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Mahesh Dattani's Final Solutions gives us the realism of contemporary India steeped in communalism and violence. It is one of the masterpieces of Dattani that won him the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award. Written and commissioned just after the Babri Masjid Demolition, the play portrays the extremist tendencies in religious communities that get infuriated when politicians use religion as a medium to propagate violence against each other. We are reminded of Bhisham Sahni's novel Tamas where he depicts the extremists attitude present in religious communities that gets infuriated being provoked towards a massive violence. The realism of characters and situations allures the audiences on a journey of introspection. Dattani uses modern stage techniques such as multilevel set, flashback techniques, interior and exterior stage designs, flashback techniques, split screens, innovative usage of spotlight, usage of masks to portray different faces of the Mob/Chorus.

Despite the evident locational identity and the inter-referential narrative strategy, it is difficult to identify thematic points of resonance or continuity among the different episodes of Kieslowski's The Decalogue. An investment in the dynamics of familial relations, as also a foregrounding of the microcosmic, the 'personal', is intrinsic to the indoor, mostly lateral, and frequently close-up gaze of the camera. What impels and at the same time resists the search for a definitive philosophical position or question which the diverse moral dilemmas in the episodes could be traced back to — for a conceptual centre as it were — is the ambitious and ambiguous invocation of the Mosaic Commandments. Any anticipation of a pontifical stance being offset by the fact that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between the Commandments and the episodes, the modernist denaturalized invocation of the Logos implies an adherence to a certain system of valuation, involving some generalized notion of human 'end', even as the applicability of a sincerely biblical schema becomes increasingly unlikely. The title, appearing at the beginning of each episode, appears designed to keep the audience on the lookout for traces of a tranacendent hermeneutics which seems all the more possible because of its absence. In this paper I attempt to argue that the motif of death could serve as a possible basic premise for the moral universe and the humanistic appeal of the series. Instead of death being associated either with culpable transgression or simply with an abstract non-life, mortality could be viewed as serving the purpose of a framework for morality. At key moments in the plots, the motif of death intervenes to underline the 'value' of life — in both senses, sanctity as well as the basis for a meaningful significatory system — in liminal moments of signiificant exchange which require ethical choices to have already been made for them to have been encountered at all. In more ways than one, The Decalogue is reminiscent of the works of Ingmar Bergman. The anecdote of the conception of the series from a medieval church altarpiece seen by its co-scriptwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz (Garbowski), for example, brings to mind the fresco of the "dance of death" seen by Antonius Block in The Seventh Seal. Marek Haltof, in the book The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski : Variations on Destiny and Chance ,writes that the characters in The Decalogue "face universal, truly Bergmanesque dilemmas. Kieślowski himself admired some of Bergman's films, The Silence (1963) in particular. Interestingly, in his 1995 interview, trumpeted as 'the last one', Bergman listed Decalogue as one of the five contemporary films that he 'most benefited from'." (Haltof 79). The parallelism can be drawn further : a self-avowed agnostic, Kieslowski makes a series of films united, albeit contingently, by a specifically religious title. While Bergman's doubt regarding religion was more direct and urgent in its nature in exposition, in case of The Decalogue, the interface between faith and doubt is less immediate-denatured and liquidated into an almost indistinguishable part of the quotidian fare of household tattle. There are, however,stark differences in treatment and mood among the episodes.

Milan Kundera had defined the novel as a genre as " the great prose form in which the author thoroughly explores, by means of experimental selves (characters), some great themes of existence, " thus taking an apparently solipsistic view of authorship, in which characters are " experimental selves " of the author. The present paper deliberates upon how this can be reconciled with Kundera's departure from classical realism in his The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and argues that the novel's insistence on the ineffable phenomenological otherness and contingency inherent in human experience amounts to an ethical as well as aesthetic stance against totalizing discourses, politically the foremost among them being Russia's Stalinist communism, Kundera's native country Czechoslovakia had suffered for decades under whose imperialist yolk. By coalescing the heterological and heterodox Bakhtinian function of critique through comic subversion with this diaphanous quality of ineffability, Kundera attains a feat unparalleled in the history of the novel. His achievement perhaps provides a direction towards what Habermas would call a " reflective understanding " of human as well as non-human (animal) experience.

Milan Kundera had defined the novel as a genre as “the great prose form in which the author thoroughly explores, by means of experimental selves (characters), some great themes of existence,” thus taking an apparently solipsistic view of authorship, in which characters are “experimental selves” of the author. The present paper deliberates upon how this can be reconciled with Kundera’s departure from classical realism in his The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and argues that the novel’s insistence on the ineffable phenomenological otherness and contingency inherent in human experience amounts to an ethical as well as aesthetic stance against totalizing discourses, politically the foremost among them being Russia’s Stalinist communism, Kundera’s native country Czechoslovakia had suffered for decades under whose imperialist yolk. By coalescing the heterological and heterodox Bakhtinian function of critique through comic subversion with this diaphanous quality of ineffability, Kundera a...

This paper offers an interpretation of Orhan Pamuk's novel The Museum of Innocence (2008), and also the actual museum by that name curated by Pamuk in Istanbul. The museum differs fundamentally from any ''real'' museum in that it is a collection of objects memorializing the relationship between two fictional characters in Pamuk's novel, and in particular one fictional individual-Füsun, the love of the fictional curator's life. By relinquishing any claim to objectivity and embodying pure affect through actual objects of quotidian use, the museum conveys the traumatic experience of a fictional personal history. The museum embodies metafiction, using verisimilitude to make a cathartic impact. My analysis seeks to understand how this verisimilitude of the eponymous Museum of Innocence in Istanbul produces a cathartic rather than a neurotic effect on the fictional curator as well as on potential audiences. Keywords Museum of Innocence Á Pamuk Á affect Á fetish Á catharsis Over the last few years, museology has registered a paradigm shift. The curatorial approach has shifted its aim from objectivity to performativity (Boyd & Hughes, 2019, p. 4). Rather than aiming to inform the visitor about the attributes of individual objects and their histories, a performative approach marshals a narrative out of those histories and impacts the visitor on an affective level. This paradigm shift has been accompanied by the emergence of a different idea of the museum as a space: whereas a museum was understood earlier predominantly as an impressive body of public archives collected over a historical and/or archaeological timescale, smaller museums now appear with much more limited and specific areas of focus.

The title of Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy is ironic, since the content and conclusion
of the novel are profoundly sombre and bleak. Recognisably a term for the queer subject, a
closer scrutiny reveals its implication in a very peculiar textual politics.
The epithet “funny” is first applied to the protagonist, Arjie, by the homophobic elders
in his family. As a child, when he is discovered cross-dressed as a bride and exhibited to the
whole family by an insensitive aunt, everyone except his parents laugh out loud, or at least
smile maliciously. His father is perpetually anxious that his son will turn out “funny” — a word
that designates homosexuality in the novel, just like “queer”. However, the word also has a
literal place in the operative dynamics of the plot: humour is a tool that Arjie consistently
reappropriates and makes his own. In the face of repeated heteropatriarchal coercion to fit into
a rigidly gender-sequestered social system, the queer protagonist responds by taking recourse
to strategies of resistance that are invariably “funny” in the literal sense. When, as a child, he
is prevented from playing with girls and forced to join the boys’ cricket team, his simple plan
of escape comprises of rebelling against team hierarchy, which leaves a distinctly humorous
impression in Selvadurai’s narration because of his use of “Indian” English, the only such
instance in the novel: “You’re a cheater, cheater pumpkin-eater! I chose to bat first!” This
rebellion, and his subsequent covert return to the girls’ games, is staged — that is to say,
performed — by the queer subject, and Selvadurai uses a postcolonial register to evoke humour
at this juncture. He is celebrated both as a postcolonial diasporic and a queer novelist, and I
argue that the word “funny” in the title of his first novel points to the important role of (black)
humour in conveying the complex correlation between these two markers of identity.
“Cheater,” funnily enough, is an anagram of “teacher,” and it is at his teachers that
Arjie’s final flourish of black humour in the novel is directed. About the fifth part of the book,
“The Best School of All,” Kaustav Bakshi has noted “how Selvadurai, the postcolonial Sri
Lankan-Canadian queer writer, engages in genre-bending by interpolating the predominantly
masculinist genre of the British school story with a queer narrative” (2015). The nexus between
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colonial masculinist ideology and postcolonial middle-class heterosexism becomes manifest,
and is represented by the draconian principal of Queen Victoria Academy and Arjie’s father,
respectively. Both these ideologies try to “force him to become a man.” As in the incident in
his childhood, cricket is the normative masculine sport valorised by the English colonial valuesystem. Coerced into the responsibility of reciting encomia to the school and to cricket, he
deliberately mixes up the lines, producing “disjointed nonsense.” He disgraces himself and his
parents in order to upend the system, so that the colonialist principal loses his position, and
Arjie’s lover, Shehan, is spared perpetual punishments.
Even more than “queer,” the word “funny” registers the social ridicule faced by a nonnormative person, right since he is a little “boy”. The undercurrent of humour in the novel is
as covert and closeted as the protagonist’s sexuality, offset as it is by the grim events of TamilSinhala racial violence. This violent backdrop vitiates all romantic alliances, be they queer or
straight, alienating the reader from any sense of heteronormative normalcy.

(Following is a treatise of Poetry which emerged through a series of serious discussions for over five years between my Master, Asis Chakravarti and I. Much of what I put forward in this critical piece has been thought of and named by Him, and I do not claim authenticity of his genuine merit. On my part, I have analyzed his exhilarated outbursts of energy with a critical eye, placing his theory before what can be practically executed, and having now been more or less convinced of the fruit that it can bear, I have cherished the idea of exhibiting before the mass a new and daring idea yet unexplored, with numerous developments in the form of additions. This study shall comprise many new terminologies, which I shall discuss as and when the arguments proceed.)

134 135 ANANTA SUKLA As They Know Him singlehandedly for over 40 years. This is no less than a Herculean feat. He sacrificed all his life, energy and financial resources to keep this Journal going year after year. JCLA is one of the finest journals in the world of literary studies.

I expound upon the methodical approach of the author in the creation of the poem. Beginning with the ambivalence of ascription, I chart the elimination, selective inclusion, the making of the moral imagination and hint at what I shall refer to as Moral amputation.

In this paper, I shall explicate upon the phrase 'sinking sublime'-its application and subsequent interpretation of Wordsworth's lesser known but revealing Lycoris poems. I proceed with a study of his fragmentary "Essay on Morals" and derive the philosophical basis of my critical discussion. The product shall be transposed with the making of the Sublime, and an attempt shall be made to illustrate why the sinking sublime is a heightened moral question if nothing more.

This essay and its purposes are twofold; it commences with an interactive discussion on the broad ideas associated with the module of Reincarnation as propagated primarily in Hinduism. The textual references are drawn from Swami Abhedananda's scholarly yet simplified explanation of its doctrines. The essay bifurcates thereon - in  the first section I strive to demonstrate its application and simultaneous mutation in Mary Shelley's 'The Last Man', whereas in the second and last section I study the devolution and Reincarnative transfiguration in H.G. Wells's 'The Island of Doctor Moreau'.