Volume 70, Issue 4

This article examines women writers as characters in British novels and stories by women writers from the 1940s to the early 1960s. In works by Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Taylor, Mary Renault, and others, there is a reflection on the social and artistic positions available to female authors. Given the gender segregation of the literary field at mid-century, in which ‘womanly’ writing was associated with the commercial form of romance and ‘manly’ writing with seriousness, the predicament of female authorship is rarely explored in fiction. But when it is, fictional women authors point up the constraints and limits of a ‘feminine’ literary aesthetic in illuminating ways. The article reconstructs how mid-twentieth-century British women authors thought about the act of writing, how they viewed the fields of literary creation and production, and which narrative strategies they used to negotiate this difficult terrain.

Lessing’s short novel The Memoirs of a Survivor encapsulates all the dominant narrative, political, and philosophical preoccupations of its prolific author. Straddling the genres of socio-realistic dystopia and post-apocalyptic fantasy, it self-consciously reflects on many questions relevant to contemporary readers. Drawing on the main premises of postmodern poetics, particularly on its ontological concerns, and on more recent theories about new ‘critical dystopias’ in literature, this article points to the multi-layered utopian aspects present at different levels of the text. Moreover, applying philosophical and sociological concepts of Jean Baudrillard to the interpretation of Lessing’s symbolic and narrative strategies, such as his notion of the alienation of death in capitalist society, the article shows how this novel can be read not only as a critique of materialist culture and a study of deprivation and isolation with serious psychological and civilizational consequences, but also as a hopeful play with ontological borders implied in the imaginative rethinking of our private and shared realities.

This essay seeks to explore the role of heterotopic spaces in the formation of transcultural self and belonging in Brian Castro’s novels Shanghai Dancing and Birds of Passage . Drawing on Michel Foucault’s initial idea of heterotopia, which relates to fictional representations of semi-mythical places, my argument aims at investigating the process of discovering one’s cultural identity within heterotopic spaces, the spaces capable of juxtaposing elements incompatible in time or character. Focusing on textual heterotopias and heterotopias of memory in literary texts, this work examines how Brian Castro employs this concept to depict the intricacies of identity formation in his narratives. Thus, I set out to examine how heterotopic spaces in these two narratives open up a path towards understanding transcultural selfhood.

Bengaluru/Bangalore, the capital city of the Indian state of Karnataka, has played a vital role in the advancement of communication and technology across the globe. Following the progressivist logic of neoliberal urbanism, the city evolved from the quiet, placid ‘Pensioners’ Paradise’ into the bustling ‘Silicon Valley of India’ at an accelerated pace. Bangalore’s sudden growth into a global cyberpolis has motivated its recent entry into the realm of crime fiction in English. The current paper draws on this connection and proposes to offer a spatial critique of the crime novels in Anita Nair’s Inspector Gowda series, Cut like Wound (2012) and Chain of Custody (2016), set in Bangalore. To map the transitions in the spatial structures and social relations of this rapidly changing city, it uses interdisciplinary approaches of geocriticism and the postmodern social theories of space. Also, by analysing the representations of residential segregation in Nair’s novels, the paper intends to foreground how social inequalities, gentrification, and ghettoization have contributed to the raging scenario of crime and violence in Bangalore.

Hashtags have become an omnipresent phenomenon in the digital age. As such, far from simply being indexing devices, they can be perceived as meaning-making practices in their own right, which are involved in shaping contemporary social discourses. This discursive potential of hashtags can, for instance, be seen in current debates about climate change on Instagram and Twitter, where environmentally themed hashtags play an important role in how individuals construct a meaningful relationship to the natural environment. The present paper takes an educational perspective on these environmental hashtags, by taking a closer look at how hashtags can be used in the English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom to foster learners’ environmental literacy. It will be argued that hashtags provide a particularly useful learning foundation in English language education, since they assist learners in developing vital foreign language competences in the form of a response-ability and a discourse-ability and, overall, reveal the cultural construction of knowledge about the environment.