درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The commitment of literature stirred up controversy in the face of European cataclysm of the post-war period. The significance of literature in political spheres fell under suspicion. It came to be looked at as a passive, impractical activity that could not express the horrors of W WII. Jean-Paul Sartre, the leading literary figure of existentialism in France, faced with such criticisms, decided to investigate the role of the writer and the reader, and endeavored to open a gateway for writers to participate in their societies actively. This study is concerned with the first three chapters of the monograph including “What is Writing?,” “Why Does One Write?,” and “For Whom Does One Write?” The present analysis does not address Sartre’s Existential philosophy per se; however, it briefly examines the roots of Sartre’s conception of literature in continental philosophy and the critical responses to his work from the perspectives of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Theodor W. Adorno. This paper endeavors to give a clear insight into Sartre’s idea of commitment and the freedom of the writer, and what he introduced as “human right literature” as an antithesis to both Marxism and Capitalism.

The current paper aims at presenting a close reading of the protagonist’s reminiscences in Mohsen Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist in terms of an eclectic approach toward representation of trauma. Freud and Breuer’s theory of psychological trauma, Judith Herman’s concept of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and Jeffery Alexander’s notion of cultural trauma are employed as the conceptual framework of this analysis. Psychological trauma refers to the unbearable, untreatable, and unspeakable psychological wounds remaining on the subject’s unconsciousness. PTSD concentrates on troublesomeness in regular physical activities including rapid distraction, insomnia, and shifting in and out through past memories, triggered by trauma. Cultural trauma traces the changes at the level of collective identity of a group due to a formerly experienced horrendous event. The Adventures of Changez, the novel’s narrator, dating back to around the 9/11 attack are represented in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The paper conducted a survey through theories of trauma depicting memory as a venue where the subject’s psychical status could be fully scrutinized. The results of the study demonstrated that a traumatic event such as that of the 9/11 has a long-term devastating impact on Changez’s subjectivity as well as a collective negative consequence for Pakistan’s new generation of intellectual immigrants.