Volume 1, No. 1Volume 1, Issue 1

This essay concerns the exploitation of African-American musicians by White businessmen in August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom; it serves as a microcosm of institutional racism in
America. In Wilson’s play, the famous blues singer Ma Rainey, in the zenith of her career in the 1920s, makes a fortune for record producer Sturdyvant and agent Irvin, who treat her badly because
they are racists with little respect for her talent and little understanding of the blues. Sensing their disrespect, Rainey comports herself like a diva to show them that she earns money for
them and should be in charge of the song list and recording session. Levee’s impetuous stabbing of band mate Toledo over the innocuous stepping on his shoes manifests how the exploitation of Black workers by Whites leads to rage and Caucasians
successfully turning Blacks against themselves. Levee’s shoes are important in the play, for they symbolize his dream of upward
mobility, which will never take place after Sturdyvant steals his songs and Toledo dies. The attempt by trumpet player Levee to
write his own arrangement of Rainey’s signature song signals his ambition to supplant her and his willingness to corrupt the blues
for his own gain. The essay concludes with an exploration of why Wilson chooses to write about the blues in this play. The blues are integral to African-American culture—deriving from their African heritage and a source of comfort when working on plantations during slavery in America. In this play, like in most of his others,
Wilson pairs two protagonists—one devoted to African-American culture of the past (Rainey) and an ambitious and mercenary character who looks toward the future and willingly sacrifices his
heritage for financial gain (Levee).

The lineage of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962)
may be drawn from several important bloodlines, the two strongest being the
American Realism of Eugene O’Neill in his plays The Iceman Cometh and Long
Day’s Journey into Night, and less realistic works of Europe from playwrights
such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and especially Harold Pinter, whose
The Birthday Party (1957) sets a similar tone of unconvincing and subversive
backstory that Albee uses to great effect and thematic purpose in his own
celebrated masterpiece. The classical traditions of stalwart categories like
Metaphysics gave way in the twentieth century to a more linguistic-based
philosophy, and Albee’s play replicates this shift in a meaningful way.
The intellectual level of puns and allusions points to the elevated
education level of the characters. The reality reflected in the stories told (out of
school, so to speak) points to a fundamental question of the nature of reality
itself, since any false story necessarily stands in for the truth of what actually
happened. Thus, Albee calls into question metaphysical reality versus illusion or
fiction at almost every twist in the plot. The concreteness of George and
Martha’s invented son in their own minds merely emphasizes the extent to
which truth has been supplanted by the conjured alternative reality they have
shared for more than a score of years. The substitution of a weaker “reality” for
the stark truth that they might suffer through calls to mind a parallel linguistic
substitution: the pronoun as a stand-in for an established person.
While absence is a theme explored to some degree throughout, the larger
concept of standing in for an absent object, which task the pronoun performs,
occurs more obliquely when George and the son are confused. Albee moves his
drama of drunken academic games from the particulars of the two couples into
the realm of metaphysical questioning of reality by imbuing the conversations
with the motif of pronoun confusion. This confusion-and-correction cycle
allows the characters to explore (willingly or otherwise) the nature of truth and
illusion, where an invented reality stands in for the awful existential reality that
pains them. Truth and illusion: we must know the difference, or at least carry on
as though we did.

Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy details the subjugation of the
Orogenes and the Tuners at the hands of the Stills and the
Sylanagistines. In this essay, I contend that Jemisin’s trilogy
suggests that the violence used by the Orogenes and Tuners is not
only an effective means to defeat their respective oppressors; it is
also a tool to create hope for a more egalitarian society for all.
Although Jemisin’s trilogy ends before a more equal society can
be formed, I claim readers can infer that it is through the use of
violence that there now exists the potential for both oppressor and
oppressed to be free, autonomous individuals and learn from the
past to prevent history from continuing to repeat itself. Through
the analysis of Jemisin’s trilogy, this essay aims to argue that not
all violence inherently equals destruction. 

This essay argues that in King Hedley II, his sequel to Seven
Guitars, August Wilson presents a bleak picture of life for African
Americans living in the inner cities in the 1980s. King, the titular
protagonist and now-grown son of characters from Wilson’s
previous play, struggles to build a future in a world that constantly
reminds him that he doesn’t count. Wilson uses King, a character
thoroughly enmeshed in the inner-city hoodlum culture of “blood
for blood” violence, to dramatize a way to break that cycle and
navigate American reality. Although King is ultimately sacrificed
at the end of the play, he learns his own and his community’s
history and adopts a “bluesman” mentality, which allows him to
learn forgiveness and, thus, transcend cycles of violence. 

The notion of self attends to individual identity in relation with
meaningful social interactions. It is a system expanded to
multidisciplinary paradigms, often discussed in psychological and
sociological perspectives. Man as a social being is entitled to
understand and accept the social significance of self which is also
an outgrowth of accumulated experiences of the past. However,
this process is challenging especially to the members of a
community with an unusual record of history. To that end, this
paper attempts to examine the case of Israeli Jews for the
complexity in their identification of self even after the
establishment of Israel as a Nation State. Israeli writer Eshkol
Nevo’s most discussed novel Neuland is closely read to engage
with the concept of self in the Israeli context and to accentuate its
centrality among the new generation Jewish Israelis. Based on the
socio-psychological theoretical frameworks, specifically of
William James, Neuland is synthesized as a textual journey to
subjective and social identifications of the notion of self. The
causes and consequences of limits to self and its problematic
representation among a particular group of Jewish Israelis as
manifested in the text are subjected to textual interpretation.

The Kitchen by Arnold Wesker is one of the remarkable plays of
the post-war period in England. This paper will analyse the class
conflict with its causes and effects in this play in the light of
Marxist literary criticism to point out that the socio-economic
conditions of the post-war period do not promise a good future to
the lower class with developed living and working circumstances.
The working class characters, the personnel of the Tivoli
Restaurant, are observed to work heavily under harsh conditions,
because of which they always have the possibility of injuring
themselves. Apart from their fast tempo, their hardwork is never
appreciated. Thus, their labour-power is commodified by the
owner of the restaurant, Mr. Marango, and they are alienated from
their work along with the food they cook. What is more, their hard
working and living circumstances result in a moral decline in the
lower class characters. In consequence, they cannot change their
viewpoints to improve their conditions and they continue living in
a vicious circle. They just work under the tension of being rebuked
or humiliated by Mr Marango, whose life is his restaurant.

This essay argues that Gary Owen’s Iphigenia in Splott (2015) and
David Greig’s version of Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Women
(2016), directed in its inaugural tour by Ramin Gray, use opposite
dramaturgical techniques to advocate for a comparable goal:
increased direct democracy and civic responsibility. Owen uses the
form of his didactic monologue play to highlight the destructive
results of austerity politics. Effie, the play’s protagonist, explicitly
accuses the audience of being complicit with the destruction of the
social safety net—policies which lead to the death of her baby. In
contrast to Owen’s single actor, Greig and Gray used Choruses of
women recruited from each city the show toured to enact a civic
collectivity. By having the audience’s mothers, wives, sisters, etc.
perform the powerful Choral role, the play encourages audiences
to identify with refugees and elevates a democratic decision to
support asylum seekers.

In this contribution I investigate how James Boswell manages to
depart from the so far usual concept of the travelogue in order to
introduce new concepts to the genre: exciting tales from flashbulb
memories, and the focus on the traveller’s special, subjective
experiences. This development was supported by the influence of
Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (1768) and Locke’s and Rousseau’s
concepts of subjectivity. This new concept of the travelogue has
made Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785) a
prototype for the contemporary travel report, according to
Voßkamp’s (1977) Haller’s (1993), and Botor’s (1999) standards.
I will engage in the comparison to Long Way Down (2007) by
Charley Boorman and Ewan McGregor, the only other pair of
travel writers known to me, and examples from other travelogues
by, for example, Paul Theroux, Bill Bryson, and Christina
Dodwell. All the authors chosen give particularly entertaining
additional examples of flashbulb memories presented in the
manner of Boswell’s prototype

This article examines representations of Hindu ūrdhvabāhu
ascetics in Western writings, through close readings of fiction and
non-fictional writings from the pre-colonial period to the present
times. These ūrdhvabāhu ascetics keep one or both of their arms
held perpetually aloft as part of their austerity. They thereby maim
themselves in the process. Most Western writers not only mock
this ascetic practice but also represent it as something evil. Yet
Western imagination manifests a strange preoccupation with it,
since Western writers return to this topic again and again. If this
type of Hindu austerity is indeed irrational and iniquitous, why do
Western writers frequently return to this topic? Why were
ūrdhvabāhu ascetics stereotyped as evil in pre-colonial and
colonial texts? Why is it chosen over other types of equally severe
Hindu austerities to represent the Indians’ need for Western
enlightenment? This article tries to suggest answers to these
questions

In Sensory experiments; Psychophysics, Race, and the
Aesthetics of feeling, Erica Fretwell employs the science of
psychophysics and its theorizations of sensation in order to shed
light to the cultural landscape of affect in the United States during
the nineteenth century. She touches upon the concerns of scholars of
American literary studies in terms of affect and feeling and also with
their entanglement with histories of racialization. Fretwell critically
engages with the disciplines of post-humanism, aesthetics, affect
theory and new materialism. She employs in her analysis different
medical case studies, music, perfumes and recipes in order to
highlight how our five senses turned into indispensable elements of
pointing out human difference along the continuum of race, gender
and ability. Sensory experiments consists of five chapters, each of
which deals with one of our five senses and also by short intervals
on the synthesis of different senses. The structuring of the narrative
is innovative as different literary genres are employed to subvert the
nineteenth century hierarchy of senses.