Silent Words

Ecological-Political Landscape of “Tintern Abbey”             Prima facie , Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” exposes the Romantic sublimity through the description of nature’s serenity, idealistic view and its vastness. But the oblique presence of ecological and political landscape: the seamy side of the then English society, ecological destruction caused by industrialism and the plight of the working class, subverts that sublimity. In elaborating this claim, I will be analyzing the existing discourse on the ‘presence and absence’ of historical and ecological concern in the poem, especially among the romantic new historicists in the likes of Jerome McGann, Marjorie Levinson and William Richey, and the romantic eco-critics like James C. McKusick and Kevin Hutchings “Tintern Abbey”, for most of more than two hundred years since its first publication in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads (1798), remained a largely uncontested masterpiece until late in...

Gender is one of the most studied paradigms as it is the main paradigm that people use in determining how to act and interact with others. For this reason, it is important to look at the ways in which individuals receive messages about gender norms. Many researches have been carried out on the effects of TV commercials, but very few studies have been made at gender within commercials. This paper departs from all of these prior studies in that it purports to study the Nepalese TV advertisements as a kind of proscenium stage on which the discourse of gender is performed. To support the claim, I will be using Judith Butler’s notion of gender as performance and also the basic insights from various performance studies scholars like Schechner, Turner and so on.   For this study, I have performed   a content analysis on current prime-time commercials from four major Nepalese Television channels—NTV, Kantipur TV, Image Channel and Avenues Channel.   The term ‘performance’ does no...

“I will take you to a different world,” my friend said leading me one restaurant in Baneswor. Not used to going to restaurant much, I simply followed him. And curiosity was there, of course, to know what was “different” there. We were going through the menu when a waiter came and just stood up without speaking a single word. To my wonder, my friend made some gestures through his fingers as if signaling something. The waiter went back. Then, he told me all the waiters in that restaurant were hearing and speech impaired. I was surprised. I had read about the deaf people who have done very marvelous jobs in western countries. But, my encounter with the deaf people in Nepal working on the equal footing with the normal people was first in that restaurant. I thanked the restaurant owner for that matter. The waiters there were the proof that if given opportunity, deaf and physically disabled people also can work as normal people do. So, they should be employed in almost every known vocation...

Nepali remix pop music is one of the most popular song types since the 1990s. Though other musical genres like log geet and adhunik geet have come under the ambit of scholarly research (Ghimire ,M.P,1975, Grandin,I, 1989, Liechty, 1995 and others), very little attention has been paid to the mix pop music. This may be owing to the relatively late development of pop music in Nepal . Though a few scholarly researches have been done, those studies have tried to show that Nepali mix music is an offshoot of western music. This paper differs with those studies in that it primarily interprets Nepali remix pop songs as a locus of global-local interaction. Though Nepali mix music is heavily influenced by western music, it is loyal to the local or Nepali indigenity as well. Secondarily, the paper will try to show that due to the ‘ glocalization ’ (Featherstone) of Nepali mix music, the whole process of imagining nation Nepal has also changed. Globalization has been one of the buzz words these ...

Fed up with my hectic job, it has been my daily routine to go through the newspapers for the job advertisements.   I come across many ads of attractive jobs. But to my dismay, many of them are with a label attached—female only. It compels me to ponder on this gendering of jobs. And I also ponder if it is contributing to women empowerment and also if there is an inherent relation between a job and gender. Gendering of job is so endemic these days. You go through the job advertisements and you will come across several instances. Most of the jobs in clothing and textile industries, telephone communication, health services, and local education are separated for women.   It is a positive thing that women are also getting job outside their homes, but the job assigned to them is still tainted by gender discrimination. Though the men and women are different by their birth in terms of sex which is biological and natural, gender differences are just a social construct, an arbitra...