What Constitutes Mediocre Writing? A Study of Excessive Sinhala Usage in English Fiction Through Manuka Wijesighe’s Theravada Man (2009)

Despite the renewed interest in Arabic writing following Naguib Mahfouz's winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the war on terror, and the US invasion of Iraq, texts by Arab authors are surprisingly absent from the major anthologies and textbooks of postcolonial and world literature in English. Postcolonial literature has been too narrowly defined so that it refers to Commonwealth literature, excluding Arabic writing altogether, whether it be Arabic fiction in English or Arabic fiction in English translation. It is perhaps even more troubling that anthologies of world literature, which include many works in translation, tend to exclude or marginalize Arab writing. Drawing from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's statement that “such slips become the rule rather than the exception in less careful hands” (1989, 272) and from the relevant ideas of other key thinkers (such as Edward Said, Roger Allen, Arif Dirlik, Waïl Hassan, and Slavoj Žižek), I explore whether such exclusions are painted with orientalist and racist attitudes toward Arabic writing. I conclude with suggestions on how teachers of world literature today can partially overcome the problems in such useful and indispensable textbooks and anthologies. The article asks whether Arabic writing in English can be given no more and no less than the level of attention other Englishes enjoy in our global village today.

A Burnt-Out Case (1960) is part of Graham Greene's “African writings,” together with the novel The Heart of the Matter (1948), and the travelogues Journey without Maps (1935) and In Search of a Cha...

This chapter discusses recent trends in Sri Lankan anglophone fiction of the last two decades; it contextualizes and reviews the fiction of some of the best-known Sri Lankan authors, notably Shyam Selvadurai, alongside others less well-known outside the island, such as Ameena Hussein. Sri Lankan writing is especially marginalized in the canons of postcolonial and contemporary fiction and in the academic study of ‘South Asia’ more generally. It has not reached the international visibility of ‘Indian writing in English’ in part because of its smaller literary output and comparatively nascent anglophone publishing culture. Thus the location and politics of publishing has had considerable impact on Sri Lankan anglophone writing, favouring authors published abroad and marginalizing the distinctive perspectives of local writers, lead to contrasting culturally located reader-responses. Lankan-based reviewers prove far more critical of Lankan texts than their counterparts elsewhere. However, as I’ve argued elsewhere, these distinct readerships have shifted within the last two decades (Ranasinha 2013). The power of the Euro-American reviewer to confer ‘authenticity’ on chosen diasporic writers is now increasingly interrogated, as are texts perceived as manufactured for easy Euro-American consumption. Moreover, geopolitical shifts, the Sri Lankan polity’s move (away from allegiance to the former colonizing power towards the multiple centres, and economic powerhouses China and India) has rendered less significant ‘the stamps of approval from the centre’.

The focus of my argument is that much of the counter-realist elements in postcolonial writing can be better understood in the more traditional terms of Menippean satire. I explore this premise in works by a cohort of four South Asian authors of satire who have never previously been examined in concert as such: Aubrey Menen, G.V. Desani, Salman Rushdie, and I. Allan Sealy. My investigations have uncovered connections of influence and resonance which make an assiduous case for considering their work as Menippean satire, running counter to extant critical discussions of experimentalism in postcolonial fiction which tend to describe counter-realism in terms of anti-realism, post-realism, and magic realism. In examining Menippean satire I will also be addressing the current wide use of the term, and suggesting that an over-emphasis on its counter-realist and hybrid elements has led to an unfortunate disregard of its roots in satire. Respective chapters on Menen and Desani look at their use of intertextual juxtapositions which begin to shape a postcolonial emphasis on revision and renewal of novelistic language and form. This emphasis is borne out in my examination of Rushdie's Menippean experiments with language and the rhetorical device of ekphrasis to break down boundaries between cultures, histories, and even art forms to depict a hybrid model of global society. I interpret Sealy's perpetual reformatting of the novel in each new work as a series of Menippean challenges to form which assert alternative narrative perspectives and relocate literary traditions. My conclusion looks at the implications of expanding the current limited critical links between satire and postcolonial literature in general, based on my examination of a body of work that connects to and updates the longstanding tradition of Menippean satire.

Hanif Kureishi occupies an ambiguous and controversial place in both twentieth‐century British fiction and in postcolonial literature. Much of his most popular fiction deals primarily with the position of Pakistani and Indian immigrants in England and their children, but he refuses to glamorize or indeed dwell upon non‐Western culture as something distinct from English life. Instead, he concentrates on the effect of immigration and other social changes on London, his fiction's dominant setting. His often autobiographical work also deals with the moral aftermath of the permissive culture that dominated the lives of young people in the 1960s and 1970s: it examines infidelity, drug abuse, family break‐up, political pettiness, economic inequality, selfishness, and men's anger against feminism with unflinching and sometimes disturbing directness.

This is first of two double-volume special issues devoted to Aspects of South African Literary Studies. Conceived neither thematically nor with any specific theoretical focus, its aim, rather is to gather current essays by leading researchers in field in a journal with a theoretical orientation which is open to general literary studies. This symptomatic approach is intentional. It seeks to open field to practices neither constrained by nor preoccupied with this or that theory without in any way placing theoretically informed approaches under erasure. This approach is mindful of fact that field of South African Literary Studies, as my opening essay indicates, has had considerable difficulties with regard to its demarcation as an object of study. This of course is a theoretical problem. Hence an attempt is made to move behind theoretical disputes in order to delineate language-based typologies for how this object has been conceived in past and how it may be defined today for scholarly purposes. What is proposed is a multilingual South African definition as a way of overcoming difficulties inherent in other conceptualisations discussed in detail. Two pertinent questions lurk behind this conceptualisation: they are that of national literature and what might be most appropriate method or methods for approaching this multilingual field of study. question of a national literature is dealt with in second double volume to follow this one. Methodological questions require separate treatment and will receive attention in a separate volume devoted to these matters. This is planned for near future. For rest, volume consists of a variety of essays reflecting on work now being done by a selection of scholars in field. Michael Titlestad and Mike Kissack's essay The Foot Does Not Sniff: Imagining Postapartheid Intellectual deals with role of literary institutions during apartheid past and new possibilities for its future in a democratic dispensation characterised by cultural heterogeneity. They draw on postcolonial theory to propose what they call a postdialectical secular mode of interpretation and critique as a way through which postapartheid literary scholar and intellectual could engage with past and present in terms other than of blame. Their essay, through a reading of Zakes Mda's Heart of Redness, establishes interconnections between contemporary fiction in English and early Xhosa writing, which, due to a history of division, has received scant attention in past. Work in opposite direction from English and Afrikaans to African languages is just as necessary. Related to this, is Mike Marais's reading of textualisation of in three postapartheid novels in English and its inscription in culture. Where Titlestad and Kissack seek to overcome paralysis induced by accusatory politics concerning past, Marais examines whether construction of a nonracial culture is at all possible and how racialism may be counterveiled. critique of which is central to postcolonial literatures has of course been at heart of brand of colonialism which prevailed for so long in South Africa and is indelibly inscribed in all literatures. His reading establishes that these novels conclude that transcendence of race through a metaphysics of nonracialism is impossible but that acknowledgement of local cultures and meaning structures combined with an ethic of tolerance provide discursive possibilities to resist racialism. From problem of racial prejudice which structured processes of human othering Africans close to, if not part of realm of animals, Wendy Woodward's Postcolonial Ecologies and Gaze of Animals: Reading Some Contemporary Southern African Narrative looks at process of othering animals in culture and Derrida's designation of animals as the absolute others. …

This paper deals with the changing dynamics of postcolonial literature by focussing on the 2008 Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. I argue that when placed in the context of Indian postcolonial fiction in English, Adiga’s novel can be seen on the surface as representing significant ruptures with existing paradigms of postcolonial literature. Further probing, however, reveals underlying continuities with the Indian postcolonial novel, in terms of thematic preoccupations as well as recurrent tropes. Studying these convergences and divergences will thus enable us to appreciate the reappraisals of postcolonial themes in a neocolonial context.

In the previous chapter, I turned my attention from the Anglophone writings of the ideologues of Hindutva to a more recognizable form of Indian writing in English that offers a challenge, in my opinion, to the discourse of metropolitan Hindutva. In order to emphasize how such a challenge is particularly effective at the level of style, I read closely in the fifth chapter Amitav Ghosh's 1992 work In an Antique Land. In this, the final chapter of the book, I will examine how an emerging band of Anglophone Indian authors is claiming to have superseded writers of Ghosh's generation, who starting in the 1980s, are credited with having made Indian fiction in English an important commodity in the world market for postcolonial literatures. I will demonstrate, in particular, how it is precisely in the manner they distinguish themselves from an earlier generation of authors that these new Indo-Anglian scribes write themselves into the discourse of contemporary Hinduization, indeed even optimizing this discourse in its millennial version, for a digitally-enabled and globally-connected, young technocratic middle-class.

ABSTRACT: This paper sets out to discuss creativity and world Englishes from a range of perspectives. It begins with a discussion of the changing face of English studies over recent decades, and then proceeds to discuss definitions of ‘creativity’ and ‘bilingual creativity’. In the later sections of the paper, there is discussion of postcolonial literature and world fiction in English, with particular reference to the work of Timothy Mo. Finally, the implications of this discussion for contemporary English studies in Hong Kong are also considered.

India is a land of multiculturalism and Ethnicity. Multiculturalism is the key feature of postcolonial literature. Indian writers of diaspora have immensely contributed to the growth of fiction in English. Postcolonial writers like Bharati Mukherjee’s, SashiTharoor, and Rohinton Mistry, JhumpaLahiri and Harikunjru have all made their names while residing abroad. They searched the root of ethnicity and multiculturalism through their works to show uniformity. The aim of present paper is to find out the unity in diversity in immigrant people on the basis of ethnicity and multiculturalism in the novels of JhumpaLahiri.

Excessive screen time is a significant global issue associated with adverse health outcomes. The most detrimental negative effects have been reported in the developing brains of very young children. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has further increased excessive screen time among all age groups. Many factors are associated with excessive screen time among young children. However, studies focusing on these factors in very young age groups are limited. This study aimed to determine the factors associated with screen time in young children aged one year to three years in an urban Sri Lankan setting. A clinic-based descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted in Kolonnawa, Sri Lanka, from January to March 2022 (post-COVID-19 era). The study included 511 primary caretakers and their children (aged 1–3 years) selected via cluster sampling. Screen time and associated factors were assessed using a self-administered questionnaire. The recommendations given by the American Psychological Association were used as cut-off points to define excessive screen usage (for children under 24 months of age, screen time of any amount per day was considered excessive, and for children older than 24 months, screen time of more than one hour per day was considered excessive). Binary logistic regression analysis was performed, and adjusted odds ratios (AOR) were calculated to determine the associations. The study population (N = 511) consisted of 253 (49.5%) male children. The mean age of the children was 22.2 months (SD ± 8.79). When the primary caretakers of the children were considered, the mean age of the mothers was 29.3 years (SD ± 3.90), while the fathers had a mean age of 32.1 years (SD ± 3.60). Among 369 children aged 24 months or younger, 298 (80.76%) had excessive screen time, whereas among 142 children who were more than 24 months old, 87 (61.27%) had excessive screen time. Excessive screen time was observed in 385 (75.34%) children. Younger age of the child (AOR = 1.16, p < 0.001), low maternal educational level (AOR = 2.50, p = 0.03), maternal (AOR = 0.48, p = 0.013) and paternal (AOR = 0.47, p = 0.009) excessive screen usage, having a television at home (AOR = 8.88, p < 0.001), and the availability of internet access at home (AOR = 1.96, p = 0.032) were significantly associated with excessive screen usage in young children. Excessive screen usage was high among children, with three out of four children spending more time in front of screens than the recommended amount. Further public health interventions, such as the development of context-specific policies and guidelines, are recommended to address this issue.

An Interview with Patrick Flanery Christopher Holmes (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Courtesy of Patrick Flanery [End Page 426] When A. S. Byatt prefaced her selections for The Guardian’s best books of 2012 with the declaration that British fiction is “going through an extraordinarily various and imaginative period,” she was unwittingly claiming Patrick Flanery, the Nebraska-raised, Oxford-educated author of a novel about postapartheid South Africa, as a Brit. This kind of extranational imaginary is not unique in the life of British fiction; indeed, the Man Booker Prize makes an annual show of reconstituting the Empire as a literary territory, prizing postcolonial literatures as its own. But Byatt’s recommendation of Flanery’s extraordinary first novel, Absolution, says something further about the state of world literature, specifically the actual production of literatures that imagine cultures and geographies unbound by national borders. In this revitalized moment for world literature, the place of production and the writer’s national affiliation(s) are more often than not marginalized by discussions of what Wai Chee Dimock, in Through Other Continents, calls the “complex tangle of relations” bound up in the “shorthand” of national literatures (3). Dimock specifically argues for American literature, long chided for its provincial navel-gazing, as a national literary tradition ironically forged from its relations with the transnational languages, cultures, and influences of the world. Flanery grows that argument exponentially to include the South African landscape in American literature. [End Page 427] Absolution contributes to the growing canon of Anglophone literatures that imagine the historical circumstances of non-Western peoples and places, while simultaneously challenging the discursive capabilities of history, politics, memory, and story to narrate the most fraught moments in the life of a nation. Set during the interregnum just before and after the fall of the apartheid government in South Africa, Flanery’s Absolution is a Rash-omon of interdependent narratives, each claiming some territory of the elusive truth about two killings of familial and national consequence. The failure of those narratives to draw a complete picture of the events and their aftereffects forms the heart of the novel’s conviction that the novelist, the memoirist, the historian, and even the censor share a common responsibility and peril: when faced with the failure of narrative to adequately capture human events, an account must still be written, however fragile and incomplete. Absolution chronicles the story of the aging writer Clare Wald and her would-be biographer, Sam Leroux, as they wrestle with the ghosts of a conjoined history overshadowed by the legacy of apartheid, and with the fragile narrative pieces of a nation in transition. Flanery’s refusal to resolve those compelling fragments, to bind the characters to a rigid ethics, characterizes the thoughtfulness with which he approaches such delicate source material. Absolution casts its drama across the landscapes of Johannesburg and the Eastern and Western Cape provinces with what the South African writer and literary critic Michael Titlestad calls an “impeccably local” idiom and diction. This is a novel concerned with historical reckonings, with the individual’s attempt to craft a narrative from the manifold discourses and voices that lay claim to the truth of social and institutional violence and its aftershocks. Flanery’s focal character, Clare, remarks on her own attempts to make sense of her conflicted past and present in South Africa: There are two things to say about that. First, that history is not always correct, because it cannot tell all the stories that have been, cannot account for everything that happened. . . . Second, that the record of memory, even a flawed memory, has its own kind of truth. [End Page 428] And indeed the novel reads as a series of interwoven, elegant, and terrifying flawed memories. Flanery’s novel works between gut and intellect with a brutal beauty that seems at once precisely attuned to apartheid’s setting while portraying a broader geography of state atrocities, as in this description of torture: “Before killing you they would burn the names from your mouth, pull syllables from your fingernails, soak vowels and consonants from your nostrils, remind you of their authority with steel and wire, electricity and fire” (88). Absolution is also...

This chapter examines renderings of the Ramayana in Sinhala poetry, drama, and fiction from the late nineteenth century to the present. It explores the resurrection of the Ramayana alongside Buddhist themes in the Sinhala “neoclassical” literary revolution of the late 1800s, along with Ravana’s role in the Heḷa Havula (“Pure Sinhala”) movement. The chapter reviews a number of radio, theater, television, and film productions of the Ramayana in the twentieth century offering a sympathetic treatment of Ravana which have hitherto escaped scholarly attention, concluding with an examination of the theme of ancient Sri Lanka as a prelapsarian paradise and repository of technological marvels in modern Sinhala and English fiction.

By G. SCOTT BISHOP Ngugi wa Thiong'o, in Language of African Literature, argues that African children should be taught African literature in their own African languages to preserve the cultural identity that colonization sought to destroy. A paradoxically similar assertion can be made for students of English literature. If by studying English literature we are studying our cultural identity, then we must also read postcolonial literature written in English. As Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and many feminists including Nina Auerbach, Margaret Homans, Sandra Gilbert, and Susan Gubar have shown, our cultural identity has resulted in our seeing the non-Western, nonwhite, nonmale, nonChristian, non-English-speaking as other, as deviant. The Western, white Christian world, so confident of its identity, has imposed itself on the of others, and from that a new Englishlanguage literature is emerging. In contrast to Ngugi's concern that the colonial mind, through the literature of the colonizers, is being to images of his as mirrored in the written languages of his colonizers (LAL, 18), the colonizer is now, in his or her own language, being exposed to images of the usurper and the usurped as mirrored in the literature of the colonized, the oppressed. Postcolonial literature shows us the postcolonial world's way of looking at the at its place in the making of that world (LAS, 21). If it is not our moral duty, it is at least our duty as students of English literature to study postcolonial literature. J. M. Coetzee's novels offer the privileged, predominantly white an illuminating if not disconcerting picture of the political and moral entanglements in the complex postcolonial world. Coetzee is an Afrikaner born in Cape Town in 1940. He was educated in South Africa and the United States and is now a professor at the University of Cape Town. He has written five novels: Dusklands (1974), In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), The Life and Times of Michael K (1983), and Foe (1986). He has won a number of prestigious awards including South Africa's premier literary honor, the CNA prize, as well as the Geoffery Faber Memorial Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Booker McConnell Prize. Coetzee's success is significant, I think, because it can be attributed to our ability, as members of the privileged world, to identify more readily with Coetzee, who is an Afrikaner, a descendant of colonizers, than with black Africans who are writing and publishing alongside Coetzee. Besides his political sympathy for blacks, his work reflects a concern for the whites' precarious position at the top of the social order. In the 9 March 1986 New York Times Magazine Coetzee's article Tales of Afrikaners appeared. In it he said, Many Afrikaners, more moderate than their stereotype, still don't understand that they live on a lip of a (19). That volcano encompasses South Africa's political realities. These political realities, which necessarily mediate the conscious voice of any writer in South Africa, direct Coetzee's voice, a voice in conflict with itself. Coetzee reveals the power of language as a political tool, but at the same time he questions the validity of that power. He tells the story of oppression without pretending to speak for the oppressed. As a white man, an Afrikaner, he illustrates and questions his own voice as spokesman for the oppressed. Coetzee's doctoral dissertation, English Fiction of Samuel Beckett: An Essay in Stylistic Analysis, explores why Beckett gave up English to write in French. During Coetzee's analysis of Watt he says:

Water footprint (WF) is a comprehensive summation of the volume of freshwater consumed directly and indirectly in all the steps of the production chain of a product. The water footprint concept has been widely used in agricultural water resources management. Water for irrigation is supplied in Sri Lanka to farmers at no cost, and thus the question is arising, whether the current management strategies the authorities and the farmers follow are appropriate to achieve productive water utilization. Therefore, this study aims at evaluating the water footprint of rice production in an irrigation scheme in the dry zone of Sri Lanka, the Walawe irrigation scheme. Due to the unreliability of the rainfall in the study area paddy cultivation depends entirely on irrigation, thus, the WFblue, in other terms the volume of water evaporated from the irrigation water supply is considered as the total WF (WFtot) in this study. Actual crop evapotranspiration (equivalent to ETblue) was estimated based on the Penman-Monteith (P-M) model integrating effective rainfall, and crop coefficient published in Sri Lankan Irrigation Design Guidelines. The study spanned for three irrigation years from 2018–2021. Actual irrigation water issued to the field was estimated based on the data recorded by the government body responsible for irrigation water management of the area—Mahaweli Authority of Sri Lanka. The total volume of percolated water was computed employing the water balance method while assuming runoff is negligible. Results show that the average annual WFblue found to be 2.27 m3/kg, which is higher than global and national WFtot. As the crop yield in the study area (6.5 ton/ha) is also higher than the global (4.49 ton/ha) and national (3.5 ton/ha) yields, a conclusion was drawn that the irrigation water usage (CWUTblue) in the area may be significantly higher. It was then noted the higher CWUTblue was due to relatively higher evapotranspiration in the area. Thus, it is vital to reduce excess water usage by shifting irrigation practices from flooded irrigation to the System of Rice Intensification (SRI).