Number 2 March 2013 ISSN: 2278 876X AMERICAN COLLEGE JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE ( An international refereed research journal of English Language and Literature ) Postgraduate and Research Department of English American College Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India ©ACJELL 2012 American College journal of English Language and Literature is published once a year. All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form and by any means without prior permission from the Editor, ACJELL, Postgraduate and Research Department of English, American College, Madurai, Tamilnadu, India. ISSN: 1725 2278 876X Annual Subscription International: US $ 20 India Rs.500 Cheques/ Demand Drafts may be made from any nationalized bank in favour of “The Editor, ACJELL,” Postgraduate and Research Department of English, American College payable at Madurai. To OUR FORMER PROFESSORS Who thought differently taught effectively & built the Department of English The city on a Hill EDITORIAL BOARD Dr. STANLEY MOHANDOSS STEPHEN (Editor- in- Chief) Head, Postgraduate And Research Department Of English American College, Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India Dr. FRANCIS JARMAN Hildesheim University, Germany Dr. SUNDARSINGH Head, Dept. Of English, Karunya University, Coimbatore Dr. PREMILA PAUL Associate Professor, American College, Madurai Dr. DOMINIC SAVIO, Associate Professor, American College, Madurai EDITORIAL “A journal is sustained by the citations it receives” said Dr. Kalyani Mathivanan, Vice –Chancellor of Madurai- Kamaraj University, while releasing the first issue of ACJELL in September 2012. The seed is sown. We wait in silence for it to sprout. ` Out of the forty five articles received for publication, the reviewers have selected thirty four. Of these, twenty two are on Literature and twelve on Language. Those on Literature range from Film Studies, Indian Literature and American Literature to European Literature whereas those on Language include Play with the Language, Second Language Acquisition, Idioms in English and Teaching English through cricket commentary. What is new in ACJELL-2? We have inched closer to the ideal that we set for ourselves in 2012- publishing articles from student researchers. We hope to have more number of articles from student researchers in the years to come. Besides, the forthcoming issues of ACJELL shall be 'special editions' on ELT, Indian Literature, New Literatures and Postcolonial Literature. It is my fervent desire that ACJELL should become the most sought after research journal in India and abroad. I rest assured, reposing faith in Browning's line, “the best is yet to be.” - Stanley Mohandoss Stephen About the Department The Department of English, the American College is as old as the college. It has been envisioned as a centre of academic excellence, professional expertise and research in English Studies. As English studies has gone global, the core English Curriculum at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels has crossed the boundaries of British Literature to include all Literatures in English. The pre-doctoral programme (M.Phil) offered by the Postgraduate and Research Department prepares students for active research in Indian Literature in English and English Language Teaching (ELT) High standards are maintained by faculty input. Of the twenty members, eight hold doctorates and six are in the final phase of their doctoral research. Their areas of specialization range from Indian Literature in English, English Language Teaching, Literary Theory, Literature of the Indian Diaspora and New Literatures to Canadian Literature. The department is enriched by its libraries. The library in the Undergraduate Department has about three thousand books and the Postgraduate library has around ten thousand books of high research value. Further, the students have access to more than twelve thousand books available in The Study Center for Indian Literature in English and Translation (SCILET). Apart from these, the Daniel Poor Memorial Library of the college also has a sizeable number of books that interest students of English Contents Page No. 1 Hats off, gentlemen!: The Wire 1 - Francis Jarman 2 The Road and the Closet: Myths and Queer America 8 - Vimal Mohan John & Aysha Iqbal Viswamohan 3 Faces without names: The Male Self and the Female Other 19 in the Poems of Jayanta Mahapatra - Sutapa Chaudhuri 4 Medievalism in Victorian Prose and Poetry 29 - Jalal Uddin Khan 5 Deviant Stylistic Devices: An Analysis of Grammatical and Graphological 59 Deviation in the Select Poems of e.e.cummings Samina Azhar 6 Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita: Correlating art with life in 1950's America? 74 - Samah Tawhid 7 Postcolonialism- An Overview 79 - G. Dominic Savio 8 The Theme Of 'Self Exploration and Quest for Spiritualism' 91 In Jhabvala's A New Dominion - Hemlata Singh 9 Inside Out: An Interpretation of The Home and the World by 100 Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray - Monali Chatterjee 10 Subverting the Centre: Writing as Pro-testing in The God of Small Things 108 - Anupama Chowdhury 11 Asif Currimbhoy's An Experiment with Truth : An Experiment in Stage-craft 123 - N. Elango 12 Use of L1 as a strategy for acquisition of English in the bilingual Indian context 133 - J.John Sekar 13 Idioms as vehicles of the Existential Angst 142 - M Rajendra Pandian 14 Play with the Language 148 - Joseph Couve de Murville 15 Semantics and the Crisis of American Conservatism 154 - Karsten Senkbeil 16 'Mother (Language) on death bed: Childen in a quandary': 172 A Postcolonial dilemma - Stanley Mohandoss Stephen & Xavier Pradheep Singh 17 Learners' Identity Construction through Ethno-Cultural Components of 181 EFL Training Programs among English Translation Students in Payame Noor University of Chenaran - Motaleb Azari 18 Integration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT's) and 185 Vocational Education and Training (VET) towards developing 21st Century competency in a knowledge based set- up - Ashesava Mazumdar 19 Developing English Language Learning among Pre-service Vernacular 191 Medium Teachers through a Social Constructivist Approach - Rupal Thakkar 20 Creativity in English Classroom 201 - C. Ramalakshmi 21 Communicative Language Teaching: An Evaulation 210 - K. Karthikeyan 22 Ringing In A New Dawn in Choma's Drum 215 - Preethi Nair 23 Wole Soyinka's The Lion and the Jewel : 221 Mapping Postcolonial Differential Identities - P. Prayer Elmo Raj 24 Study in the Civilizational Interaction between East and West in 231 Ruth Jhabvala's Heat and Dust - Hilda David 25 The Circulation of Invincible Social Energy as depicted in 238 Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost - S. Arockia Nirmal Dorothy 26 The Motif of Self-Realization in Patrick White's The Season at Sarsaparilla: 246 A Postcolonial Perspective - P. Bagavathy Rajan 27 Cry for identity in Mahesh Dattani's Dance like a Man 254 - Daniel Gnanaraj 28 Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance as a Political Satire 262 - D. Jockim 29 Voice of the Marginalized: A Study of Gita Hariharan's Fugitive Histories 276 - F. Mary Priya 30 Revolutionary Stratagem and the Existence of 285 Dalit Women – A Study of Women Characters in Bama's Novel Sangati - M.Poonkodi 31 'Family' as depicted in the select novels of 291 Anita Rau Badami -Anita Caroline 32 Teaching English through Cricket Commentary: 299 A Non-Conventional Method in the Acquisition of Speaking Skills - Jehoson Jiresh 33 Sports Sources in Developing Reading Skills 303 E.Baby Sumanna, A.Tamilselvi, J.Sam Christadoss 34 Negotiating between Science and Fiction: A Reading of 315 Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome - Chitra Thrivikraman Nair Contributors 323 Hats off, gentlemen!: The Wire Francis Jarman University of Hildesheim, Germany Abstract While other genres like the Western are dying or stagnating, the television crime series has finally come of age. The HBO series The Wire, set in the American East Coast city of Baltimore, has the depth, complexity and emotional power of a good novel. Tracing the interaction between drug pushers, drug users, and the forces of law and order, but widening gradually to include problems of everyday life, local politics, the schools and the media, it creates a multi-level portrait of a depressed city and the way that it functions. The Wire invites emotional involvement with its often troubled characters and, as these are followed to their fate, evokes in the viewer Aristotelian reactions of pity and fear: a truly remarkable achievement for a television series. What are the signs that a genre in literature, film or television is dying? There will be a feeling of tiredness and irrelevance; the plots and situations will begin to seem hackneyed and predictable; and the consumer, no longer entertained, and unwilling to waste his or her time, will turn to newer, fresher things. Genres (such as the television soap opera) that deal overwhelmingly in clichés must be particularly on their guard to stay up-to-date and to find ways to continue to satisfy their fans without boring them. But there may come a tipping point after which the genre is effectively dead. Something like this has happened to the traditional Western movie. Partly it is because Westerns have ceased to reflect how Americans imagine their country—the simplistic values of the mid-twentieth century Western and its celebration of frontier optimism are now completely out of step with America post-Vietnam, post-Watergate and post-9/11. Partly it is because the Western has run out of plot-lines. The raw, unsophisticated, underpopulated world of the Wild West offers only a limited number of plot scenarios, and most of these have been worked to exhaustion. In its long-drawn-out death throes, the Western genre has undergone a number of unconvincing makeovers: it has turned politically correct (with greedy settlers and nasty U.S. Cavalry endangering the Noble Savage redskins); it has incorporated exotic variations like the Spaghetti Western, the Science Fiction Western (Westworld, 1973) or the Samurai Western (and perhaps even the Gay Western: Brokeback Mountain?); and now, finally, it has limped off into the sunset to die, leaving many of its key themes to be recycled by television space series like Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica.