Novel Approaches
Myths and Legends as Dynamic Socio-Cultural Constructs: A Study on Robinson Jeffers's Poems View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alvin Joseph
This study aims to establish the idea that myths and fairy tales in various literary forms and environments are reflections of the socio-cultural constructs in a particular society. It is also the objective of this paper to bring out the different pros and cons of myths and fairy tales in the poems of Robinson Jeffers. This paper discusses the terms ‘myths’ and ‘fairy tales’ in brief and their role in poems as socio-cultural constructs. It is also the paper's objective to reconsider the purpose of poets and other creative writers in telling and retelling myths, legends, and fairy tales in literature and other artistic discourses. Besides, this paper also tries to have an analysis of the experience of traveling or journeys while meditating through different myths and fairy tales through wonderlands, miraculous worlds, elfin grots, and fairy castles along with the realization that all these provide a sufficient background for poetry, drama and literature with the purpose of constructing culture, the ideals and values accepted by society.
Child(ish)ness in Graphic Novels: Experiments with New Forms of Expression View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Maaheen Ahmed
Turning to three contemporary alternative publications from North America, France and Belgium, this talk delineates the contours of childish elements in graphic novels to show how they figure as the unsaid in a transatlantic comics history marked by the emergence of the graphic novel: in the zealous ‘growing up’ of comics, the childish and childlike has been reconfigured to acquire a more marginalized, heavily connoted space within comics for adults. In the now acclaimed, but once difficult to publish, comics by Lynda Barry, in Dominique Goblet’s partially autobiographical Pretending is Lying or more recently Disa Wallander’s Becoming Horses, the childish and childlike are activated to open the spaces and meaning-making potential of the graphic novel in overlapping but different ways. I examine the possibilities of understanding these graphic novels’ incorporation of childlike elements - ranging from the collaging of children’s drawings, the interweaving of imitations thereof, to the representation of children’s spaces, imaginations and logics - from the angles of affective connections, material interventions into the possibilities of communicating and expressing through drawing and the essence of drawing itself (use of childish colors, forms, techniques) to the hybrid, word-image spaces of the graphic novels themselves and how, ultimately, the very space of the book-object is reconfigured through childlike elements.
