Bodily and Spiritual Borders in the Parsi Males of Rohinton Mistry’s Tales from Firozsha Baag
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Pilar Somacarrera-Íñigo
Abstract
In this essay, I am going to read the bodies of the Parsi male characters in Rohinton Mistry’s Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987) through the lens of Julia Kristeva’s theories of the abject. According to Kristeva, the abject refers to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other, a reaction elicited by bodily fluids such as excrement, blood or even semen. The bodies of the Parsi males in Tales of Firozsha Baag are a site of awareness in which the “bodily borders” (Moreno-Álvarez 2014: 39) explode. In the first section of the essay, I will discuss the stories “One Sunday”, “The Collectors” and “Exercisers”. In the second section, I will delve into Mistry’s Canadian trilogy — ”Squatter”, “Lend Me Your Light” and “Swimming Lessons” — whose main subject is the young Parsi male striving for happiness and individual liberation (moksha) through emigration to North America. I will conclude that these Parsi men have difficulties integrating themselves in their Indian and North American contexts because the realms of the corporeal and the spiritual are, quoting Frantz Fanon’s phrase, “zones of occult instability” (Fanon 1967: 21).
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Artikel in diesem Heft
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- “I pray sir, hear me: I am married”: Language and Sexual Politics in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi
- A Changeling Becomes Titania: The Realm of the Fairies in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
- Queering Time: The Temporal Body as Queer Chronotope in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
- Digging the Liminal Spaces: Chronotopic Representation of Liminality in Seamus Heaney’s North and Station Island
- Bodily and Spiritual Borders in the Parsi Males of Rohinton Mistry’s Tales from Firozsha Baag
- Guarding the Guardians: Fictional Representation of Manipulated and Fake News in Graham Greene’s Work
- Restoration Celebrity Culture: Twenty-First-Century Regenderings and Rewritings of Charles II, the Merry Monarch, and his Mistress “Pretty, witty” Nell Gwyn
- The Contemporary South African Trauma Novel: Michiel Heyns’ Lost Ground (2011) and Marlene van Niekerk’s The Way of the Women (2008)
- Reviews
- Rhona Alcorn, Joanna Kopaczyk, Bettelou Los and Benjamin Molineaux (eds.). 2019. Historical Dialectology in the Digital Age. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, xvii + 274 pp., 42 figures, 33 tables, £ 80.00.
- Reviews
- Aaron J. Kleist. 2019. The Chronology and Canon of Ælfric of Eynsham. Anglo-Saxon Studies 37, xxii + 347 pp., 1 illustr., Cambridge: Brewer, £ 75.00.
- Michael J. Warren. 2018. Birds in Medieval English Poetry: Metaphors, Realities, Transformations. Nature and the Environment in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Brewer, ix + 259 pp., 6 illustr., £ 60.00.
- Julia Boffey and Christiania Whitehead (eds.). 2018. Middle English Lyrics: New Readings of Short Poems. Cambridge: Brewer, xviii + 310 pp., 8 illustr., £ 60.00.
- Elizabeth Archibald, Megan G. Leitch and Corinne Saunders (eds.). 2018. Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance. A Tribute to Helen Cooper. Studies in Medieval Romance. Cambridge: Brewer, xii + 295 pp., £ 60.00.
- Rory G. Critten. 2018. Author, Scribe, and Book in Late Medieval English Literature. Cambridge: Brewer, 238 pp., 3 illustr., £ 60.00.
- Catherine Sanok. 2018. New Legends of England: Forms of Community in Late Medieval Saints’ Lives. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, ix + 360 pp., 8 illustr., $ 65.00/£ 54.00.
- Pete Bearder. 2019. Stage Invasion: Poetry & the Spoken Word Renaissance. London: Outspoken Press, 210 pp., € 12.50.
- Kirsten Twelbeck. 2018. Beyond the Civil War Hospital: The Rhetoric of Healing and Democratization in Northern Reconstruction Writing, 1861–1882. Bielefeld: transcript, 438 pp., € 49.99.
- Marius Henderson and Julia Lange (eds.). 2017. Entangled Memories: Remembering the Holocaust in a Global Age. Heidelberg: Winter, 500 pp., 48 illustr., € 54.00.
- Sonja Frenzel und Birgit Neumann (eds.). 2017. Ecocriticism: Environments in Anglophone Literatures. Anglistik und Englischunterricht 86. Heidelberg: Winter, 2017. 264 pp., € 32.00.
- Rubén Cenamor and Stefan L. Brandt (eds.). 2019. Ecomasculinities: Negotiating Male Gender Identity in U. S. Fiction. Lanham: Lexington Books, 206 pp., $ 95.00/£65.00.
