درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Critically reading Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, the present paper attempts to explore the impacts of colonization on indigenous subjects, plants and animals. To trace the detrimental effects of colonialism on both environment and people in Sea of Poppies, this study foregrounds the reflection of the obligatory cultivation of poppy under the rule of British colonizers in India. Sea of Poppies is indeed a portrayal of the catastrophic policies enforced in India by British colonizers in the nineteenth century. In his seminal novel Ghosh deals with the changes brought about by the lucrative cultivation of poppy in the exacerbation of the financial status of indigenous subjects. Environmental devastation and the changes in the normal behavior of animals are also dealt with. Focusing on the theoretical frameworks proposed by Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, this paper explores the convergence of postcolonialism and ecocriticism in Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies to indicate that not only were native people impoverished during colonialism in India, but also the ecosystem was severely damaged.

The purpose of this study is to explore the image of loss in modern American drama in the theme of family. The image of loss prevails the post-war era of American drama in three levels of psychological, physical, and moral space. This image is clearly observable in two of the prominent works of the era, Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Moreover, this image of loss is closely connected with the notion of time. The familial breakdown appears as a sustaining motif that plays a central role in the psychologically shattered personality of the major characters, as a result of the profound changes in the American post-war society and family. World War II was a milestone in the society as a whole, and in the family as a smaller society, and correspondingly among the people as entities which the image of loss seemed inseparable from. American post-War drama fully represents the tough conditions of that era particularly in the themes of familial breakdown and the image of loss.

Auster’s first novel The Invention of Solitude was significant, in that it not only catalogued his own experiences, but also provided one of the earliest examples of the psychological processes involved in trauma and memory storage. It demonstrates the self’s psychological use of the Ego, in a classical sense, to negotiate between emotional response and reality, in order to create meaning around a set of events. More specifically, the death of Auster’s father operates as a catalyst for the author’s journey of self-discovery, which is richly tied to the psychoanalytical principles of Freud and Lacan, and which ultimately allows him to fully appreciate his experience of loss, by supporting the wish fulfillment related to his relationship with his father, and his need to understand the rejection he perceives suffering as a child. This highlights the difference between the inner child’s ego-centric or narcissistic perception, and the adult’s ability to rationalize, especially as it relates to memory and unfulfilled need. Keywords: Paul Auster, psychoanalysis, trauma, memory, self-myth

Shakespeare’s The Tempest is an outstanding theatrical microcosm representing the unavoidably overwhelming Foucauldian power relations in all human civilizations and their intricate interdependency of such power relations with the possession of knowledge and construction of reality. The fictional world of The Tempest is thoroughly endowed with the mechanisms of an intense web of power struggles and domination fixations which typically have been, are, and will be characteristic of any human society throughout history. For the sustenance of such a complex texture of power structures and for the manipulation of the overall balance to the advantage of a specific minority, the pivotal function of a constructed reality is as substantial in the story as the real life. Prospero, the central character, successfully manages to subdue all other dangerous, power-thirsty rivals by making use of his superior knowledge enabling him to shape the subjectivities/beliefs of other characters by different means including language and masquerades in an induced world of realities on the island. Shakespeare’s text can well be drawn on to reveal the stealthy workings of different social, cultural and especially moral institutions in recruiting subjects to their malignant power/knowledge network and duping the individuals with the desired notions produced constantly by the institutional apparatuses leading to the construction of an exploitive ‘truth.’