Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature
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Resurfacing of the Literary Public Sphere: Interpreting Pattern Change in the New Media
Get PDFThis paper examines the literary criticism which has burgeoned in the New Media, foregrounding the pattern change in the text-interpreting process with the help of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 2002) and Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas, 1962). According to Relevance Theory, the discourse initiator (writer) wants the discourse recipient (reader) to consider what is being communicated as the most relevant, which constitute "cognitive effects" and which may be applied for interpreting any communicative event. Thus the study contends that such a pragmatic approach enables us to critically engage with the reader’s behaviour facilitating literary study in the digital humanities and further helps in evaluating and determining the requirements of a reader in conjunction with the expectations of a writer. So with these literary forums, literature and literary criticism no longer exist in isolation as in earlier times. Their dissemination to a much wider public has given rise to a new media reader as well as critic. Furthermore, the paper posits that these literary forums may be identified as the "literary public sphere" of Habermas (1962). The study focuses on four Indian diasporic writers, Kiran Desai, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Amitav Ghosh and Rohinton Mistry, and their community review in an online literary forum website: www.goodreads.com
In Search of Literary Love in Malay Literature: The Early Stages of Relationship
Get PDFThe culture of desire, passionate love and marriage is often a main plot in oral and written Malay literary works. However, the emotions that we categorise as love are extremely complex, with their different stages of development. A long list of words refers to this central emotion: “Berahi,†“asyik,†“asyik berahi,†“gila asmara,†“berangta,†“kendak,†“kasih,†“sayang,†“cinta†and “cinta asmara†(romantic love).  In his study of Victorian novels and paintings, Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns, Stephen Kern found a process of 18 steps and/ or elements in love. These are waiting, meeting, encounter, embodiment, desire, language, disclosure, kissing, gender, power, others, jealousy, selfhood, proposal, wedding, sex, sexual relations, marriage and ending. In my initial survey of the Malay oral and written hikayats, and poems I am able to fit in most of Kern's categories. However, because of the differences in cultural and literary perceptions, some are blurred, and some others are absent, replaced still by others.  This paper explores the first four categories, i.e. the first news/ dream, the first peek, the meeting and the verbal lovemaking and illustrates the uniqueness of this concept in Malay literature
The Poetics of Transience in Marjorie Evasco’s Skin of Water: Selected Poems
Get PDFThis article seeks to examine the poetics of transience manifested in the poetry of Marjorie Evasco. She is the 2010 SEA Write Award winner from the Philippines who writes both in English and Visayan Cebuano. The article focuses on several selected poems from her recent collection, Skin of Water: Selected Poems (2009). It underscores how Evasco's poetic situations reflect on life's transitory character – the brevity of relationship, the fragility of a child's body, the passing of pain, an encounter with trees and the inevitability death. It also investigates how Evasco's poetic vision imagines ways of confronting the transient and even triumphing over it. The poet has resorted to clever and creative stratagems, such as conjuring images of things ephemeral, the naming of things to hold dominion over them, the manipulation of rhythmic breaks, the deployment of metamorphic imaging and the evocation of deep emotions of love, pain and joy
Literature for Life: The Context and Conditions of Its Emergence in Thailand, 1940s-50s
Get PDFThis article examines the context and conditions of the emergence of “literature for life†(wannakham phuea chiwit) in Thailand. In contrast to previous works that emphasised a single prerequisite such as the role of the Writers' Club, the Communist Party of Thailand, or the importation, translation and circulation of Marxist literature in the country, this article argues that the concept of “literature for life†developed out of the dynamic contestations and exchanges among writers, journalists, social critics, and literary scholars of various political and ideological inclinations, namely the conservative, the “liberal†and the communist, as each attempted to assert its cultural legitimacy in the period between the end of the Pacific War and the early phase of the Cold War in Thailand
