Papers by Kazi Shahidul Islam
Journal of Arts and Humanities, 2019
The black characters’ degenerative behaviours in Toni Morrison’s first two novels The Bluest Eye ... more The black characters’ degenerative behaviours in Toni Morrison’s first two novels The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1973) can be attributed either to their collective unconscious or to their perceptions of the socio-economic reality characterized by white supremacy, racial discrimination, abusive parenting and several other human depravities. Following previous research on these issues, this paper examines whether the characters of the two novels as victims and/or victimizers should be subjected to archetypal interpretation or to the black Americans’ negating reality that instilled in them notions of inferiority, ugliness and self-loathing and that put their existence in a binary contrast with their white counterparts. In order to determine the main factor for black degeneracy in the two novels, this paper firstly postulates that the characters are driven by a self-imposed belief system that spurs certain behavioral traits singular to or rarely reactive to the community’s conventions....
Journal of Arts & Humanities , 2019
The black characters' degenerative behaviours in Toni Morrison's first two novels The Bluest Eye ... more The black characters' degenerative behaviours in Toni Morrison's first two novels The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1973) can be attributed either to their collective unconscious or to their perceptions of the socioeconomic reality characterized by white supremacy, racial discrimination, abusive parenting and several other human depravities. Following previous research on these issues, this paper examines whether the characters of the two novels as victims and/or victimizers should be subjected to archetypal interpretation or to the black Americans' negating reality that instilled in them notions of inferiority, ugliness and self-loathing and that put their existence in a binary contrast with their white counterparts. In order to determine the main factor for black degeneracy in the two novels, this paper firstly postulates that the characters are driven by a self-imposed belief system that spurs certain behavioral traits singular to or rarely reactive to the community's conventions. However, the findings of this research do not support the prevailing ontological or psychoanalytic approaches to the black characters in the novels. Finally, this paper calls for a phenomenological analysis of the black characters and establishes that the ubiquitous perceptional influence that leaves deep negative impressions on their self-image and collective identity significantly accounts for the root of black degeneracy in the novels.
European Journal of English Language and Literature Studies (EJELLS), 2019
Any full-length critical work on Seamus Heaney's poetry indispensably or pertinently touches on h... more Any full-length critical work on Seamus Heaney's poetry indispensably or pertinently touches on his bog poems incorporated in Heaney's first four poetry collections. Composed mostly in quatrains, these poems actually represent the essential Heaney and subsequently suffice to fathom his distinctive poetics in the Irish-English literary tradition. The first of these poems constitute Heaney's archaeological discourse on the metaphorical grandeur of Ireland for its temporal and spatial features of bog while the later ones which raised Heaney to a greater prominence define his aesthetic and political stance during the Irish Troubles. In fact, Heaney's bog poems have become windows into his oeuvre including his prose works too. This paper claims that the bog poems alone constitute Heaney's distinctive poetics per se and make him perpetually relevant in literary studies. The corollary of this paper comes to the point that understanding the essential Heaney is grounded in the bog poems.
Metropolitan University Journal , 2014
The most prominent structural aspect of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novel As I Lay Dying is ... more The most prominent structural aspect of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novel As I Lay Dying is certainly the multi-narrator continuum of the plot through the attribution of narrative turns to characters who tell their parts of the story respectively and independently, and at the same time, delineate themselves and others' personae. Hence, people, particularly to mention the Bundren family members, in the novel are not only simply characters but also narrators. Though the family's focal concern is burial of Addie Bundren in her kindred's town in Jefferson, the characters speak of each other in relation to their memories of incidents centering around that end. This multi-narrator technique, which gives the author a whole session of absence, facilitates free speech for each character, and thus authorizes the reader to understand characters more actively and critically, is the subject of this paper.
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Papers by Kazi Shahidul Islam