Md. Abdul Karim Ruman

The structuralists believe that to understand any narrative text, it has to be seen in the context of the larger structures it is part of. Roland Barthes sees five narrative codes as the basic underlying structures of all narratives. So, in terms of our structuralist reading of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, the individual item is this particular story and the larger structure is the system of codes which Barthes sees as generating all possible actual narratives. This essay explores textual signifiers..

Nadine Gordimer's July's People is a novel focusing on the inversion of colonial power-play in South Africa whose history till 1990s was nothing but a chronicle of racism, violence, bloodshed, slavery, oppression and exploitation by the white English colonizers. This essay explores how all such inversion and reversal of colonial power-play have affected the Smales family, the white refugee in the black community of July, their servant. It is a metaphor of dialectical historical materialism.

According to Michel Foucault, our identity is constructed by how we are seen. In this regard, ‘gaze' and panopticon are the mechanics that create, propagate, establish, and gradually naturalize racial identity and prejudices, leading to the blacks' internalization of hegemonic ideology and inferiority which sustain automatically because of the victims' blindness to them.The Bluest Eye Morrison challenges the Western standard of beauty and Native Son is concerned with the ‘black' and ‘red' phobia

The Pleasures of Exile is a postcolonialist, postrealist and postnationalist counter-discourse because it gives us George Lamming's glimpse of the complex issues of identity contained within the Caribbean island-states that were largely shaped by European colonial practice from the late-fifteenth century upto the late twentieth century. This thesis paper explores--"How is the Caribbean identity constructed by colonial discourses and how far is it possible to reconstruct it by counter-discourse?"

In Doris Lessing's "To Room Nineteen" the title indicates the protagonist Susan's illusive no-man's-land for physical and psychological freedom from excessive family responsibilities, but in reality it turns out to be an alternative to commit suicide. The writer illuminates the restrictions placed on women of mid twentieth century London and the devastating consequences of those restrictions. This essay explores whether suicide is the only way of redemption for the traditional women like Susan.

Oresteian Trilogy, of which Agamemnon is the first tragedy, revolves around the old and everlastingly unsolved problem of "The ancient blinded vengeance and the wrong that amendeth wrong". Here every wrong is justly punished; yet, as the world goes, every punishment becomes a new wrong of the old. This essay explores Aeschylus's attempt "to justify God's ways to men"--due to the curse in the house of Atreus, leading to a bloody chain of revenge and murder in the context of Agamemnon.

Antigone is a passionate story of conflict and suffering. Its plot revolves around Antigone's burial of her rebel brother Polyneices. This essay explores its consequential conflict in human and divine level: e.g. conflict of Antigone with Ismene, Creon with the Watchman, Creon with Antigone, Creon with Haemon, Creon with Teiresias, Creon with the upper and nether gods and Eros Aphrodite. The objective of this research is to focus on the socio-cultural, political and religious implication of them

J. M. Coetzee is concerned with important moral issues including post-apartheid and race relations in his native South Africa, human rights, animal rights and social and political injustice. In Disgrace, he involves us in the struggle of a discredited university teacher Lurie to defend his own and his daughter Lucy's honor in the new circumstances that have arisen in South Africa after the collapse of white supremacy. This essay explores--Is the white's disgrace by blacks in the novel justified?

Formalism generally studies the form in the text to show how the aesthetic effects are produced by the literary devices.This essay explores the formal aspects of the poem; e.g., the title, syllogistic pattern, style, diction, figuratives like hyperbole, metaphysical conceit, simile, metaphor, personification, imagery, wit, epigram, unified sensibility, time and space etc.- to establish the theme of ‘carpe diem' through which the speaker is trying to convince his beloved to have a physical union.

In Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad has portrayed ironically how the white European people assume themselves to be ‘civilized' and consider the black people of the Dark Continent Africa to be ‘uncivilized' or ‘savage'. But a bitter irony lies in the fact that the people who look apparently civilized in the novel are most savage in reality.This essay asks- "What are the criteria of civility and savagery? - and explores how the actual ‘savagery' hides under the Euro-centric cloak of ‘civilization'.