Browsing by Subject "Western discourse"
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Item Parody on Western Discourse of Rationality in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow(Department of English, 2009) Sharma, Rikhi RamThomas Pynchon inGravity’s Rainbow presents, nightmare of hyper- technological society, made possible by the discourse of calculation and control, mechanical certainty, along with the development of science and technology that has gone out of human control. The science and technology has been capitalized, individual has became perpetual victim of external observation and manipulation of outer forces; and individual has been reduced to a functional receptacle unit of work process through the interlocking of corporations, and unions. Pynchon at the same time opposes the science and technologyby presenting characters inside and outside the dynamic cultural politics of dominant social discourses.Gravity’s Rainbowis rereading, ironic rethinking and the interpretation of the past in a deconstructive effort to revise or reread the past in paradoxical way that simultaneously affirms and challenges historical representation. It focuses on the differences and ex-centricity, interest on the hybrid, the heterogeneous, and local, and an interrogative and deconstructive mode of analysis. It seeks to assert difference, not to homogeneous ideology. Pynchon declares that the differences are always multiple and provisional. By bringing the intertexual references, historical references, complicit and critical role of central characters to dominant ideology along with their failure, reification of science and it’s limitations and by recontexualizing them in present postmodern context, Pychon has clearly undercut the western mode of all aesthetic, cultural politics and mode of thinking, so called rationality.Item Quest for an Ideal Woman in Thomas Hardy’s The Well-Beloved(2013) Chaudhary, Ram AsreAbstract The Well- Beloved is one of Hardy’s ‘romances and fantasies’ which explores the destructiveness of a man’s idealization of women through ageing process of an individual by three generations. It is filled with misguided love, and is closely concerned with the thoughts and feelings of women. It delineates the situation of females in Victorian patriarchal society where they were exploited, subordinated, and undermined by male that means patriarchy defined itself in relation to the supremacy of males over females in Victorian society. Because of such representation, patriarchy undercut the egalitarian standpoint to view woman in the society by placing them as the subordinated ‘object’ or ‘other’. Such marginalization of woman is an inherent tenet of male practice of patriarchy evident in The Well- Beloved because it depicts the ego of masculinity in the name of ‘desire’ or ‘imagination’ of ‘ideal’ object and ‘perfection’ searching for that domain in women. It also explores the resistance of unities of Western discourse or male-centered thinking by females. However, at the end, Hardy’s novel The Well-Beloved clarifies that all the women, in patriarchal society are not submissive, naïve and weak but most of them are also powerful, authoritative and strong like men.