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Delirium is a psychiatric disorder featuring disturbance of consciousness and cognitive changes, usually secondary to underlying medical conditions. It commonly occurs in hospitals, particularly in postoperative settings. Despite its frequency, its description in literature, specifically in Southeast Asian literature, is rare. This paper examines "Last Days in Hospital," a contemporary poem by Malaysian poet Wong Phui Nam, as part of an interdisciplinary Medicine and Humanities module at a medical university. It explores the evidence for delirium from the poem and the sound imagery that further bolsters the diagnosis, and examines the synthesis of these two factors in contributing to the poem's being a unique and interesting way of looking at contemporary portrayals of delirium in poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the novels The Powerbook and Lighthousekeeping by contemporary British writer, Jeanette Winterson, this paper discusses the figure of the storyteller in the context of postmodern narrative negotiations. The analysis charts the presence of an often active storyteller whose intense preoccupation with the creation of new worlds leads to innovative language. To this end, the paper argues that Winterson's work is imbued with many characteristics associated with postmodernism, including intertextuality, parody, pastiche, selfreflexivity, fragmentation, the questioning of master narratives, the problematizing of closure, the valorization of instability, and the rejection of coherence. The postmodern stance of Winterson's storyteller clearly aims to challenge the patriarchal and heterosexist discursive practices by encouraging an oppositional position. Particularly concerned with creating new spaces for articulating and celebrating marginalized identities and desires and clearly repudiating a 'master' narrative, Winterson's strategy is to give voice to alternative narratives and to target the fixed, unitary narrative that depicts whole and coherent individuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a linguistic stylistic analysis of Walt Whitman's lyric, "One's Self I Sing". The study involves an analysis and synthesis that examine how ordinary simple language has been used in the realization of a particular subject matter, quantifying all the linguistic means that coalesced to achieve a special aesthetic purpose. These linguistic features as applied here to Whitman's poem include how, through a network of lexical selection (diction), the tone in the text is revealed; how the stylistically significant phrasal and clausal typology, sentence structures and punctuation patterns have combined to produce the aesthetics of the poem under study. The 'democratic theme' in the poem is brought out with amazing flexibility and dexterity. Additionally, the paper also looks into the aspects of Formalist Criticism and how these aspects help the reader to focus on the form which eventually leads to the content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generally, subaltern literature is related to colonizer-colonized framework within a society. In this research paper, the author wishes to put forward some ideas regarding the cultural, social and economic spheres of the society and the subalternity of the Dalit women in it. The Dalits are marginalized and when one is talking about the Dalit woman, she becomes more than thrice marginalized as we believe in patriarchy and our rules are such that they do not give any kind of liberty to a woman. Here, a woman is depicted with a new point of view of being subaltern as she is Dalit and a widow, and moreover, she is a single parent. The author wishes to take interest in the character of a mother who is a wholesome nourishment to the son who, at last, accepts the rumors about his mother being a 'slut'. Why cannot our patriarchal society accept a mother being alone and still pure in her relationships? If she has relation with someone after being a widow, why cannot she marry a person of her choice? Why do males have wrong 'concepts' about a widow but cannot accept her being with someone else? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Don DeLillo's now-cult 9/11 novel, Falling Man. It provides a framework for reading the novel, arguing that to simply treat it as a literary expression of trauma is inadequate, given the layers that DeLillo gives his narratives. Building on a variety of theoretical concepts, specifically Freud and later psychoanalysts, and cultural theorists such as Nicholas Royle, on the uncanny, and Christine Battersby, Kimberley Segall, and others on the sublime, the paper argues that DeLillo's central trope of dematerialization recalls the uncanny and in fact treats the events of 9/11 as uncanny, with its ghostly doublings and the central image of fading and transience. Having established the uncanny's dematerialization as a synecdoche for the events of 9/11, DeLillo, the paper argues in its second part, suggests a traumatic sublime. The traumatic sublime emerges in the novel from the condition of uncanny perception (of 9/11) through the presence of two components: repetition and incorporation of the foreign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the function of trauma as a political apparatus in Barnes's (2016) latest novel The Noise of Time. Focusing on the artistic life of worldly, well-known Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, Barnes's narrative shows how trauma, as a dominant political apparatus, is systematically implemented by Stalin's State of Terror or Power and how it dramatically impacts the psychological state of an artist. By presenting three stages of the central character's traumatic experiences, the omniscient narrator represents trauma's continuous impact on Shostakovich's mind through his own retrospective perspective. The narrative focuses on Shostakovich's constant sense of fear and intense panic at three decisive points of life when he finds himself in humiliating conversations with Power. The narrative presents the manner in which Shostakovich's mind is possessed by the horrors, fears, and anxieties of both his traumatic experiences and posttraumatic recollections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Guterson in his Snow Falling on Cedars weaves a fiction around the trial for the murder of Carl Heine, an American. Though a work of fiction, the novel remains faithful to its portrayal of the persistent prejudice against the Japanese Americans in various forms. Kabuo Miyamoto, a Japanese American, accused of the murder faces prejudice among the whites of San Piedro, a fictional island, with even the judges not being objective during the hearing of the case. The author traces, in this narration of the tale of a wronged individual, a series of betrayal meted out to the entire Japanese American community. This paper sees the prejudice against Kabuo in the trial as a smaller manifestation of the general racial hatred towards the entire section of the Japanese Americans, especially before and after the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indian English Literature, like any other literature, has had its share of both talented and eminent precursors and successors. Of the latter, prominent among the better known ones is Shiv K Kumar, whose short stories can best be described as being products of a genius raconteur. This paper attempts at exploring-structurally as well as technically-select short stories from his second volume of short fiction titled, To Nun with Love and Other Stories, which has not witnessed significant research. The stories are chosen with a specific purpose-to bewitch the readers with the uncanny harmony of human anatomy, where every single organ comes to life in isolation. Rare and engaging descriptions reveal his passion for the human psyche; mortal feelings of love, loss and betrayal; fantasies of ordinary men and women; and the much-neglected genre of the short story. The mere titles of the stories-those that have been discussed in this paper-attract the readers' immediate attention. This paper begins with a briefing on the development of the prose narrative, and examines, through a close analysis of the various characteristics of the short fiction, how Kumar structures these stories around the predefined notions of the genre and yet creates a uniqueness that is typical of him. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The women in the novels of Manju Kapur seem to be the personification of new women who have been carrying the burden of inhibition since ages and want to be free now. The writer clearly shows the dilemma of women who carry the burden of being female as well as the added responsibility of being mothers to members of their own sex. In the traditional social milieu of the novel where mothers and daughters exist, marriage is regarded as the ultimate goal and destiny from which these women cannot escape. Manju Kapur succeeds in presenting the real picture of women in a male-dominated society. Her female protagonists are mostly educated aspiring individuals caged within the confines of a conservative society. Their education leads them to independent thinking, for which their family and society become intolerant towards them. They struggle between tradition and modernity. It is their individual struggle with family and society through which they plunge into a dedicated effort to carve an identity for themselves as qualified women with faultless backgrounds. The novelist has portrayed her protagonists as women caught in the conflict between the passions of the flesh and the yearning to be a part of the political and intellectual movements of the day. Manju Kapur says that writing in India tends to involve the family and community to a far greater extent than in the West. Here, women are often defined in terms of their roles. The tension between these notions of identity and the desire for personal fulfillment forms much of subcontinental literature. This paper takes up for study the novels of Manju Kapur-Difficult Daughters, A Married Woman and Home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ray Bradbury, in his most significant and popular work, Fahrenheit 451, paints a futuristic, dystopian, and dysfunctional society in which possessing and reading books and any exercise of thought are illegal. Firemen, in the story, burn all books in order to prevent proliferation of independent thinking. Fahrenheit 451 uses the conventions of science fiction to illustrate the deception of government through censorship for suppressing thought. The novel's general atmosphere of suppression, alienation, fear, anxiety, and mistrust is associated with a surveillance society. This study tries to shed light on both Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian theories of surveillance in the story. Private and public institutions in the story are monitored via disciplinary techniques. By becoming 'docile' bodies, citizens lose their individuality. However, the novel also depicts interference of electronic technology in subjugating individuals in digital, hyperreal world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The God of Small Things is certainly rooted in Indian culture, but its author Arundhati Roy's exemplary intercultural competence renders it easy to teach in a variety of cultural contexts. This fact is amply testified by its forming part of required reading in a number of university courses across the world. Roy employs several thematic and linguistic devices to ensure the international reader's easy access to the novel. Among these devices are the many western characters that populate the novel, Indian characters' cross-cultural experience abroad, their professing Christianity, their subscription to the Communist ideology, linking India's colonial past to its current history, intertextuality mainly by means of embedding literary classics and media texts in the novel, and even the multicultural trivia scattered around the novel. Apart from all this, and in linguistic terms, Roy clearly suggests that barring a few characters, all speak in English for most part of the novel. These devices help the readers overcome the cultural barriers posed by such Indian phenomena as caste and untouchability and render the novel highly amenable to teaching in any cultural context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]