ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

(ENG4 C11)

IV SEMESTER

MA ENGLISH 2019 Admission onwards

UNIVERSITY OF CALICUT School of Distance Education Calicut University- P.O, Malappuram - 673635, Kerala.

190013

School of Distance Education

UNIVERSITY OF CALICUT School of Distance Education Study Material

IV SEMESTER

MA ENGLISH

ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: (ENG4 C11)

Prepared by:

Smt. MEENU S, Guest Lecturer, Govt. College, Kottayam.

Scrutinized by: Smt. PINKU BOUSALLY, Asst. Professor of English, Govt. College, Peringome, Payyannur.

DISCLAIMER “The author shall be solely responsible for the content and views expressed in this book”

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CONTENTS

POETRY : 5

DRAMA : 23

FICTION & PROSE : 33

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A Vision by Simon Armitage Armitage's poems echo the poetic genius of modern British poets such as Philip Larkin and W. H Auden. They share the same philosophic point of view that nothing is certain.Simon Armitage was born in Marsden, a village in West Yorkshire, England. From 2015 to 2019, he served as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, and in 2017 he was appointed Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds. He was named UK Poet Laureate in 2019. Armitage is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems (2020); Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic (2019); TheUnaccompanied (2017); Paper Aeroplane: Selected Poems 1989–2014 (2014); Seeing Stars (2010); Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid (2006); TheShout: Selected Poems (2005). Armitage has also published fiction, including the novels The White Stuff (2004) and Little Green Man (2001), and the memoir All Points North (1998). ‘A Vision’ is taken from Armitage’s collection called Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus Corduroy Kid. The title of the poem is “Vision” but more than a vision it is actually a “Remembering” or “Unfulfilled dreams”. The poem speaks off the contrast between our idealistic hopes and the perfect reality. The miniature display model of the projected town which the speaker of ‘A

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School of Distance Education Vision’ recalls presents a perfect, but unrealistic, picture of urban life. The poem opens in an ambiguous note.” The future was a beautiful place”, the presentation of future in the past form makes the reader wonder about the poet’s ideas about the future. The vision the poet presents before us is grim and sleek. ‘Electric cars' ‘tubular steel' all defines modernity. The vision of the future the poet aims to achieve resembles to the model of a village that would have been on display in the Civic Hall. ‘Smoked glass' evokes an industrial feel. The narrative shifts to the people of this utopian future. The vision he imagines is utterly idealistic, a civilization unparalleled in history.

The language of Armitage’s poem is frequently playing on this joint meaning of ‘vision’ as both ‘imaginary illusion’ and ‘optimistic idea of the future’. As The Times pointed out “Armitage speaks with an utter lack of sentimentality or pomposity of the transcendent mysteries that lie beyond the ordinary moment”. Water Gardens

by Sean O' Brien Sean O' Brien is a British poet, critic, novelist, short fiction writer and a fellow of UK's Royal Society of Literature. He has written six collections of poetry: The Drowned Book (2007), which won the Forward and T.S. Eliot prizes, Cousin Coat: Selected Poems 1976- 2001 (2002) and other works which include the book of

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School of Distance Education essays The Deregulated Muse (1998),the verse plays The Birds (2002),Keepers of theFlame (2003) and a verse translation of Dante’s Inferno (2006). He is a central figure in the contemporary poetry world – he has won major prizes for each of his five poetry collections, including the Cholmondeley Award, the Somerset Maugham award, the E.M. Forster Award and, twice, the Forward Prize for Best Collection. What marks him out as a large literary figure is energy; his emphatic critical intelligence combined with a willingness to take on a wide variety of projects . “Water gardens” belongs to his poetry collection The Drowned Book. The T.S Eliot prize panel called the collection “ fierce, funny and deeply melancholic”. The forward panel described the collection as “a sustained elegy for lost friends landscapes and decaying culture”. The opening poems are all about seas rivers water that takes the reader to the dark terrain. Water seems to work here as a borderline between the living and the dead. The current political and cultural scenario of Britain is satirized in the poem. The poet talks about mortality vendors and rotten smelling mansions. The city has been degraded and degenerated. Water in the lawn looks like a half buried mirror which reflects many faces that we have seen. On the bookshelf we have poets, but they have never been read. His poems often use simultaneously particular and imaginative places. Real places become vehicles for exploration. O' Brien has integrated a wider dimension into everyday experience. His political imagination emerges as multiple.The Drowned Book is more a book than it is a poetry

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School of Distance Education collection. Many of the poems relate to water, and not only under water—rivers, boats, ports, lighthouses, water gardens, ferries, drains, fish, bayous and meres. Yangtze by Sarah Howe Sarah Howe was born in Hong Kong in 1983 to an English father and Chinese mother, and moved to England as a child. She studied English at Cambridge.Sarah was a Poetry Society Young Poet of the Year in 2000 . She won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2010. Her first collection, Loop of Jade was published by Chatto&Windus in 2014 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Loop of Jade crosses boundaries of time, place and space. It interrogates what it means to belong – to a race, a country, a family. Her poetry aesthetically striking, precisely painted often grapples with Cultural identity and representation. Her poetry is highly playful and inventive.Howe's poetry is marked by a deep fascination with the ways in which poetic imagery that enables human connection across geographical and cultural distance and across time. In both Sarah Howe's poetry and non fiction, Yangtze emerges as a major element. Yangtze is the concluding poem in Sarah Howe’s Loop of Jade, her TSEliot prize-winning poetry collection.Loop of Jade isHowe’s first collection, in part an account of the poet’s journey to Hong Kong and China to learn about her and her mother’s past. Howe gathers an extended commentary on her return visits to mainland China and

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School of Distance Education Hong Kong, where she lived until she was just shy of eight years old. The poem goes with the flow of the river while accommodating the physicality of the journey. Loop of Jade crosses boundaries of time, place and space. It interrogates what it means to belong to a race, a country, a family. ‘Yangtze’, might be read as an evocation. . A moon glimmers uncertainly on water’s surfaces, a river flows, a diving bird vanishes into it, fishermen’s nets catch on something submerged, a bridge remains only “half-built”, a travelling boat merely “points” to its destination. References

Lau, Lorraine. “Sarah Howe.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2018, https://writersmakeworlds.com/sarah-howe/.

Accessed 12 July 2021.

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School of Distance Education Look We Have Coming to Dover by Daljit Nagra

Born and raised in London, DaljitNagra is the first writer to receive the Forward Prize for both his first collection of poetry, in 2007, and for its title poem, Look, We Have Coming to Dover!, three years earlier. The tensions of duel heritage and between first and second generation immigrants are a key theme in his poems.DaljitNagra's second collection, Tipo Sultan's Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!!, was inspired by an 18th-century automaton, published in 2011. It was shortlisted for the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize. His third book, Ramayana: A Retelling (2014), was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. His latest collection is British Museum (2017).

Look We Have Coming to Dover!’ take models from acknowledged classics of English-language poetry, using Seamus Heaney and Matthew Arnold as predecessors with varying relations to Britain. In his carefully crafted poetry, Nagra explores the challenging experiences of British-born Asians and through this presents a fresh portrait of modern Britain. His mixing of cultures and language is most obvious in his use of ‘Punglish’, a form of Indian English, influenced by the language of the Punjab.

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School of Distance Education Look We Have Coming to Dover!’ by Daljit Nagratells of the arrival of immigrants to England and of their lives filled with hard work, fears, and dreams. The poem begins with the speaker describing the terrifying arrival into Dover. The water is dirty, the tourists lord over them and they fear being spotted. When they finally make it to shore they drive off quickly hoping to make their lives a brighter and a happier one. In spite of the hard work they have to put in, these people are joyful that they could start their lives over. The immigration crisis is one of the most challenging aspects of modern civilisation. People in search of a brighter future take risks that may cost them their lives. Their journey is full of turmoil and turbulences. But its their perseverance and optimism that guide them into new land. Nagra captures the fear, hopes, anxiety that reflect in these people’s faces. The contrastive nature of immigrants and English people are quite prominent throughout the poem. Immigrants, though they seek a new life in a strange country, still keep their culture intact. They want to keep a piece of their homeland with them. Deto Nation by Ocean Vuong Born in Saigon, poet and editor, Ocean Vuong is the author of the poetry collections Night Sky With Exit Wounds (2016), winner of the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize, and the chapbooks No (2013) and Burnings (2010). His novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

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School of Distance Education (2019), was longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction. His books have been translated to Korean, Vietnamese, Hindi and Russian.His grandfather was an American soldier for the US Navy and was posted to Vietnam where him and his grandmother met and had three daughters. As a result of this, in his poems he often refers to the Vietnam war as the start of his family. At the age of two him and his family moved to Hartford, Connecticut. Vuong’s father left shortly after their relocation and left him to be raised by all the women of his family. The poem Deto Nation belongs to his collection of poetry called Night sky With Exit Wounds. The collection brims with surreal imagery. Vuong authoritatively lays claim to a range of symbols and tropes: hands and guns; words and stars. Vuong possesses a large and unusual imagination The poem starts off with a linguistic pun -- detonation as the explosion, and the focus on "Deto" and then "Nation." It talks about his inability to reconcile with the pain inflicted on him by his father. He hopes to alleviate the pain through writing. The poet speaks of a joke that ends with “huh? “There is a kind of uncertain , “Joke of bomb “ he tells us about his father. The first four stances represents the conflict in the poet’s mind. He believes that the shadow of his father can never be erased from his mind. His mysterious nature confuses him. A sense of alienation and existential crisis is quite visible in the poem. The next part of the poem deals with night and light.Enough light to drown in, but never enough to enter the bone," he says. His trauma English Literature in the 21st century 12

School of Distance Education runs deep, the speaker still recognizes that it has the force of a "bomb saying here is your father." Moreover, the trauma left by the father penetrates to the speaker's insides, even the parts that are keeping him alive. The father seems to reach forward in time and dissuade the son from confronting the truth that resides in the light. These Were My Homes Vijay Nambisan Vijay Nambisan is a poet, writer, critic and journalist of India writing in English. He won the First

Prize in the first ever All India Poetry Competition in 1990 organized by The Poetry Society (India) in collaboration with the British Council. Vijay Nambisan is the co-author of the poetry book Gemini with JeetThayil and Dom Moraes. '’Gemini'’ was Thaiyil's debut poetry book.The articles he wrote for prominent journals and newspapers in Chennai outlined the importance of places that shaped people. His works include English translations of two 16th century Kerala poets from Sanskrit and Malayalam. His first collection of poems since 1992, ‘First Infinities’, was published in 2015.

Idealism and reality balanced themselves in Nambisan's work .There’s a childlike simplicity to his works and lyrics, a musical quality that evokes the classic English poetry. ‘These were my Homes ‘has a tender touch and a careful craftsmanship runs along the lines. The warmth of a home runs through the first stanza. A mother’s closeness, fresh air in the morning,

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School of Distance Education peace of a children’s room, all these images are painted in a meticulous manner. The poet didn’t know that these could be his home too. He is reminded of the worn cool green of the lands, which are older than any battle or war. It would’ve been his home too. To the poet, a book, romantic relationship and the turbulences of life itself had been his home. He considered himself to be a content man. But he realizes that there’s more to life than simple things. Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100 By Martin Espada

APuerto Rican revolutionary, abolitionist, writer, activist, and diplomat, Martin Espada is called the Latino poet of his generation. He has published more than fifteen books as a poet, translator, editor and essayist. His major works include The Republic of Poetry(2006) The Trouble Ball (2011), A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen(2000)etc.

Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100 is a poem written in praise of immigrants who worked in the window in the World restaurant. Throughout the work, Espada represents and celebrates the lives and stories of immigrant workers by linking the historical elements with the current scenario. The labour struggles of the workers form the major focus of the poem.

Regarding September 11 Espada stated that “Poetry humanizes. Poetry gives a human face to a time

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School of Distance Education like this. Poetry gives eyes and a mouth and a voice to a time like this.”. The terrorist attack that shook the world is given expression through poetry. Espada elaborates the lives of working class in a sympathetic yet powerful manner. The first two stanzas describe the quick movements of the workers and their dedication to the work. The poet describes their actions with the music of bread and eggs by a cook from Fajardo. The poet associates the blue eyes of the cook with the American and Spanish invasion of Puerto Rico. The genius of Espada as poet is quite visible as he associate, what seems to be irrelevant to a layman, with a historic event. The poet resembles the “oye” written upon the shoulder of the cook as an exclamation that shares its tint with many other languages of the world. The poet does not limit the term “oye” with one culture or nation as he deems it to be universal. Espada shares the personal experiences of the labor movements that occurred in the Caribbean during 1970’s in the next stanza. The poet associates the “roll call” of the workers in remembrance of the immigrants and migrants during the labor movement. Espada focuses mainly on the labor struggle rather than the falling of the twin towers. He wants to direct our imagination that it is the labor that suffers in actuality in every major military campaign, trade or agrarian agreement. By unifying the diversity in labor he wants to point out that the struggle for labor is universal in nature.

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School of Distance Education Rong Radio Station by Benjamin Zepaniah Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zepaniah was born and raised in Birmingham, England. His poetry is strongly influenced by his Jamaican heritage and what he calls street politics. Zepaniah uses poetry as a medium to voice his concerns over matters such as racism, sexism and homophobia. He made use of his poetic abilities to bring light to issues that are marginalized. To revolutionize poetry was the sole objective of his. His anthologies include The Dread affair: Collected Poems(1985) Rasta Time in Palestine (1990)Too Strong(2000) and We’re Britain (2002). Rong Radio Station embodies everything Zepaniah stood up for in his entire life. The poem is an aggressive portrayal of life as a black man. He realizes that he had been listening to the wrong radio station. AS a result, he believed in stereotypes such as all black men are bad and white men are saviors. He believed that white man burden is true. He perceived himself as a drug freak, one that needs redemption. He goes on list all the common stereotypes that have been created ever since media took control of our conscience. Saving African children from poverty because Africa is dominated by dictators, believing that you need to fill into certain box to be normal, all Muslims are terrorists, terrorism cant be done by our “white” government, all these ideas, he swallowed without doubt. But now he cane to his senses and realized that he had been listening to the wrong radio station.

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School of Distance Education He goes on to list another set of misconceptions that we learned along the way. To us a Palestinian child doesn’t matter, hating Iran is normal, bombing Afghanistan is alright, bombing your way to peace is a practical solution, all these lies that media and the government cooked for citizens, people believed it, without suspicion.

Anti black violence, media misinterpretation, state violence, they firm the major part of Zepaniah' s poetry. Imperialistic nature of state and the egalitarian western democratic social order is challenged so many times by the clever use of sarcasm and imagery. Zephaniah, throughout his life exposed to abuse and rights violations, makes this poem an open book. He questions the identity vested upon him by white men and authoritarian states. The poem is a battleground where his bestowed identity and his authentic self come to confront one another.

Another major point Zephaniah makes is how the Middle East has been perceived by the media. The War on Terror was an imperialistic phenomenon, he believes. Favoring the imperialistic interests, the media functions as a mouthpiece for blatant lies. The poem takes its aim at interlocking configurations of state violence, anti black racial domination and media representations of people of color.

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School of Distance Education Atlantis : A Lost Sonnet by Evan Boland Considered as one of the foremost female voices of Irish literature, Evan Boland presented an honest account of female experience through her poetry. Born in Dublin, Ireland, she published her first collection, 23 Poems (1962) when she was a student. Boland’s poetry is known for subverting traditional constructions of womanhood, as well as offering fresh perspectives on Irish history and mythology. Her fifth book, In Her Own Image (1980), brought Boland international recognition and acclaim. Her next books, including Night Feed (1982) and her first volume of selected poems Outside History (1990), continued to explore questions of female identity. The poet and critic Ruth Padel described Boland’s “commitment to lyric grace and feminism” even as her subjects tend to “the fabric of domestic life, myth, love, history, and Irish rural landscape.” Irish folklore and mythology forms an important area of interest for Boland.

‘Atlantis A Lost Sonnet' uses the imagery of Atlantis to convey a deep sense of loss. Boland carves the mythology to mold the feeling of longing, dilemma of the heart.Boland is able to create a close and personal atmosphere throughout this sonnet through a first person narrator, the use of word choice and rhetorical questions.The poem starts with the narrator talking about how they used to wonder about how Atlantis was able to sink to begin with. The phrase “used to wonder” gives it a childlike quality. She then leads into, “The world was English Literature in the 21st century 18

School of Distance Education small then. Surely a great city must have been missed?” The narrator is using Atlantis to relate it back to something in their life. A deep nostalgic sense. She talks about how much she misses her old town in the next stanza. She talks about “you and I meeting under fanlights and low skies to go home in it” They make their old city and relationship seem beautiful. Just like Atlantis, it is very easy to see something with rose-tinted glasses once you have lost it. The last stanza tries to explain what Atlantis is to her. That Atlantis was never Atlantis at all but a feeling. A feeling of longing of grief for something too far gone to ever come back. That Atlantis just represents the things in their past — their old city, their old relationship — that has also sunk down to the bottom of the ocean. Just as an entire city can never raise from the bottom of the ocean, neither can their past.

The message of this powerful poem is understood in its last two most important lines, “to convey that what is gone is gone forever and never found it. And so, in the best traditions of … where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name and drowned it. ” Boland’s simple rhyme, imagery, and use of personification create the final resolution of the author’s feelings and thoughts towards a past which cannot be recovered except with your memory.

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School of Distance Education Lock You in an American Sonnet by Terence Hayes Terrance Hayes was born in Columbia, SouthCarolina, on November 18, 1971. He is the author ofeight collections of poetry, including American Sonnetsfor My Past and Future Assassin(2018), Wind in a Box (2006), Hip Logic (2002). In his poems, in which he occasionally invents formal constraints, Hayes considers themes of popular culture, race, music, and masculinity. Terrance Hayes’s poetry collection, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin contends with America’s past, present, and future selves from the vantages of racism and systemic oppression. Terence Hayes is a black american poet who expresses his experiences as a black man in America. The poem does not give out racial themes right away. But it is quite clear by the use if metaphors and allusions that the poet is addressing black Americans. The poem begins in a contrastive note, first prison then a panic closet. Both are claustrophobic and surrounded by danger. The fire implicates danger. The poet then forms an image that is part meat grinder and part music box. A juxtaposition of violence and love. Then he goes on to describe an assassin and a better/ alternate self. Both of them are versions of the poet himself. Then there’s the subtle reference to Jim Crow laws, with use of the terms such as ‘gym' and ‘crow'. I make you a box of darkness with a bird in its heart. Once again the bird is in a cage. The inescapable cycle of hatred continues. The experience of black Americans is a constant self love

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School of Distance Education and self hatred, a separation of the “song of the bird from bone”. The physical structures of confinement are images of the oppressive power structure, and birds represent the vulnerability of African Americans. The sonnets themselves are relatively free and diverse. They’re mostly unrhymed. They defy tradition and forge a path of its own. Fast by Jorie Graham Hailed by Poetry Foundation as one of the most celebrated poets of post war generation, Jorie Graham, is the author of Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts (1980), Erosion (1983), The End of Beauty (1987), Region of Unlikeness (1991), The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1992 (1995) winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Never (2002), Sea Change (2008), Place (2012), winner of the Forward Poetry Prize for best collection, From the New World (2015), Fast (2017), and most recently Runaway (2020) .She is famous for her deep interest in history and language. Mythology history and philosophy forms the center of her works. The subjects of poetry has always been large such as, myths, war, god et cetera. Graham was influenced by European visual art as well as the poets W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, John Milton, and Emily Dickinson. Graham experimented with form, constructing subtle, sometimes inaccessible poems divided into series of short, numbered stanzas with missing words. Her poems open out on an experience, in

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School of Distance Education the mind, and she has perfected a kind of syntax that stays true to the mind’s weird reasoning, justifications, leaps of imagination. The title of the poem suggests, ‘Fast’, holds in tension the senses of reckless speed (“too much”), sought-for stability (“not enough”), and involuntary abstinence (“starve”). The death of the poet’s father, her mother’s dementia, her own body’s cancerous mutiny, ecological “systemicide,” the erosion of humanity, these misfortunes molded her poetry. Fast is full of unmarked questions. Here she imagines an experience she has never had and never could have.Graham converses with a bot, observing, “. . . here’s the heart of the day, the flower of time—talk—talk—,” temporality remaining the inescapable substrate of communication, a communication which blooms inevitably with an ever- increasing freight of technology that invades our most intimate spaces, literally delimiting time and everything else. The thoughts emerging in the poem is purely personal. The ever present question ‘what is human’ takes on a new import in the face of a forever empty bed or a loss of mental health. The poem addresses a bigger concern that of running out for each of us.

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School of Distance Education August: Osage county by Tracy Letts Tracy Letts is a multifaceted award winning actor and playwright. From pulp-inspired crime, to horror, to his own family tragedies, the subject matter of Tracy Letts' plays has been diverse. Letts received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play August: Osage County and a Tony Award for his portrayal of George in the revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He has written the screenplays of three films adapted from his own plays. August: Osage County written by Tracy Letts, is undoubtedly a brilliant play about a dysfunctional family that is obligated to deal with veiled duplicities and cruelty. It centers on the home of the Weston’s up country in Oklahoma -overheated Midwestern Plains territory. When the large Weston family unexpectedly reunites after Dad disappears, their Oklahoman family homestead explodes in a maelstrom of repressed truths and unsettling secrets. The matriarch, Violet, depressed and addicted to pain pills and “truth-telling,” is joined by her three daughters and their problematic lovers, who harbor their own deep secrets, her sister Mattie Fae and her family, well-trained in the Weston family art of cruelty, and finally, the observer of the chaos, the young Cheyenne housekeeper Johnna, who was hired by Beverly just before his disappearance. Holed up in the large family estate in Osage County, Oklahoma, tensions heat up and boil over in the ruthless August heat. All

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School of Distance Education major actions in this play show the character’s need for escape through a push a pull pattern found within the scenes. Throughout act two, the characters constantly push and pull against one another, unable to keep their bodies or their mouths still and quiet. They argue and fight one moment, and then the next, they have nothing to say. Their restless demeanor illustrates their need to escape from their family both physically and emotionally. The language throughout the play conveys a lot about the characters’ eager attempts to escape their past. Karen’s undying attempts to make her new fiancé Steve a part of the family illustrates her need to distinguish herself as her own woman. Throughout second act, she continuously talks about him to the others, making him out to be the greatest thing that has ever happened to her. In making Steve a part of the family and getting her family’s approval, she would be able to truly distinguish herself away from her hometown in Oklahoma. She wants to be her own person with Steve, living a new, glamorous life away from all the madness and disorder she once knew. With this sporadic language, Letts also utilizes contrasting images of order and harmony to further convey a sense of disorder. The house is constantly a mess, something that is inevitable in a household with two substance abusers. However, Johnna creates a sense of order that the house does not possess on it’s own. Letts also uses literal images of the blacked-out windows at the beginning of the show to create a setting in which the characters want to escape. . From the top of the first act, the audience immediately sees a dark, gloomy home. Another way Letts shows the inescapable feeling in this

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School of Distance Education show is through the unbearable Oklahoma heat. The heat is representative of the intolerable dysfunction present in Beverly and Violet’s home. Once Beverly started talking about Violet’s addiction, Johnna physically shows the audience that she is hot. This idea is manifested throughout the play to show how inescapable the family dynamics are. Another example of Violet’s need to escape through her drugs comes out through her slurred dialect. In the beginning scene when she first meets Johnna, she can hardly get a solid sentence formed. Through this language, the audience can quickly pick up on her inability to control the affect the drugs are having on her body. In an attempt to regain control and make sense, she tries to over-articulate. But despite her attempts, the drugs have taken over her ability to do so, thus causing her to slur her words. Violet is unable to process her sadness and anxiety. She cannot fathom the thought of having to take care of the bills and house all by herself now that her husband is gone. She is slowly realizing that she will be the one taking care of everything now, and cannot deal with all of the overwhelming feelings that come with the responsibility. This slow loss of control is shown in her taking pills in order to escape from her pain. A prominent theme in August: Osage County is the way shame is used to dehumanize another character. Each character does it in some form or another, giving him or her a feeling of false power over the other. Another theme in this show is the character’s need to escape their problems with something external, whether that is drugs or physically leaving home. Barbara and

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School of Distance Education Karen moved away from home and started their own families; Bill escaped his relationship with Barbara by having an affair; Jean escapes her father’s affair and parent’s separation through marijuana; Ivy and Little Charles plan to get away by moving to New York together; Beverly and Violet used alcohol and drugs in order to escape their troubles.

Disgraced by Ayad Akhtar Ayad Akhtar is a novelist and playwright. His work has been published and performed in over two dozen languages, and he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ayad is the author of American Dervish, published in over 20 languages and named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2012, as well as his latest novel, Homeland Elegies. His masterfully constructed works are brainy, incisive and humorous. His characters are hyper-modern blending ancient beliefs. His themes, though seen through a Muslim lens, are universal: self-awareness, religious devotion, sibling love, a father’s dreams.

Disgraced builds to a fateful dinner party, at which an interracial couple—a South Asian lawyer who has rejected his Muslim faith and his wife, a Caucasian artist who takes her inspiration from Islamic art—play host to another couple, a Jewish art curator and his African- American wife, also a lawyer. The stakes are high for English Literature in the 21st century 26

School of Distance Education everyone present, both personally and politically—and the evening ends in violence.

The play is centered on Amir Kapur, a lapsed Muslim, and his wife, Emily, who battle over their conflicting perceptions of Islam. Amir maintaining a hostile, radical view of Islam, while Emily forming a moderate, appreciative stance. Their tension is exacerbated by Amir’s extremist-leaning young nephew, Abe, and Emily’s Jewish art dealer, Isaac, who serves as a provocateur in drawing out Amir’s deepest and darkest opinions on issues related to political Islam. Any attempts to establish a middle ground, pursued by Emily,are snuffed out by the pulling power of the opposing extremes on the spectrum. Emily’s insistence on portraying Islam as a religion steeped in a history of cultural, scientific and spiritual excellence and innovation is opposed by her husband’s stubborn refusal to see Islam as nothing more than a collection of outdated, “backward” ideas that promote savagery. The rift between Emily and Amir is a snapshot into a broader struggle of competing interpretations of Islam.

The juxtaposition between transnational (religion) and national identities, and the resulting tension are laid bare. Disgraced exposes the complexity that arises when nationalism and religion contradict in particular circumstances.

At a first glance, it might seem like Akhtar’s play is antagonistic towards Muslims. However, upon closer

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School of Distance Education examination, Akhtar is simply opposed to extremist views of Islam, and at an even deeper reading he is opposed to the societal and cultural events or attitudes that lead to these extremist views. The title of the play suggests a perpetrator and victim relationship where Islam has been victimized and disgraced by another party. Amir’s character is a representation of this disgrace. Considering the revelation of Amir’s development of his identity throughout the story, he has taken conscious actions to a certain degree to integrate into the American society. He is a South AsianAmerican who purposefully changed his name from Abdullah (a Muslim name) to Kapoor (a Punjabi name), most likely to avoid certain scrutiny in relation to his legal status or employment application. He voluntarily offered himself to be searched by airport security, a group which tends to racially profile. He had denounced Islam as a backwards religion based on his prior personal experiences. Yet, at the same time, he also feels “pride” for his people (“we”) at the time of 9/11, which he admits stems from seeing America finally being defeated.

The political relevance of theatre is becoming more significant with the push to diversify all sectors of society in popular culture and to include the experiences of the marginalized and the minority. The analysis of three elements of Emily and Amir’s relationship in the play; the painting, the White Savior Complex, and the violence; uncovered complex layers of contradiction.

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School of Distance Education Emily’s painting of Amir in the style of Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Juan de Pareja, is the source of power dynamic shift between Emily and Amir. Emily’s White Savior Complex shows itself in other instances such as when she influences Amir until he agrees to help the imam’s case. Amir’s violence uncovers some Neo Orientalist concepts which are the hierarchical binary opposition of ‘barbaric brown man’ and ‘free white woman,’ and the ‘new barbarism’ motive. Chimerica by Lucy Kirkwood

Lucy Ann Kirkwood is a British playwright and screenwriter. She was born in Leytonstone and raised in east London. She has a degree in English literature from the University of Edinburgh. In 2005, she wrote and starred in her first play, Grady Hot Potato. The following year she took two productions of her second play, Geronimo. Her third play Guns or Butter, about soldiers being overcome by the horror of war, was written for the Terror 2007 Festival . Tinderbox, a dark comedy set in a fictional 21st-century England, premiered at the Bush Theatre in 2008. In 2010, a fresh and humorous version of Beauty and the Beast was devised by Kirkwood and it premiered at the National Theatre in London. Her play Chimerica examines the relationship between the US and China since the Tiananmen Square protests through the eyes of a former activist, and features over forty scene changes and

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School of Distance Education British-Chinese actors. The play opened at the Almeida Theatre in May 2013 and transferred to the West End in August 2013. The play's title echoes the portmanteau word "Chimerica", invented by economists to define the intertwined economies of the US and China.

Inspired by one of the 20th century’s most powerful images, Chimerica tracks two decades of complex US- China relations alongside the personal stories that exist beyond the margins of history. At once intimate and geopolitical, it is a gripping thriller, a touching romance, a cracking comedy and a rich drama. It takes the form of a quest. Joe Schofield, a fictional American photojournalist who snapped the lone protester confronting a tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989, gets a tip-off that the man may now be living in the US: this leads him on a journey through America’s Chinese community, in the course of which he jeopardizes his job, his friendships and his affair with a British market researcher. In Beijing, meanwhile, Joe’s chief contact, Zhang Lin, has problems of his own. Outraged at the death of a 59-year-old neighbor through smog poisoning, Zhang Lin leaks the story to Joe, only to find himself being tortured by the authorities and losing the love of his factory-foreman brother. This epic play – told in five acts and thirty-nine scenes – has a running time of nearly three hours but it engages the audience through the sophistication of its writing. At its heart, it is a political drama, but it plays out on a personal level – it has elements of the thriller, romance and comic genres.

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School of Distance Education Chimerica” was a term coined by economist Niall Ferguson and historian Moritz Schularick in 2006 to indicate the global dominance of the dual country that is China and America. But Kirkwood’s play highlights the sharp differences, as well as the similarities, between the twin superpowers.

There are over 35 speaking roles in the play along with various non-speaking parts. Joe Schofield is the protagonist of the play. At the age of 18 he was in a hotel room overlooking Tiananmen Square where he was able to take the famous ‘Tank Man’ picture. Now in his early forties, he is idealistic. Mel Stanwyck is a colleague of Joe. He conforms to stereotypical masculine behavior; all talk, cynicism and bravado. The relationship between Joe and Mel is one of good mates. Joe and Mel first meet Tessa Kendrick on a flight to Beijing. She is English and is established quickly as a ballsy character. The relationship between Tessa and Joe warms as the play progresses, as they move from their initial business interactions to a messy romantic entanglement. Zhang Lin is Joe’s main contact in China. The audience sees him at two stages of his life – in 1989, as a young man, and in 2012, as an English teacher. He still grieves for his deceased wife, despite the long passage of time and his brother’s best efforts to cheer him up. He is haunted by her image; and she ‘appears’ from inside his refrigerator – the significance of which we find out in a flashback. He makes some reckless decisions in his quest to find out the truth about air

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School of Distance Education pollution which results in him being arrested. He is not afraid to speak out against the communist regime.

As the title suggests, the key idea the play explores is the relationship between China and America. Zhang Lin embodies the dissenting side of the Chinese people and we see a broad cross section of the American population (from prostitutes to a man being arrested in Harlem). The play is effective because it presents a balanced but honest picture of these two superpowers. The play also questions the ethics of journalism. There is the complexity of portraying an event accurately and from whose perspective a story is told. Pollution in Beijing is referred to throughout the text and most damningly, the lack of concern shown by the Communist Party. The fact suggests that what is more important is the front that everything is ok, when the reality is far from that.

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The Reluctant Fundamentalist By Mohsin Hamid Mohsin Hamid was born in 1971 in Lahore, Pakistan, and moved to the US at the age of 18 to study at Princeton University and Harvard Law School. He then worked as a management consultant in New York, and later as a freelance journalist back in Lahore. His first novel was Moth Smoke (2000), winner of a Betty Trask Award and shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award. It dealt with sex, drugs, and class conflict in 1990s urban Pakistan. It inquires the reader to judge the trial of an ex-banker and heroin addict who has fallen for his best friend’s wife. Moth Smoke became a cult hit in Pakistan. Writing regularly for publications like The New Yorker, The New York Times and The Guardian, and with internationally acclaimed novels like The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West to his credit, Hamid has established himself as an authority figure on Pakistani culture and politics. Hamid’s writing really took off in the post-9/11 era, when the world once again became obsessed with the Middle East and a static idea of “Islamic civilisation”. This obsession, mixed with fascination and terror, was more than anything else a desire to know “the Muslim” and the possible dangers he could pose. The Reluctant Fundamentalist stoked this desire and thus launched Hamid to the stature of a literary celebrity.

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School of Distance Education “Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America.” So begins The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a novel which follows the transnational journey of Changez, a young man from Pakistan. The novel begins a few years after 9/11. Mohsin Hamid has very intricately woven the story around a young bearded man, Changez who happens upon the American in Lahore, invites him to tea and tells him the story of his life in the months just before and after the attacks. In 2001, as he explains, Changez was hardly a radical, as he now appears, not from within, but from without. Fresh out of Princeton, Changez was living in New York City and working as a Financial Analyst. At Princeton he was one of only two Pakistanis in his class who did exceptionally well there. His indoctrination, however, was never total. Starting with his job interview at Underwood Samson to a post graduation trip to Greece with friends from Princeton, Changez maintains an outsider’s double perspective. On the trip he is infatuated with Erica, one of the other travelers, but is also bothered by his rich friends’ extravagance and the arrogance. Two things follow the turning point in the novel: Changez begins his introspection about America’s hegemony and power and the city he had embraced with such joy only a few months before begins to view him with mistrust and suspicion as the public mood and climate change.

The use of monologue in ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ allows the writer intimate access to his central character’s mind. Not without its limitations, monologue is used here with great effectiveness,

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School of Distance Education particularly in helping to build suspense. Changez’s tone, which is sometimes exaggeratedly polite, sometimes darkly menacing, is laced with the bitter irony.

Changez feels betrayed by America in the aftermath of 9/11. Manhattan, which had always seemed welcoming to him, and its crowds, in which he had always found a place and felt at ease, suddenly began to seem to accuse him. Suddenly, he became the target of racist slurs. As America prepared for military retaliation in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, he began to feel even more discomfited. Changez begins to further identify as a Pakistani. He decides to abandon his job in New York and returns to Pakistan. In Lahore, he becomes a university lecturer, an advocate for anti- Americanism, and an inspiration for oft-violent political rallies. His exposition of US behavior in its grief-crazed, wounded state offers a sort of postscript to this novel. “As a society, you … retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world … Such an America had to be stopped in the interests not only of the rest of humanity but also in your own.” What The Reluctant Fundamentalist trying to convey is the deep rooted indoctrination of religion the stereotyping of Muslims in the West.

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School of Distance Education The Echo Maker by Richard Powers Richard Powers is at once one of America's very best- and least-known novelists. With his formidable intellect, this honest-to-goodness polymath, sets blisteringly smart, highly literary novels not in politics or journalism, but in the worlds of genetics, chemical manufacturing, pediatrics, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, even opera. Powers was born on June 18, 1957 in Evanston, Illinois. At the University of Illinois , Powers studied physics, rhetoric, and literature as an undergraduate, and earned a master’s degree in English . Powers moved to Boston to work as a computer programmer, but soon quit to write his first novel. A venturesome reflection on photography, memory, and war, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance was published in 1985 and nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1995, Powers experienced nearly unanimous critical acclaim with Galatea 2.2, another National Book Critics Circle nominee. He pushed the boundaries of met fiction by calling his main character “Richard Powers,” a reclusive novelist who holes up in the Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences in a Midwestern university called “U.,” where he falls under the cynical tutelage of a neuroscientist who insists he can teach a supercomputer to pass the master’s oral exam in literature. As a writer-in-residence at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Powers taught creative-writing classes and wrote Gain. The novel movingly details a Midwestern single mother

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School of Distance Education dying of ovarian cancer as it chronicles the one-hundred and-seventy-year history of the fictitious Clare and Chemical Company. What Powers does in The Time of Our Singing, published in January 2003, is to delve into nothing less than America’s dark history of racism. He explores it through the twentieth-century experiences of the Strom family. The Echo Maker ,written in 2006 revolves around the story of Mark Schluter, who has an accident with his truck on a winter night in Nebraska. He is nursed back to health by his older sister Karin but after Mark recovers from his coma and head injury, he believes his sister to be an impostor. While he sleeps, Karin finds a mysterious note left at his bedside which reads: "I am No One / but Tonight on North Line Road / GOD led me to you / so You could Live / and bring back someone else." Karin contacts a neurologist called Gerald Weber for help and he diagnoses Mark with Capgras syndrome, a condition where emotional memory is cut off from factual memory. Usually found only in schizophrenics, Mark's case is an extremely rare example of Capgras caused by injury. Mark however tries to recover from this and seeks to learn what happened to him on the night of his accident. The Echo Maker is a quiet exploration of how we survive, day to day. Powers has chosen a brain disorder that doubles as handy metaphor for human miscommunication of all kinds, and then added one more element to the mix, in the form of Gerald Weber —

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School of Distance Education “the natty neuroscientist,” “the Beau Brummell of brain research” — who comes to town to lend a hand, or at least gather material for his collection of psychological oddities. His scientific discourses point to how the world works, but the struggles of his characters, whether down and-out misfits like Mark or well-heeled magicians like Weber, help us understand how we work. And that’s where the setting — 2002, early 2003 — comes in. As the features of life after 9/11 come into focus — the engagement in Afghanistan, “that bleak, first anniversary” of the attacks, the march to war in Iraq — Powers accomplishes something magnificent, no facile conflation of personal catastrophe with national calamity, but a lovely essay on perseverance in all its forms. What is unusual in The Echo Maker, besides its intricate plot, is Powers’ interest in nonhuman nature, in the countless species of plants and animals that have no beliefs but that now depend on our care to keep them alive. The flocks of cranes, with their collective migrations, are like the sets of neurons in our heads; Mark’s failure to recognize his sister as his is like our failure to recognize endangered cranes, and coral reefs, and polar bears, as connected to us. Near the end of The Echo Maker, Karin decides that humanity “suffered from Capgras. Those birds danced like our next of kin … called and willed and parented and taught and navigated all just like our blood relations … Yet humans waved them off: impostors.” If we can’t share their world, Powers implies, we may share their fate. Powers cleverly English Literature in the 21st century 38

School of Distance Education intertwines the themes of doubles, aliens, echoes, loops, and repetition to emphasize the almost wave-particle duality of quantum physics when it comes to identity as decoded by the heart versus the brain. Set against the Platte river's massive spring migrations, one of the greatest spectacles in nature, The Echo Maker is a gripping mystery that explores the improvised human self and the even more precarious brain that splits us from and joins us to the rest of creation. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitabh Ghosh Amitav Ghosh is a well-known name in the contemporary literature. The Indian-born writer produced a wide range of novels in the genre of historical fiction. His fictional work centers on the Southeast Asian population dealing with the identity crisis at different levels. A pioneer of Indian English Literature in India, Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956, and studied at Dehra Dun, New Delhi, Alexandria and Oxford and was awarded a doctorate from Oxford University. His works include: The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines (1988),The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), The Glass Palace (2000), and The Hungry Tide (2004). His books of non-fiction include 3 collections of essays: Dancing in Cambodia and At Large in Burma (1998); The Imam and the Indian (2002), and Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times

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School of Distance Education (2005). . He has also published The Great Derangement (2016), a nonfiction book on climate change. By Reading climate change through the lens of fiction Mr. Ghosh provides a fresh perspective on the global calamity. Ghosh divides The Great Derangement into three parts: “Stories,” “History,” and “Politics.”. Stories” employs historical anecdotes and scenes from Ghosh’s own novels to situate us in the affective and geographical spaces of the “Anthropocene.” Through his work he argues that western fiction has been incapable voicing the concerns of climate change. The book explores the past present and the impending calamity of climate change. Ghosh denies the argument that climate change is a propaganda by environmental lobbies. While Asian countries and their booming industrial sector contributed to the acceleration of the climate change, its western counterparts had been reckless for a long period of time since industrial revolution. Part 1 of The Great Derangement deals with stories. By examining the conventions of science fiction, its obsession with futurity, Ghosh tries to determine the genre’s fitfulness to address the specter of the Anthropocene. He investigates how our story telling experience is incapable of perceiving a threat like this. Grappling climate change is not an easy task. Modernist predispositions toward realism and individualism make addressing climate change in the novel much more difficult. The realist tradition generally eschews the sort of dramatic, large-scale events that define climate change, such as weather-related disasters. When one encounters such an event in a novel, it often reads as

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School of Distance Education implausible, despite the fact that such disasters are becoming more common year by year. Individualism involves a focus on the individual person and their character development over collectivism—there is no broad concern about the issues facing humankind as a whole. Climate change is one such issue. Ghosh also believes that people have a difficult time grasping the idea of nonhuman consciousnesses. He writes of the Sundarbans, a forested area in the Bay of Bengal populated by tigers. The residents there are particularly attuned to nonhuman consciousnesses because they are constantly scanning their environment for the presence of predators. He goes on to say how India and the surrounding countries are extremely vulnerable, Mumbai especially. The city is located on the water and has a population of 19-20 million residents. In 2005, Mumbai was struck by a major rainstorm that resulted in substantial flooding and the deaths of over 500 people. After this incident, city officials did not craft a contingency plan for the city's evacuation, should disaster strike again. Ghosh believes this is because such a plan would have caused property values on the coast to decline. In other words, ordinary people and government leaders alike turn a blind eye to climate change and its potential repercussions. Ghosh begins the first part by talking about his ancestors who were ‘ecological refugees'. They were from what is now known as Bangladesh, near Padma river. In 1850s the river changed its course drowning the whole village And they began to move Westward. He remembers

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School of Distance Education about the event that changed the course of the lives of his ancestors, an elemental force that untethered humans.

‘They awoke to the recognition of a presence', says Ghosh,’ that had molded their lives’. Regarding literary fiction change of climate doesn’t seem to affect that much. Even if one could seriously meditate upon using climate change as a relevant topic to his/ her fiction, literary journals might not take it seriously. Potentially life challenging threats are cast away into the oblivion. It is also a striking fact that novelists who choose to write about climate change, wont pick fiction as their genre.

Ghosh points out to Arundhati Roy as an example.

Ghosh then moves on to Dipesh Chakraborthy who wrote ‘The Climate of History'. He is of the opinion that historians may have to correct certain assumptions in this era of Anthropocene. It presents a challenge not only to arts and humanities, But to contemporary culture too. culture is widely related Histories of imperialism and capitalism that shaped the world. Throughout history these branches of culture have responded to war, ecological catastrophes, and to several crises. Fiction has always been a vehicle for presenting the atrocities to the world. Ghosh wonders what us it about climate change that writers find not suitable for fiction.

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School of Distance Education The Purple Hibiscus Chimamamda Ngozi Adichie Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in 1977 in Enugu, Nigeria. After initially writing poetry and one play, For Love of Biafra (1998), she had several short stories published in literary journals, winning various competition prizes. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, was published in 2003 and is set in the political turmoil of 1990s Nigeria, the narrative told from the perspective of 15-year-old Kambili Achike. It won the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize. Her second novel is Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), set before and during the Biafran War. It won the 2007 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. We Should All Be Feminists, a long essay adapted from a 2012 TEDx Talk, was published in 2014, followed by Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions in 2017. The story takes place in a city in Nigeria called Enugu, the novel begins with Jaja refusing to go to church on palm Sunday. Jaja has no good excuse for missing church so papa throws his book at him. The book hits his wife’s shelf containing her beloved figurines. This is the beginning of the end for the Achike family. Afterwards Kambili explains what happened before Palm Sunday and all the events, papa’s sister

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School of Distance Education Aunty Ifeoma is liberal and has been giving Jaja and Kambili rebel thoughts. Kambili does not say much and she often has problems speaking fluently without stuttering. Her strict father has shaped her this way by his rules and way of living. In the privacy of his own home, however, Papa is an abusive tyrant. He demands perfection from Jaja and Kambili, plans every moment of their lives, and punishes them physically if they don’t follow his plan. Papa also physically abuses Mama, who excuses and endures his abuse by taking refuge in her collection of miniature figurines of ballet dancers. A military coup topples the government, and Papa gets caught up in pro-democracy work. At about the same time, Mama discovers she is pregnant again after several miscarriages. Ultimately, a critical mass is reached in terms of the lives of Kambili, Jaja and the existence of their family as it once was. Unable to cope with Eugene's continual violence any longer, Beatrice poisons him. Jaja takes the blame for the crime and ends up in prison. In the meantime, Aunty Ifeoma and her family move to America. The novel ends almost three years after these events, on a cautiously optimistic note. Kambili has become a young woman of eighteen, more confident than before, while her brother Jaja is about to be released from prison, hardened but not broken by his experience there. While the military coup is the national setting of the story, Purple Hibiscus is narrated within a religious timeframe stated in three stages; namely; Palm Sunday, Before Palm Sunday and after Palm Sunday. These three settings divide the novel into three parts. For Purple

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School of Distance Education Hibiscus to evoke Palm Sunday, by utilizing it as the opening setting of the narrative is to underline the arrival of another king, who will challenge the colonial and oppressive powers and religious leaders. Papa Eugene embodies colonial epistemic violence, so much so that he is likened to a person "shouting gibberish from a severe case of malaria. Adichie uses Kambili's life as a microcosm of the tyrannical rule in Nigeria, to explore the effects of an Oppressive rule on social ideologies. The genre, bildungsroman creates a medium for Adichie to show a moral and psychological growth of Kambilli. This allows the correction of media influenced, stereotyped views on Nigeria. Similarly it emphasizes the importance of female figures in the development of young girls like Kambilli to challenge the patriarchal and dictatorial norms. In Purple Hibiscus we investigate religion, hypocrisy, politics, charity and culture. Purple Hibiscus explores the issues of ethnic tensions and political unrest in Nigeria as parallels for coming of age and issues of identity definition. The allegory between personal and national identity elevates this story from a typical narrative of adolescent angst into a thoughtful analysis of the formation of self. While it is easy to read this tale as essentially feminist and the novel demands a post– colonial interpretation due to its post–colonial setting, it is important not to ignore the aspect of bildungsroman and the presence of Jaja. The nature of identity–seeking requires a somewhat psychoanalytic approach. The children of Purple Hibiscus , Jaja and Kambili Achike,

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School of Distance Education seek to carve out their own identities. The youth of Nigeria are tasked with rebuilding the nation, depopulated after a destructive war. Similarly, as Kambili and Jaja's family disintegrates, they must come into their own, a task metaphorically equal to the struggle of Nigeria to form its own identity in its post– colonial society. Kambili and Jaja are allegories for burgeoning post–colonial Nigeria, which must also face an adolescent– like emergence into an identity separate from its colonial roots. The fact that both children are ethnically Igbo, a culture and ethnicity ripped apart by violence, indicates that the identity of Nigeria rests in how well its people can overcome the pain of their past. Kambili and Jaja are bombarded by opposing forces: indigenous and colonial, Pagan and Christian, Nigerian and English, familial loyalty and individual identity. They, like many groups effectively inhabit two worlds simultaneously, navigating between indigenous and dominant Western systems. Identities are also formed upon hopes and goals for the future and continue to be shaped as these potential futures come—or do not come—to pass. Two potential futures of Nigeria are embodied in Father Amadi and Aunty Ifeoma. Both of these characters are surrogate authority figures whose influence expands the farther Kambili and Jaja get from Eugene. Father Amadi is a young pastor at the Catholic church in Nsukka, the university city where Kambili and Jaja visit extended family. More interested in people than power, he has successfully blended the colonizing culture with the indigenous one. The bulk of Nigerian Catholics reside in Igbo land, and Father Amadi is the ideal Nigerian

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School of Distance Education Catholic. His songs of praise are sung both in English and Igbo, and he is far less bound to European Catholic tradition than Eugene. Although Kambili could sense that life with her father—symbolizing life in Nigeria under the current regime—was not the way life was supposed to be, devoid of both joy and spontaneity, she does not begin to understand this consciously until her stay in Nsukka, where Kambili meets Father Amadi. At first, Kambili is unable to socialize with Father Amadi; she has been raised in an environment that makes her place in the Church abundantly clear. But Father Amadi wishes to make Kambili a participant in her religion rather than a passive recipient. Through unceasing effort, Father Amadi is able to draw Kambili out of her shell. The way that Ifeoma raises her children is diametrically opposed to the way that Eugene raises his. Eugene raises his children on the principle of fear. They are able to achieve only what Eugene wants them to achieve, and then they only achieve because they are afraid of the consequences of failure. Kambili and Jaja do not nurse any ambitions of their own, but are simply being made into machines. Ifeoma, on the other hand, allows her children to nurse ambitions and to make mistakes, for she believes that this is the only way that the children will grow. Her parenting philosophy is about "setting higher and higher jumps for them in the way she talked to them, in what she expected of them. Aunty Ifeoma represents the possible future of Nigerian democracy. In this future, no child is bound by socioeconomic measures or questions of race or religion, at least in theory. Ifeoma's is the future within which each Nigerian citizen has a voice as well as the freedoms that the polity of Western society considers a birthright.

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School of Distance Education The purple hibiscus is the personification of Jaja and is used as a symbol for freedom which Jaja won from his father. He got it from Nsukka “Nsukka started it all” and has brought it now in Enugu. Kambili wants him to spread it to Abba, as she speaks with her mother on their way to visit Jaja in prison. The hibiscus is a symbol of sought freedom. The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Ban Me Thuot, Viet Nam. He came to the United States as a refugee in 1975 with his family. He is the Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. His debut novel The Sympathizer was published in 2015,Won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2016. Nguyen’s recent works include the short story collection The Refugees and the nonfiction collection Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America, which he edited.

The sympathizer can be considered as a spy novel that explores the dynamics of power. It offers a Vietnamese refugee’s perspective on the Vietnam War. It follows the life of an unnamed South Vietnamese secret policeman, Who is actually a spy working for north Vietnamese communists. The Captain gets orders from another agent to accompany the General as he, his family, and close associates flee to the United States.

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School of Distance Education The novel attempts to craft the captain’s identity in an unfamiliar land, as he deals with love, loss and the heartbreak of exile. The Sympathizer is a novel in the form of a confession to The Commandant in a reeducation camp. The Captain’s identity is multiply complex, and his role as a spy, a man wearing a South Vietnamese mask over his communist face, is the least of it. In fact, it is the in betweenness into which he was born that makes him fit to be a spy. He was born in the North but made to flee the Communists with his mother when he was nine, settling in the South. Cut off from the possibility of respectability and family, he lives mostly as a political and professional being, although even in these realms his sense of self is contradictory: on the surface he is a supporter of the Republican South and an ally of the Americans; deep inside, under the mask he wears as a spy, he is a communist working for the revolution. He is unable to take a hard line against American capitalism, so that even though he has devoted his life to the revolution, the revolutionaries find him, and his confession, suspicious. Nguyen gets much good humor from parodying the white, male, “educated” arrogance of the Department Chair who tells the Captain who he is as “an oriental,” explains to him his identity crisis, and treats him like a patient in a cultural experiment. . The Chair symbolizes particularly an American way of thinking and being, common both in and out of the academy, a mentality that surfaces particularly in interactions with women and minorities. The mentality may express itself as a faith in science, knowledge, and

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School of Distance Education study, but it arises out of a belief in one’s cultural, racial, or gendered superiority. At one level, The Sympathizer is a thrilling spy story, a novel about friendship, exile and personal compromise, and a study of moral and mental degradation under the crushing weight of a totalitarian regime. But it is also an unmistakably satirical and political indictment of a savage war that ended in tragedy. He who owns the representation owns history and controls who is human and worthy of sympathy. The Sympathizer punctures the seal of American control over the story of Vietnam, giving us complex characters who love their home and want it back. The novel’s ending reflections move our thoughts from the particulars of the Captain’s identity towards a more universal understanding of the complexities of identity. And we begin to see that simplifying people’s ways of identifying and their thoughts and beliefs is a political project, and that it is the embrace of complexity that is the truly revolutionary act. Consciousness and the Two Cultures by David Lodge Known for his satiric works, David Lodge has been one of Britain’s most loved and widely read versatile novelist, playwright and an academician. Lodge's creativity, and his wonderful sense of humor, have made his work popular in translation in numerous countries.Lodge's suburban upbringing in a traditional Catholic family in the austere conditions of postwar England is reflected in his early fiction. The works The

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School of Distance Education Picture goers(1960),The British Museum is Falling Down(1965) are a clear example of this. Several of Lodge’s novels satirize academic life and share the same setting and recurring characters; these include Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small World: An Academic Romance (1984), and Nice Work(1988). The latter two were short-listed for the Booker Prize. Human consciousness has always baffled scientists as well as philosophers. While scientists attempted to understand consciousness by rational, empirical standards, Philosophy took a different turn. Developments in Artificial Intelligence, Neuroscience and evolutionary biology paved way for the better understanding of this dark continent. Lodge, in his work is examining how, our evolved consciousness find its expression in British fiction. In essays on Charles Dickens, E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Henry James, John Updike, and Philip Roth, and in reflections on his own practice as a novelist, Lodge is able to bring to light to the mysterious working of the creative mind. Lodge starts his essay by alerting the readers on the intellectual debate on the nature of human consciousness. He mentions two books: Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennet and The Astonishing Hypothesis by Francis Crick. A scientific view of Consciousness is presented before the reader before moving on to the novel called Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels. The narrator Jacob Greer, a holocaust survivor is obsessed with the history of holocaust. When he is looking a premature baby, it brings back terrible English Literature in the 21st century 51

School of Distance Education memories of his past. Lodge finds that this passage invokes the religious idea of the soul, which is scientifically impossible. He finds that western culture seems to rely heavily on distinguishing between flesh and spirit material and immaterial, body and soul and in turn commits the fallacy of dualism. Consciousness has not been studied much by natural sciences. It was primarily considered as a province of philosophy.. Psychology perceived consciousness as ‘a black box'. Stuart Sutherland in International Dictionary of Psychology, wrote “ consciousness is a fascinating but an elusive phenomenon “. Psychoanalysis, which has been dismissed as unscientific tried to understand consciousness. But it was fruitless. The current interest in the study of Consciousness can be traced back to Francis Crick and Crist of Koch. An empirical study and analysis of human consciousness was proposed by these two scientists. The scientific urge to know human brain was the result of several other scientific innovations, such as: the discovery of quantum physics, discovery of DNA, new brain scanning techniques, neo Darwinian evolutionary theory, developments in Artificial Intelligence and scientists like Richard Dawkins. Researches and the innovations in the field of AI made people realize that human brain and consciousness is like a software, with multitude of connections capable of evolving. Some philosophers began to ask, the catchphrase 'Ghost in the Machine' really disposed of all the question raised by the phenomenon of consciousness. Joseph

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School of Distance Education Levine in an influential paper in 1983 drew attention to the failure of purely material processes to explain this phenomenon. Philosophers like David Chalmer, physicist James Trefil were dissatisfied with materialistic theories. Trefil concedes that “no matter how my brain works, no matter how much interplay there is between my brain and my body, one single fact remains . . . I am aware of a self that looks out at the world from somewhere inside my skull . .” But neuroscientists and AI researchers reject this line of argument. Distinguished neuroscientist V S Ramachandran Says that “the barrier between mind and matter is only apparent and arises as a result of language”. Daniel Dennett is of the opinion that consciousness is an illusion unhappy phenomenon which requires greater brainpower and it has a strong evolutionary need for survival. Lodge then moves to the relationship between literature and the perception of human consciousness. When one say nothing has been written about consciousness he ignores the whole corpus of literature as literature is the record of human consciousness, The richest and the most comprehensive. The novel is arguably and individual's most successful effort to describe the human experience through space and time. Noam Chomsky has stated that we learn more about human behavior and personality from novels than scientific psychology. We learn about human behavior how a person would react to a certain situation or how one would perform through fiction. Works of literature focus on strict personal experience. For example Jane

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School of Distance Education Austen's Emma could not be written by anybody else will not be written by anybody else. The Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman has some interesting things to say on this topic : “We are at the beginning of the neuro scientific revolution. At the end we should knowhow the mind works, what governs our nature, and how we know the world “He makes an interesting distinction between science and history. : “Science has emerged within history, and it attempts to describe . . . the boundaries of the world—its constraints and its physical laws. But these laws . . . do not and cannot exhaust experience or replace history or the events that occur in the actual courses of individual lives. Events are denser than any possible scientific description.” The recent scientific work on consciousness has stressed its essentially narrative character. Antonio Demasio Has stated that human consciousness is self consciousness be not only have experiences but we are aware of having them. He draws attention to the paradox stated by William James that our self in the stream of consciousness changes continuously as it move forward in time. As Daniel Dennett puts it .”As spiders make webs and beavers build dams, so we tell stories”. Lodge In this essay alludes to CP snow's 1959 “The two cultures and the scientific revolution” He points that Britain had the power to revolutionize science for greater good but it was impeded by ignorance of politicians. Literature constitutes a kind of knowledge about consciousness which is complementary to scientific knowledge. The philosopher Nicholas

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School of Distance Education Maxwell calls this kind of knowledge “personalistic,” and argues that it must be combined with scientific knowledge if we are to attain true “wisdom. “The most recent novel that explores the theme of consciousness is Galatea 2.2 by Richard powers. The core story of Powers ‘novel is a wager about whether or not it is possible to build a machine that can pass an examination in English Literature. The narrator is called Richard Powers, and his biography corresponds quite closely to publicly known facts about the real author at the time of publications. He is 35 years old. He tells us that as a young man he was going to major in Physics at his Midwestern university but switched to English instead, started graduate work in literature but dropped out, lived in Boston for some time, lived in Holland for some time, published highly praised novels with scientific and speculative themes, received a prestigious fellowship which took him back to his alma mater in the Midwest, where the story of Galatea 2.2 begins—though the main narrative is interwoven with regular flashbacks describing his earlier life in some detail. First Person and Third Person According to V S. Ramachandran, the “need to reconcile the first person and third person accounts of the universe . . . is the single most important problem in science.” Scientist Gerald Ederman finds it crucial in the understanding of consciousness. The problem with the consciousness is that how to give an objective third account perspective to a subjective or first person phenomenon. Lodge then analyses how Henry James' novel Wings of Dove gives an account of consciousness

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School of Distance Education in an objective sense. The diction is mostly subjective, belonging to Kate’s consciousness, and the syntax is objective. The change of personal pronoun also changes the effect of the verbal tense. In the original text the past tense is a storytelling convention. It doesn’t imply a gap between the time of the action and the time of the narration, or raise questions about the character of the narrator. First-person, present-tense narration is used in certain kinds of stream-of- consciousness fiction, where it is called interior monologue—in Joyce and Woolf. The most recent example is Nick Hornby’s How to be Good. It really doesn’t go with James’s very literary narrative style, with his well-wrought syntax and elegant, balanced pairings and alliterations. By the time he wrote this novel, published in 1902, James had perfected a fictional method which allowed him to combine the eloquence of a literary, authorial narrative voice with the intimacy and immediacy of the first- person phenomenon of consciousness. Antonio Demasio, in The Feeling of What Happens, observes that philosophy’s “preoccupation with what we call consciousness now is recent—three and a half centuries perhaps. The word did not exist before and neither did the concept. This era witnessed the emergence of a new narrative experience. Ian Watt in his famous work the Rise of the Novel states that The philosophical and literary changes are manifestations of a larger picture. A vast transformation of western civilization since renaissance. novelists were the first storytellers to pretend that their stories had never been told before, that they were entirely new and unique,

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School of Distance Education novelists were the first storytellers to pretend that their stories had never been told before, that they were entirely new and unique. Dafoe and Richardson are perfect examples. It has been observed that Old novels are about the difference between appearance and reality progress from innocence to experience And the propensity of human beings to hide their thoughts and feelings and to project themselves in a way that is partial and to deceive each other. The heroes and heroines of most novels are involved in a social world where the achievement of their goals requires constant adjustment of their own beliefs, and the correct understanding of other people’s. This is very clearly illustrated by the first three great English novelists, discussed by Ian Watt—Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. The most obvious difference between these novelists are their choice of first person and the second person narratives. Daniel Defoe is the most simplest and the straightforward novelist. All of the novels are exactly the same form, Fictitious or autobiography or confession. The protagonists, Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Roxana, and the others, tell their life stories in their own words. Samuel Richardson enormously extended and refined fiction’s ability to represent consciousness when he stumbled on the idea of the epistolary novel, first in Pamela and much more magnificently in Clarissa. When s story is told through letters, the first-person phenomenon of experience is reported in a first-person narrative while it is still fresh. Fielding’s approach was quite different. Though he calls his novels “histories”—The History of Joseph

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School of Distance Education Andrews, The History of Tom Jones—his storytelling method is much more traditional, much more overtly fictive, than Defoe’s or Richardson’s. They removed all trace of themselves from their texts, posing as editors of documents written by their characters. Fielding’s authorial voice is everywhere in his novels, and indeed is the dominant element in them, speaking in the first person, describing the characters and their actions in the third person, and commenting on them with an omniscience that he boldly compares to God’s perspective on his creation. Tom Jones teems with instances of deception, hypocrisy, and concealed spite, of the disparity between people’s private thoughts and their outward speech and behavior, but it is the omniscient author that tells us this. Ian Watt distinguishes between what he calls Fielding’s “realism of assessment” and Defoe and Richardson’s “realism of presentation.” These were the swings and roundabouts of the eighteenth-century novel. It was not possible to combine the realism of assessment that belongs to thirdperson narration with the realism of presentation that comes from first-person narration until novelists discovered free indirect style, which allows the narrative discourse to move freely back and forth between the author’s voice and the character’s voice without preserving a clear boundary between them. The first English novelist to fully exploit its potential was Jane Austen. She began writing fiction using the model of Richardson’s epistolary novel. Most of her juvenilia and early adult experiments, like Love and Friendship and Lady Susan, are in that form. These are entertaining, but the epistolary form gave no room for Jane Austen to

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School of Distance Education deploy her equivalent of Fielding’s authorial irony. Somewhere between the lost epistolary novel Elinor and Marianne and its rewriting as Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen discovered free indirect style. She discovered it in the women novelists of slightly older generation, Fanny Burney and Maria Edgworth, because it appears briefly and fragmentarily in their work. Henry James is a crucial figure in the transition from classic to modern fiction, and “consciousness” is one of the key words in his criticism of fiction. In his famous essay of 1884, “The Art of Fiction,” James says, “Experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. “His words remarkably resonates with Virginia Woolf’s assertion in her essay “Modern Fiction” :” The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms . . .life is a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end”. The essay, published in 1919, was a manifesto for the modernist stream-of consciousness novel, and an attack on the perpetuation of the nineteenth-century novel tradition of social realism by writers like Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy, whom Woolf calls “materialists.” Virginia Woolf was excited and inspired by Joyce’s technical innovations in rendering the stream of consciousness. James Joyce was publishing Ulysses in The Little Review at that time.

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School of Distance Education Joyce creates the illusion of representing what Virginia Woolf called “the quick of the mind” partly by a technique of condensation. Joyce represents the stream of consciousness by leaving out verbs, pronouns, articles, and by leaving sentences unfinished. Joyce’s representation of consciousness was a quite new combination of third-person and first-person discourse. The third-person narrative is impersonal and objective— there is no trace of an authorial persona. Joyce represents the consciousnesses of his three main characters, Bloom, Molly, and Stephen Daedalus, in three quite distinctive styles—as regards vocabulary, syntax, and the type of association. He came as close to representing the phenomenon of consciousness as perhaps any writer has ever done in the history of literature. Henry James, although dedicated to representing life through the consciousness of his characters, did not go so far. He would not surrender the coherence and control of the well-formed grammatical sentence. His preference was for a third-person narrative that was intensely focalized through the consciousness of one character, as in The Ambassadors, He did not approve of the first-person, pseudo-autobiographical mode for full-scalenovels, deploring “the terrible fluidity of self-revelation” it encouraged. Surface and Depth The modern novel the artistically innovator E cutting edge literary fiction that evolved in the first few decades of the 20th century, is a conscious reaction against the classic realism of the previous century. The kinds of novel pioneered by Henry James, Virginia

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School of Distance Education Woolf, James Joyce, D. H Lawrence ,Ford Maddox Ford, Joseph Conrad manifested A general tendency to center Narrative in the consciousness of its characters, and to create those characters through the representation of their subjective thoughts and feelings rather than by describing them objectively. The most important factor in this shift Of emphasis was the introduction of psychoanalysis the influence of Freud and Jung. It was Freud who introduced the reasonable and pervasive nature of humans and the secret recesses of human psyche. . The idea of subconscious or unconscious motivation, of suppressed or repressed drives and desires which lie behind overt behavior, and which may be traced in the jumbled and enigmatic narratives of dreams, was immensely stimulating to literary imaginations. Another potent idea for writers was that of a collective unconscious that connects us to the earliest stages of our evolutionary history and manifests itself in the archetypes of myth and legend. D. H Lawrence had a strong connection to fraud's theories, especially Oedipus complex which found its way to his novel sons and lovers. Virginia Woolf also had affiliations with the British psycho analytical movement. Freud’s idea of the unconscious anticipated the discovery of cognitive scientists and neuroscientists that much of the brain activity that produces the effect of consciousness is hidden from us. V S.Ramachandran says: “Freud’s most valuable contribution was his discovery that your conscious mind is simply a façade and that you are completely unaware of what really goes on in your brain.” The Freudian model of the mind was structured like geological strata: unconscious, ego,

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School of Distance Education superego. It therefore encouraged the idea that consciousness had a dimension of depth, which it was the task of literature to explore. For modernist writers, the effort to plumb these depths, to get closer to psychological reality, entailed an abandonment of the traditional properties. Ambiguity and obscurity permeate human behavior in the stories of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Maddox Ford. The play of human memory disrupts and shuffles the chronological order of events in the minds of Joyce’s characters, and Virginia Woolf’s. D.H. Lawrence uses an incantatory symbolist style to base character on some deeper level than that of the ego. The terms “postmodern” and “postmodernist” entered the English language in the second half of the twentieth century. The key figures in the first postmodern generation of English novelists were, I would suggest, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Henry Green, Anthony Powell, Christopher Isherwood, and George Orwell. They all began to write in the daunting shadow of James, Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf. They admired them imitated them, But also in due course reacted and rebelled against them. They reverse the modernist privileging of depth over surface. There is a return in their novels to objective reporting of the external world, and a focus on what people say and do rather than what they think and feel. There is a striking readjustment of the ratio of dialogue to narrative, of direct speech to the rendering of characters’ unspoken thoughts. When he walked through postmodern novels such as Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies

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School of Distance Education (1930), for example, or Anthony Powell’s Afternoon Men (1931), and riffle through it, to see a great difference, just in the way the pages are laid out. There is a great deal more dialogue in proportion to description, and direct speech is clearly marked off from the narrative discourse by conventional indentation and quotation marks. the stylistic turn of the novel, away from depth to surface, was connected with the emergence of a new narrative medium in the twentieth century—cinema. Compared with prose fiction or narrative poetry or drama, film is most tied to representing the visible world, and least well adapted to representing consciousness, which is invisible. The principal means by which film conveys the thoughts and feelings of its characters are: (1) dialogue—though in the era of silent movies this was restricted to a few captions (2) nonverbal acting—gesture, body language, facial expressions, and so forth—by the performers (3) suggestive imagery in the setting of the action or the way it is lit and photographed (4) music. The combination of all these channels of communication operating together and sometimes simultaneously can have a very powerful emotional effect. But it is not capable of the precise descriptions

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School of Distance Education and subtle discriminations of a character’s mental life that we find in the classic and modern novel. In film, the subjective inner life of the characters has to be implied rather than explicitly verbalized. There are many postmodernisms, and they are not all experimental. Some were simply anti-modernist. The dominant British novelists of the 1950s, for instance—Kingsley Amis, John Wain, C. P Snow, William Cooper, John Braine, Angus Wilson, Alan Sillitoe—used fictional forms which harked back to the Victorian or Edwardian novel of social realism, and several of them mounted critical attacks on modernist literary experiment. Their representation of consciousness was entirely traditional in method. The later work of Waugh, Powell, and Isherwood, for instance, maintains a conservative balance between surface and depth. Graham Greene’s work always did. Metafiction has been a favorite resource of many postmodernist novelists, as different as John Fowles, Muriel Spark, Malcolm Bradbury, John Barth, and Kurt Vonnegut. By openly admitting and indeed drawing attention to the fictionality of their texts, they free themselves to use all the conventions of the traditional novel, including omniscient insights into the consciousness of their characters. There does seem to be an increasing reluctance among literary novelists to assume the narrative stance of godlike omniscience that is implied by any third-person representation of consciousness. they prefer to create character as a “voice,” reporting his or her experience in his or her own

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School of Distance Education words. Where third-person and first-person narration are combined, the latter usually has the last word. IN Atonement (2001), Ian McEwan, who has tended to favor first-person narration in his previous novels and stories, seems to be telling his story in a rather old- fashioned way, entering into the consciousness of several different characters, and rendering their experience in third-person discourse that makes extensive use of free indirect style. Even Philip Roth, who in his impressive trilogy

American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain addresses the social and political history of postwar America with something of the scope and ambition of classic nineteenth-century fiction, prefers to use his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman as narrator, rather than claim direct authorial knowledge of the minds and hearts of his characters. Zuckerman reports, reconstructs, imagines the inner lives of the characters just as a novelist would—because he is a novelist. But he is also an alibi that the author can claim if held to account for any of the opinions stated in the text. Postmodernism” is sometimes used in a very broad sense to include a whole range of cultural styles, attitudes, and arguments: deconstruction, post industrialism, consumerism, multiculturalism, quantum physics, cybernetics, the Internet, and so on. Most of these phenomena and ways of thinking deny the existence of universals in human nature. They regard the concepts of “soul” or “spirit,” and even the secular idea of the “self” which humanism developed from the English Literature in the 21st century 65

School of Distance Education Judeo-Christian religious tradition, as culturally and historically determined. One must concede that the Western humanist concept of the autonomous individual self is not universal, eternally given, and valid for all time and all places, but is a product of history and culture. Autumn by Ali smith Scotland's Nobel laureate-inwaiting", Ali Smith is a novelist, playwright, an academician and a journalist. Smith was born in Inverness on 24 August 1962 . She studied a joint degree in English language and literature at the University of Aberdeen. From 1985 to 1990 she attended Newham College, Cambridge studying for a PhD in American and Irish modernism. During her time at Cambridge, she began writing plays . In 1995 she published her first book, Free Love and Other Stories, a collection of 12 short stories. Ali Smith’s 2016 Autumn is the first in a four- part series. The novel centers on the unconventional friendship between Elisabeth and Daniel Gluck who meet in 1993. In the present, Daniel Gluck is over a hundred years old; confined to a bed in an assisted care facility. After this surrealist blending of old and new, Smith drops us back into the dreary present . We are now introduced to the grown up Elisabeth – a junior lecturer in the history of art – as she battles the bureaucratic forces at work in the Post Office.

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School of Distance Education There is a huge age difference between Elisabeth and Daniel, sixty-nine years to be precise, yet they are friends from when she was a young girl (fatherless) and he is a next-door neighbor. She likes the art and music she finds in his house and they share a common love for storytelling, telling each other odd stories. Daniel is now a hundred and one, living in a care home and clearly dying. Elisabeth seems to be the only person who visits him. There are two key women whom Smith uses to make her point on strong women . The first is Pauline Boty, the only female British Pop Art painter, who sadly died at the age of twenty-eight. Boty was apparently a very attractive woman, nicknamed the Wimbledon Bardot. She had a minor career as an actress, to help pay the bills, but always thought of herself as a first and foremost a painter, despite her father’s disapproval .When Elizabeth expresses his desire to carry out her dissertation on Boty her tutor refuses to do so by calling Boty's work derivative. The other feminist icon Smith uses is Christine Keeler, famous for her involvement in the Profumo Affair, a notorious spy scandal, involving prostitutes. In the uneasy present of Smith’s novel, the EU referendum has just occurred and Britain is full of “people saying stuff to each other and none of it actually becoming dialogue”. It’s been hailed by the Guardian as the first ‘post Brexit novel’ possessing a somewhat brutal undertone in relation to the world which exists beyond the fictional page. The political fragmentation of the United Kingdom English Literature in the 21st century 67

School of Distance Education is explored through the fragmentation of time, and the construction and deconstruction of binaries. The division between old and young in the referendum is contrasted with the friendship of the protagonist Elisabeth and her old friend Daniel. There is comedy such as Elisabeth’s struggle to renew her passport, but even the funny moments interrogate the idea of Englishness post-Brexit. The contrast between nature and reality is also something that is painted perfectly. There are so many moments of stillness, where the wind is evoked in the silences created through full stops and sentence breaks. Autumn can be read as a study of remembering and forgetting. The relationship between the two main characters – Daniel Gluck and his young neighbor Elisabeth Demand – is pieced together through fragments of their memories and of those they have known and loved. Such memories acquire value through the contexts in which they are framed and the narrative structures which underscore them. the novel refutes chronology in its reconstruction of the human capacity to both remember and forget, leaping between apparently disassociated events.

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