We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Signification of Duality in Anita Desai's Voices in the City.
- Authors
Mishra, Binod; Sharma, Narinder K.
- Abstract
Anita Desai's fictional world offers a wide range of duality-ridden structures open for strong psycho-semantic render ings or interpretations. The major dualities woven in the fiction of Desai are of masculine versus feminine, tradition versus modernity, illusion versus reality, body versus soul, self versus other, Oriental versus Occidental, spirit versus flesh, rational versus irrational, emotion versus intellect, esoteric versus exoteric, lack versus desire, presence versus absence, attachment versus detachment, and so on. These dualities become foregrounded with the use of the technique of counter-pointing one issue with the other, connoting darker or brighter aspects of existence. The motif of the dualities comprises recurrent metaphors, metonymic parallelisms, ironic reversals, frequent flashbacks, cultural codings, stream-of-consciousness symbolizing dissection of the psyche, etc. Desai's women characters, though caught in the dynamics of lack and desire, always strive and struggle to find the basic truth of life which can show them the union of opposites manifesting a state of trance and tranquility. The patterns that she weaves are essentially dualistic in nature. The present paper aims at exploring some of the dualistic patterns which, in turn, constitute the thematic conflict in the novel Voices in the City (1965). The author herself admits that her world-view is innately subjective, which gives her ample scope to lay bare the varied feminine nuances manifesting the dualistic dialectics which cause the core conflict in the novel.
- Subjects
DESAI, Anita, 1937-; DUALITY (Logic); EAST-West divide; MIND &; body; EMOTIONS &; cognition; VOICES in the City (Book)
- Publication
IUP Journal of English Studies, 2010, Vol 5, Issue 1/2, p50
- ISSN
0973-3728
- Publication type
Literary Criticism