ENG2602 ASS01

The memoir starts with Orwell describing the tendency of defiance and disobedience that had grown in India since it became a British colony. Indeed, “the anti European feeling was very bitter” (256) among the native population. Orwell who was on the frontline of this crisis could testify about how “the young Buddhist priests who had nothing to do but jeer at Europeans” (256) were causing him trouble. However, as surprising as it is, Orwell himself is opposed to Imperialism. He thinks that for Imperialism to sustain, there is a “dirty job” of mistreating and terrorizing the natives on an everyday basis that policemen like him were responsible of. Imperialism seeks for imposing its conformity to the Indian population by gaining their compliance.

Although James Joyce's story "Araby" is told from the first per-son viewpoint of its young protagonist, we do not receive the impression that a boy tells the story. Instead, the narrator seems to be a man matured well beyond the experience of the story. The mature man reminisces about his youthful hopes, desires, and frustrations. More than if a boy's mind had reconstructed the events of the story for us, this particular way of telling the story enables us to perceive clearly the torment youth experiences when ideals, concerning both sacred and earthly love, are destroyed by a suddenly unclouded view of the actual world. Because the man, rather than the boy, recounts the experience,

James Joyce’s short fiction, “Araby”, speaks of the loss of innocence when one enters adulthood. The narrator of “Araby” reflects back to his childhood and the defining moment when he reached clarity on the world he stood before. The young boy, living in a world lifeless and religious influence, becomes consumed with the lust of a neighbouring girl. The girl, Mangan, is symbolically the narrator’s childhood obsession with growing up. As she resembles the desire to become an adult, the Araby is the enchanted vision of adulthood. By the end of the short story, he realizes the bareness of everyday life. In fact, the disappointment that is Araby awakens the boy to the fact that his immature dreams have blinded him to the cold and stagnant

The British Raj, or the British rule over India, has long since passed; however, the remnants of the pro-colonization have lingered around and are seemingly even making a comeback. Salman Rushdie in his essay, Outside the Whale, notices this romanticisation of Britain’s colonial past in the resurgence of Raj fiction and films. Rushdie, in his criticisms, embraces theories from Edward Said, and hints at theories from Frantz Fanon. By emphasizing the influential language of Raj films and texts, analyzing Orwell’s theory institutional denial, and finally calling for a systematic upheaval of oppressive thinking, Salman Rushdie’s essay and criticism mirrors John McLeod’s theories and definitions of colonial discourse and recognizes that with the comeback of Raj fiction comes a resurgence of the pro-colonization colonial discourse that it originated with.

Throughout time, works of literature have often carried messages of great social importance. It is essential to understand these significant themes and agendas in order to understand the basis of the novels. Throughout The Prophet’s Hair by Salman Rushdie, War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells and A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, there is much evidence supporting the idea of social or political ‘warnings,’ one could argue, about the functionality of society and those who govern said societies. The philosophies discovered by the reader (set there purposely by the author) provide the means to the essential bridge between reading literature and understanding the possibilities and comprehending the literature in question. Allegorically

The novel “Night” is the story of a horrifying experience of Elie, a victim of the Holocaust; the genocide of six million Jews. Violence, race, religion, and identity are the main themes of “Night”. The theme of religion however, is one of utmost importance to the novel. Religion serves as the centerpiece for the book, as it tells of a boy who struggles to hold onto his faith in God.

“Tell me, is that a nationality, ‘Arab’?” muses Harun, the narrator of Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation (Daoud 138). Daoud’s novel is full of questions and ramblings such as this one that serve as a response to Albert Camus’ The Stranger, which explores the trial of a French Algerian (Meursault) for killing an Arab man. In The Stranger, Camus fails to name the Arab victim and gives him no backstory nor significant reason for the cause of his murder. In The Meursault Investigation, Daoud gives the dead Arab a name: Musa. Much like Musa’s Quranic and Biblical counterpart, Musa is unable to speak for himself and so his brother Harun is left with the task of narrating the story. The Meursault Investigation draws many parallels between Meursault and Harun: both have a complicated relationship with their mother, both have an ambivalence towards their home country and most obviously both murder a ‘stranger’. The parallels in the novel are used to compare and contrast the different qualities of the two men and also cause the reader to change the way they view Meursault in The Stranger. Camus portrays a Meursault that is detached and passive, while Daoud gives an emotional Harun who ends up seeing Meursault from The Stranger as a “mirror held up to [his] soul” (Daoud 131). Through Harun’s identification with Meursault and the various parallels between the novels, Daoud is able to raise questions in the reader as to whether Meursault was as cold hearted and detached as he

In many works of literature, especially those coming in Africa, Indian, Middle East, we meet characters who are struggling with their identities, culture, religions, submission of other people or country. As we can imagine when you analyze the novels from these countries as we cites the problem of characters are the same as: economic, political, cultural, and emotional effects that colonizer brought and left behind, these are called emotional trauma for the people of these nations cited. The literature asks the readers to enter a text through the post-colonial lens; the chart will help how the approach can be analyzed in reading of a text, the reader would look for the effects of colonialism and how the characters they addressed through of

Rushdie assumes magic realism as an efficient tool to resolve the problems of post colonialism. So, by linking and combining historical events, mythological stories and fictional narratives, Rushdie tries to generate and convey a true picture of Indian post colonialism while the colonizers considered India and Indians as a colossal place and people, the novel illustrates India’s multiplicity and diversity, in an effort to overturn the colonial representation of India. Midnight's Children is therefore an attempt to evoke India. All these attempts would have been impossible without the insertion of magic realism.

“Araby,” is a story of emotional passion carefully articulated by the author, James Joyce, to mark the end of childhood and the start of adolescence. It is told from the perspective of a young boy who is filled with lust for his friend, Mangan’s, sister. He lives in a cheerless town on a street hosting simply complacent families who own brown faced houses that stare vacantly into one another. The boy temporarily detaches himself from this gloomy atmosphere and dwells on the keeper of his affection. Only when he journeys to a festival titled Araby, does he realize that his attempt at winning the heart of Mangan’s sister has been done in an act of vanity. Joyce takes advantage of literary elements such as diction and imagery to convey an at times dreary and foolishly optimistic tone.

Post-colonialism is defined as the study of texts to discover themes and reasoning that were prevalent during the post-colonial period of literature. The way one observes these texts is by using a specific critical lens. This essay will focus on the critical lens of hybridity. Hybridity is the mixture of two equal cultures that evolve together contrary to viewing them as separate. The lessons the characters undergo help the reader to understand the change or conflict and how to resolve it.

In fact, by attempting to glamourize suffering by portraying it superficially, writers may lose the connection with us that appreciates literature. Instead, what we are left with is an over extended attempt to glorify suffering, or hide it within a guise of reality that is too savage to be true. Instead of the appreciative feeling that reality imbues within me as a reader, I am left with a sense of disgust, confusion and dissatisfaction. This feeling almost overwhelmed me while reading Adiga’s “The White Tiger” and it tainted my experience with the book. Adiga had written the novel without any firsthand experience in the rural areas of India to which his main character referred to as the darkness. Instead, being of a higher class, his accounts were based on second or third hand experiences which do not adequately depict the lower class’ realities. I found the following depiction of India’s ghettos both farcically unrealistic and eventually

Postcolonial criticism analyzes literature created by cultures that developed in response to colonial domination. This type of criticism defines formerly colonized people as any population that has been subjected to the political domination of another population. Readers analyzing literature in a postcolonial critical way will seek the political, social, cultural, and psychological understanding of the colonialist and anticolonialist. Authors, like Ralph Ellison, address the problem of cultural identity using postcolonial critical theory through their works of literature. In “Battle Royal” (Chapter 1 of Invisible Man,) Ralph Ellison discusses a number of postcolonial issues such as control, race, and double consciousness.

The old saying “The sun never sets on the British empire” is a phrase usually associated to reference the vast swaths of land the English nation acquired through colonial expansion during the 19th and early 20th centuries. With this in mind, writers during the Late Victorian Gothic period use English imperial control in places such as India to project perceived English racial superiority, dominance, and prestige. For instance, in Rudyard Kipling’s 1890 work “The Mark of the Beast”, the primitive nature of Indian culture is used to make a broader commentary on the advancement of western society. In order to understand why British authors continually conquer their imperial counterparts through their writings, sir Henry Frere’s 1882 Anthropology

Abstract: The nineteen-thirties were the most confused years in Indian history. It was the time of Indian thrash about for sovereignty and everyone was effected by the blow of this even poetry, drama and novel too. So Anand could not stay uninfluenced by it. He suffered a lot so this made him abhorrence imperialism. He was conscious of the sufferings of our community from dearth and nastiness. No one in India had yet written the classic on this suffering effectively because the realities were too rudimentary for a writer like Tagore. Mulk Raj Anand an immense Indian novelist draws our consideration through his immortal characters Munno and Bakha, from existent civilization. As a novelist he speaks on pragmatism, variance, humanism and exploitations. Anand wrote about real natives whom he knew quite intimately. Mulk Raj Anand awakens social principles by his works. He arouses compassionate sensation of readers for the subjugated and under-privileged, who suffer a lot.