraying elements such as religion, folklore, and culture as integral parts of indentured lives. Using critical discourse analysis, this paper employs religion as a tool for investigating the girmitiya migration and their identity formation. Further, it uses Counted and Zock's idea of place spirituality and Sunden's roletaking theory to understand the role of religion in the journey across the Kala Pani. In the process, the paper also attempts to analyze the role and significance of the Ramayana in the construction of the identity of the girmitiya and their succeeding generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revolves around a pedagogical initiative undertaken by the authors involving different stages of classroom activity that worked integrally to derive an effective and engaging output benefitting the teacher and the learner alike. The classroom activity is based on the approaches recommended by Bruner's (1987), Kolb's (1984), and Kuh's (2008) dictums of learning such as constructivist theory, concrete experience, and providing opportunity for participation. The first phase involves a role-reversal activity in a business management course. Here a student dons the role of a teacher and the teacher that of a participant observer in a feedback session of a written task. The second phase centers around the viewing of this feedback session of the written task by another batch of students. The researcher examines whether such classroom activities optimize opportunities for enhancing classroom learning, critical thinking and student engagement while offering realistic opportunities in a risk-free environment to the students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of reconstructing nationhood and national identity in terms of culture, religion, language, politics, etc. has become one of the greatest challenges faced by the colonized countries after their achieving political freedom. In his novels, Ngũgĩ wa Thiang'o criticizes the presence of "imperial tradition" in African countries, fostered by the local neocolonial bourgeois, as it is detrimental to the reconstruction of national identity and culture. His novels draw the readers' attention to the "resistance tradition" in the post-independent colonized nations, focused on reconstructing their national identity; however, the continuing imperial tradition makes the struggle a perennial one. This paper explores the elements of constraints in the process of reconstruction activities attempted by African natives to establish nationhood and national identity from cultural debris, with reference to selected works of Ngũgĩ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postcolonial "writing back" and resistance concur on their common goal to question, subvert and critique imperialist and hegemonic discursive practices. Former postcolonial writing attempted to provide agency to the subject from within the binaries of the colonized Self and the colonizing Other. However, the conceptual categories of hybridity, liminality and contrapuntal reading, as explicated by postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Edward Said respectively, provide better discursive strategies which enable voicing the hitherto silenced voices, which also enable breaking away from the limiting framework of binaries. Through an analysis of P Sachidanandan's The Book of Destruction (2005; translated in 2012) and Tabish Khair's The Thing About Thugs (2012), which pivot the Indian secretive cult of thugs and the practice of thugee, this paper argues that the discussion of thugee and the narratives of violence in the novels do not just validate the need to understand and accept "deviant" cultures, but also provide the context to discuss postcolonial issues of marginalization, identity and the creation of alternative narratives which subvert/resist the macro narratives created by imperialism and the nation-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecopoetics, a subgenre of the ecocritical movement, focuses on human beings' impact on nonhuman world and various ecological concerns. It draws people's attention to the deep link that exists between man and nature. Poets like A K Ramanujan, Nissim Ezekiel, and T Vasudeva Reddy have brought out the interrelationship between human and nonhuman realms in their own distinct way in their works. This paper analyzes selected works of the abovementioned Indian poets to highlight the presence of various ecopoetic elements in the same. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'language of breathlessness' and 'systemic distortions in breathing patterns,' often termed as 'postcolonial breathlessness,' mark the narrative techniques of almost all the postmodern and postcolonial writers to match the uncertainties that prevail at the backdrops of their fictional works. A number of Salman Rushdie's novels mark the unusual properties of breath in providing an interface between the physiological, the metaphoric and the linguistic. Rushdie has used a variety of narrative techniques to depict the theme of 'postcolonial breathlessness,' namely, Magic Realism, 'pessoptimistic divide, "chutnification of history,' and many other binary oppositions. One such set of elements is the Grotesque and the Aesthetics. The interplay between these two elements is prominent in Rushdie's fictional writings. This paper focuses on the last scene of The Moor's Last Sigh where the interplay weaves an intricate design to portray the final catastrophic climax of Moor's 'combat breathing' amidst 'intergenerational conflict' in Vasco Miranda's palace in Benengeli. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Space has various meanings; while sometimes it can be expansive, at others it can be condensed into a particular frame. When power comes into question, space is internalized and subsequently challenged. The spaces of Seamus Heaney's writings are an extension of the wide expanse of the space of Ireland in general. The geographical spaces project fault lines distributed across religious, political and social grounds, and Heaney's poetry broadens this view of the Northern and Southern Ireland, trying to reestablish the lost Irish identity, entangled within the complexities of history and culture. Through the recollections of childhood, Heaney dwells on the rural landscape forming an essential part of nativity arising from the regionalism in question. This paper explores the relationship between the social and spatial aspects of Ireland as seen in Heaney's writing space. It is interpreted through Edward Soja's concept of Thirdspace that encompasses the socio-spatial and the spatial-temporal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subversion of the body and mind of women is a complex and pervasive issue that has been present throughout history. It takes many forms, from physical violence and sexual assault to more subtle forms of discrimination and social conditioning. However, even less overt forms of violence, such as verbal harassment and intimidation, can significantly impact women's wellbeing and sense of safety. This paper is an exploration of Atwood's novel Bodily Harm to expose the inhuman and stigmatic attitudes meted out against women by subverting their bodies and minds. Further, this paper is based on the argument that power politics, gender discrimination, and trauma reflect changes in the lives of Rennie, the protagonist, and other female characters while pointing out the problems they face and the reasons for the problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Translation is an art. To some extent, it is an operation performed across two languages. A single language has many a variety with regard to its characteristics and the uses by its speakers. The varieties are an idiolect, a dialect, slang, register, jargon, pidgin, creole, etc. Dialect changes every sixty kilometers of a place. The factors causing changes in a language variety are manifold. The main reasons are socio-historical and linguistic. Geographically settlements, migrations, language contacts, and language groups contribute for the formation of dialects. Linguistically, word and word meaning, rule extension, pronunciation, and grammaticalization, etc. form the ground for dialects. The levels of difference in a dialect are lexical, phonological, grammatical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. The present paper proposes to analyze the lexical variations inherent in different Tamil dialects and their English translations. Lexis is a unit of sentence or vocabulary of a language. The variation of words occurs when different dialect speakers use varying words for the same context. For the present analysis the three different famous Tamil dialects namely, the Tamil Brahmin dialect, Coastal Muslim dialect and Tamil Dalit dialect have been chosen. It further analyzes the characteristics of lexical differences and causes and also explains the circumstances that create new words like compounding, blending, clipping, borrowing, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecofeminism is a modern venture that aims at achieving gender equality as well as nature's empowerment, but the Covid-19 pandemic has added more to its definition. The increasing violence against women during the pandemic has revealed the greater necessity to fight for them and their liberation. The nature-culture binary has been almost dissolved by the pandemic, resulting in a chaotic situation. The confinement of human beings liberated nature and allowed it to breathe freely, but the condition of women still seemed ambiguous. Though nature was temporarily emancipated from human interference, women's confinement with men within the boundaries of household activities increased the violence meted out to them. Hence, we need to liberate both women and nature simultaneously to make the earth a better living place. This paper takes a relook at the established notion of ecofeminism against the backdrop of the post-pandemic by re-reading the poems by two South Indian women poets, i.e., Meena Kandasamy and Perundevi, through the lens of ecofeminism. It also conveys how poetry, through its intermingling themes of women, nature, and pandemics, served as a revolutionary tool during the quarantine period to liberate women and nature from the long-built shackles of patriarchal oppression. The study aims to fulfill the objectives of gender equality and ecological sustenance, which in turn, are the sole objectives of the theory of ecofeminism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ngugi wa Thiong'o, a revolutionary writer from Kenya, presents the sufferings of the main characters and the common people in his novel, Petals of Blood, who struggle to survive in a village called Ilmorog due to neocolonial policies. The characters of Ngugi hope for a better future after Kenya is liberated from British colonial rule. Soon, they are disillusioned as neocolonial forces in the form of industrialization, capitalism, market forces, and corruption take control of Kenya. The people of Ilmorog had to fight against their own government for their rights even after achieving independence from the colonial rule. On the other hand, Pico Iyer is an Anglo-American prolific writer of travelogues. He is an essayist and novelist who primarily focuses on describing multicultural aspects in various countries, especially in Asia, in the wake of globalization. In his essay on Ladakh, a Union Territory of India, Pico Iyer observes the impact of mindless tourism, which has been systematically destroying the culture, traditions, economy, and spirituality of the Ladakhi people. He takes a jibe at the neocolonial forces that undermine the fragile texture of Ladakh and warns of the irreversible consequences that can happen due to the commodification of the people of the Himalayan region. By contrasting the two regions, the paper advocates the need to resist the commodification of human and natural resources in the yet-tobe-modernized Ladakh. Indeed, Ngugi's Ilmorog serves as an eye-opener for protecting and preserving Ladakh's unique culture from the clutches of neocolonial exploitative forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper proposes to critically deconstruct the image of Africa projected in the movie, Black Panther from a postcolonial perspective. The postcolonial visual narrative has supplanted the stereotypical colonial narrative by empowering a black man as a super hero. The paper has also attempted to highlight the reversal of colonial stereotypes which positions blacks not as slaves but as masters of science and technology in the modern world. It also problematizes the paradigm shift in race, gender and politics in the movie by exploring the theme of Afrofuturism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper attempts to unravel Manju Kapur's The Immigrant that relentlessly branches out relatable episodes by putting forth a transparent portrayal of diasporic dislocation of identity and culture. The paper explores the cultural association of oneself with one's own habitat by peeling off layers after layers of the feelings of loneliness and being uprooted from one's own cultural milieu. The usage of the adjective "diasporic" in the title of the paper embodies an "immigrant" who migrates to other countries in search of better opportunities, eventually submitting oneself to the language, culture and social traditions of the host country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students learning English via distance education encounter emotionally wearying barriers (Hurd 2000). This paper highlights qualitative data from a bigger study investigating students' Emotional Intelligence (EI) and their distance education. 238 students completed a questionnaire with the Schutte's Self-Report Inventory, generating their EI scores, demography, and views about the English course. 18 respondents chosen based on their EI were interviewed. The qualitative data were analyzed, classified, and generated using grounded theory and content analysis. This paper showcases a case study to illuminate how a low EI student grappled with her experiences in learning English and how EI interventions in English language and distance learning programs could help students overcome the adversities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a critical reading of the mnemic mode of representing, remembering and disseminating a community's history through visual archives and oral performance as represented in Amitav Ghosh's River of Smoke (2011). In the novel, Ghosh imaginatively characterizes Deeti, the matriarch of the La Fami Colver community, as creating a visual archive of her community's movement from the inland plains of various parts of Eastern India to the Mauritius. That the visual archive-called Deeti's Memory-temple-is not informed by a lithic logic (which was one of the governing principles of the modern European archival processes of the time), but is, instead, determined by embodied and performative acts of reliving memories is central to this paper. By moving away from a textual archive of memory and instead, paying attention to creative visual narrative forms, Deeti's mode of archiving, it is argued, is an illustration of other non-narrative traditions of archival methods already in place in Indic traditions. The paper highlights the imperial cosmopolitan vision that characterized European modes of assimilation of knowledge being countered by Deeti, enabling a discursive movement from technologies of memorialization to a cultural memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Undoubtedly, Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved is a work of fiction whose main function is not only to depict a story of slavery and emancipation, but also to produce a universal insight, a possible philosophical overview, and promote an aesthetic taste for receiving culture, language, and history from a different point of view, perhaps a “New Consciousness.” While analyzing the text Beloved, we understand how the language game itself is responsible for creating a decoded sense of “Signification” based on its usage of “rhetorical tropes”— an idea that has been minutely illustrated by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his theory of “Signifyin(g) Monkey”—a theory of “Signification” indigenous to Black American literature. This paper demonstrates an intersectional application of Black American “Aesthetics” and “New Consciousness” to Toni Morrison’s Beloved. At the same time, the paper also demonstrates the possible application of Black American “Aesthetics’’ and the idea of “New Consciousness” beyond the Black American canon, taking several references from postcolonial literary criticism, theory, and the very concept of “Third World Consciousness.” With the help of the “Compare and Contrast” research technique, the paper explores the possible applications of Black American “Aesthetics’’ and “New Consciousness” as reflected in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The meaning of the phrase “prostitutes Nigerian style” is interrogated by the female protagonist of Emecheta’s Double Yoke (1983, 141). Although the novel is primarily set in independent Nigeria, this paper analyzes the theme of female submission in the novel vis-à-vis dominant sexual intercourse powers to procure agency for discourses on basic human rights: to live, to educate, and to work freely within the national boundary. Drawing on the discursive idea of Dworkin (1987, 10) on intercourse in a man-made world, characterized by “depravity, debauchery, dissoluteness,” this paper argues that Emecheta’s novel calls into question why the existing hearings for an unimaginable devaluation of womanhood are still unrecorded, why the discourses of human rights and liberty fall short of women’s needs, and how their existence is fraught by torture, beatings, and sexual punishments via the State’s educational institutions and other governing organizations such as National Electric Power Authority (NEPA), Nigeria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines and analyzes Ben Okri’s novel Songs of Enchantment (1993), which reflects his diverse and protean opinion of the social and political upheavals in post-independent Nigeria through the congruous amalgamation of the mythical, magical, and real. Okri situates his characters, especially protagonist Azaro, the abiku child, on the threshold of two worlds—the tangible, humane, and concrete/real world and the intangible, supernatural, abstract, and mythical world of the spirits. The act of deliberate blurring of boundaries between these two worlds exemplifies the ‘in-betweenness’ of Azaro’s existence. The paper discusses the theoretical evolution of the concept of ‘liminality’ and renowned Indian-British scholar and critical theorist Homi K Bhabha’s understanding of the implications of the term ‘liminality.’ He contends three important aspects of ‘liminality’—in-between spaces, cultural difference, and hybridity. These aspects have been taken into consideration to locate the character of Azaro and his journey in a ‘liminal’ space—a passage of constant fluidity where the protagonist Azaro dwells in a ‘borderland’ or ‘in-between space’/threshold. Real-life experiences merge with the mythic realm to create a world beyond chaos and mysterious occurrences. Dreams and reality coalesce to create a ‘liminal zone’, which transforms into a ‘transcultural space’ for the characters with multiple identities, fractured identities/self-fragmented identities. The ‘hybrid’ identity of the protagonist Azaro in the Famished Road Trilogy situates him in a ‘third space’ where ‘cultural difference’ unchains him from the traditional stereotype descriptions and presents him as a challenge to the established notions and conceptualizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the folktales of jackals in the less-explored Santal folklore. It foregrounds the unique interdependence of humans and animals in these folktales, inconsistent with the contemporary subject-object dichotomy between the human and animal worlds. Rather than being passive objects of literary discourse, animals in Santal folktales are depicted as potential individuals with “agency” who participate in various sorts of interaction. By questioning anthropocentricity, this study examines how the man-animal dichotomy is challenged by the jackals’ active engagement in Santals’ everyday lives and how the jackals are represented as closest neighbors of humans. In the process, it deploys a critical discourse analysis method to analyze stories from Bodding’s three-volume collection of Santal folktales. Drawing on concepts like anthropomorphism, animal agency, and animal cognition, this paper examines the symbiotic relationship between Santals and jackals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the practice of translation as a cultural activity foregrounding the fact that language and culture are intricately connected. Literary translation involves various challenges, wherein finding the cultural equivalence is of prime importance. Ostensibly, applying an appropriate translation strategy and approach is another significant task. This necessitates an in-depth understanding of concepts of translation studies such as equivalence, domestication and foreignization. Drawing on insights from these concepts, this paper attempts a critical assessment of the English translation of Ramnath Shastri's acclaimed play Bawa Jitto (1599) in terms of cultural issues in translation. Further, the paper examines the experience of both the translator and the reader, who in this paper are the author and the co-author, of translating and reading the text in its source language, that is Dogri, and its target language, that is, English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women do enjoy importance in most of the civilizations and cultures, including Indian society. However, in reality, women are never considered equal to men and are kept away from the position of power. It is this suppression of women in general that, over time, sparked the emergence of the feminist movement in Western society. Feminism essentially emphasizes social, economic, and political equality of the sexes. In her novel Ladies Coupé, Anita Nair, an author from Kerala, narrated the constraints imposed by the shifting social norms on the lives of women and the resilience with which the protagonist and her fellow travelers fought against societal constraints to free themselves and shape their destiny. The journey these ladies undertook is not only physical but also emotional in character, and as a result, each woman has a deeper awareness of who she is. This paper attempts to trace the resistance that these women faced in their journey to establish their identity and the outcome thereof. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]