Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature
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Angelia Poon, Philip Holden and Shirley Geok-lin Lim, eds. Writing Singapore: An Historical Anthology of Singapore Literature
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Tagore and Education: Creativity, Mutuality and Survival
Get PDFThis essay examines some of the seminal experiences of Rabindranath’s life that informed his educational vision and helped shape his educational priorities at Santiniketan. In particular it will explore three central themes that can be said to characterise the essence of his educational experiment. These themes – creativity, mutuality and survival – which help define his “Education for Creative Unity,†can be said to be the guiding principles for an educational paradigm that he hoped to establish for his own time and as a model for the future. The final section of the essay explores Tagore’s early concerns as an environmentalist through a 1922 fable that he wrote concerning human greed and the role of technology in outstripping the planet
Reading Tagore: Seductions and Perils of Nationalism
Get PDFNationalism, implicated as it is in the modern imagination, is a deeply contested idea. So is nation – also referred to as an “imagined community†– which evolved as a sociopolitical institution, fairly recently, and which is characterised by either a unifying cultural signifier or an overarching ideology. Empirical studies reveal that the idea of nationalism often originates with the elite or with an aspiring middle-class, the rest of the society are appropriated into it. Tagore dismissed such nationalism as “the organised self-interest of a people,†which is “least human and least spiritual.†He saw it as a constant threat to humanity.  This paper argues that Tagore’s diatribe against nationalism is a recurrent motif in all his writings and lectures. For him the nation is distinctively and exclusively Western. He developed an alternative conception of modernity which would take into account inclusive and synergic interaction between cultures that can take the world towards harmony and global fellowship
Popular Pedagogy: Multimodal Environments for the Teaching and Learning of Literature in the Malaysian Tertiary World
Get PDFThe task of teaching literature (in English) to Malaysian tertiary students is often fraught with difficulties. Challenges range from dealing with a majority of learners with little competence in the English language, much less analytical reading and writing skills. However, literature taught and learnt effectively can pave the way towards the development of multiple literacy skills especially as it is known to be an effective tool in generating multicultural awareness and communication skills in learners. This article will demonstrate the ways in which the latter can be achieved through the incorporation of popular television series and music in literature courses. It will show how popular television series as well as popular songs can be used as captivating tools to channel an understanding of key issues and terms crucial to literary studies that can prove to be far more successful than when teaching and learning is based merely on literary texts alone. The article concludes that such incorporation of diverse perspectives in teaching what has been traditionally a text based subject can effectively foster a sense of inclusiveness in its learners and in the process generate desired literacy skills
Chronotopes of “Places†and “Non-placesâ€: Ecopoetics of Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide
No full textThe Hungry Tide (2004) is a unique combination of fiction and cultural-anthropological research. The tidal land or bhatir desh is the destination for two travellers in the novel, Piyali Roy and Kanai Dutt, with one aim: to research into the mysteries of the Sunderbans. While Piya intends to study Irrawaddy dolphins, Kanai through the journal of his uncle Nirmal researches into the shifting ghettos of a group of refugees. In this paper we attempt to explore the idea of “ecopoetics†through an analysis of The Hungry Tide with the concept of chronotopes and chronotopic motifs proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin in “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novelâ€. We try to understand the novel in terms of the “folkloric†and “idyllic†chronotopes, and also examine “places†and “non-places†as related to each other, especially the chronotope of “non-places†as deeply related to the terrains of the mind