Literary Constructs of the Self : Socio-Cultural Contexts

Contents: Introduction I: Reflections of the Creative Self. 1. Writing the Self/U.R. Ananthamurthy. 2. From Being to Becoming/Rajee Seth. 3. Writing the Self: Intent and Content/Mridula Garg. 4. The ‘I’ of the Storm : The Self in Literature – Form and Trans-Form/Lakshmi Kannan. 5. Words Liberate Me/Esther David. 6. Writing the Self that Isn’t, or Not Writing the self that Is, Boils down to the Same : Writing the Self is What Each Reader Sees in It/Uma Parameswaran. II: Critical Explorations. 7. The difficulty of Writing/Reading the Self/Jasbir Jain. 8. Becoming Canadian, Becoming Indian: History, Politics and Ideology in Maluka/Harish Narang. 9. Beyond Purdah: Intersubjectivity and Interstitiality in Imtiaz Dharker’s Poetry/Sudha Rai. 10. Childhood Ghosts and the Scars of Adulthood: Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin/Urmil Talwar. 11. Self/Selves? : Voices in the Construction of Alias Grace/Sudha Shastri. 12. Fictionalizing (Her) Self: Alice Munro’s Short Stories/Bandana Chakrabarty. 13. Unburying the Self?: Confessions of Failure in Alice Munro/Nilofer Kaul. 14. The Role of Focalization in the construction of the Self: A Study of Three Canadian Short stories/Preeti Bhatt. 15. A Narrative of Self-Reclamation: Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge/Charu Mathur. 16. Interrogating the Arab-American Experience: The Novels of Diana Abu-Jaber/Nidhi Singh. 17. Writing as Healing: Unless by Carol Shields/Uma Mahadevan. 18. The Vagaries of Memory and the Shaping of the Self: Carol Shields’ The Stone Diaries/Mini Nanda. 19. Self within the Shadow of History/Santosh Gupta. Index.

"Literary Constructs of the Self: Socio-Cultural Contexts presents 19 essays, divided into two sections. Creative writers like U.R. Ananthamurthy, Rajee Seth, Mridula Garg, Lakshmi Kannan and Uma Parameswaran explore the diverse modes of the narration of the self in literary texts and share their views on the construction of the self, the impact of language upon the persona within the text and other related issues. Critical essays in Section II examine the impact of translations between languages, forms and mediums of literary constructions on the making of the self; writers’ locations in history, nation, region and diasporic shifts are among the various contexts that shape not only their narratives but also the human images they contain. Eminent critics like Jasbir Jain, Harish Narang, Sudha Rai, Sudha Shastri, Urmil Talwar and Mini Nanda read afresh literary texts, autobiographies and films, to relate them to their specific socio-cultural, aesthetic and psychological contexts. The various frameworks work upon the imagination and creative powers that go on to formulate the human self in all its heterogeneity. Poetry, drama, films and fiction are among the different cultural texts that these critics and writers explore in their deliberations upon the narrations of the self-imagined, real, personal and community-centred." (jacket)