Academic literature on the topic 'Communal living – Fiction'

Fiction is not created just to entertain. It serves as a historical treasure trove of social change, the context, and condition of a changing society by uncovering social problems and suggesting solutions. Fiction creators act as the lifeblood of this forum. Such a creator is Rajam Krishnan. With the aim of social development, he has created many new personalities in his fiction from various angles. He has given life and meaning to the nucleus of innovation with the aim of improving the individual's character and interests and has sown the seeds of social excellence in the form of the contribution of storytellers. If the standard of living of the people is to be raised, the level of education should be raised. Education should be communal. We need to get rid of the condition of being dependent on others economically. Educated young people need to listen to experienced elders. Capitalist norms should be broken and rights should be voiced. Students of higher education should be aware of these principles and be aware of social progress. Eliminating the distinctions between upper and lower caste people, Rajam Krishnan's Katha Manders has been created so that the idea of living with the idea of humanity should be removed and vandalism should be eliminated. Educated women and illiterate women should have clarity of thought. They should become powerful in the liberation struggles and in opposing the groups that work against women. When sexual harassment and violence occur in the workplace, workers should be courageous and have a strong mindset to get rid of them. In order to raise the economic status, the standard of education should be raised. Rajam Krishnan's award-winning novelizations capture the idea that women's thinking should be beneficial to the nation and the home.

In terms of Michel Foucault utopias afford consolation : “Although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold ; they open up cities with waste avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical.” Utopias testify to our inability to dream our way out of the myths and the historical situation we live. As a matter of fact, our attitude towards history, says Dmitry Likhachev, is directed by notions “ encapsulated’’ in myths. During the 20th century, Russian utopian narrative expanded literary horizons by providing new visions of those “untroubled regions”. The revolutionary ideals of equality, communal living, new morality, and technology worship, generated in Russian utopianism a range of experimental fiction. This implied also a new genre of an “open-ended utopia”. Such an ambiguous utopia is indeterminate and incomplete, and often interrelated with the genre of the short fragmentary prose. Open-ended utopia involves the reader more actively in a dialectical process, giving him a more fundamental organizing role as the constructor of the text’s meaning. Velimir Khlebnikov (1885 -1922) and Elena Guro (1877-1913) - though not utopian writers in the same meaning as H.G. Wells or Alexandr Bogdanov - however, both directed their creative thought towards futurological visions of a new universal order and a new universal Man. In this paper I examine some of Khlebnikov’s and Guro’s futurological texts as fictional experiments of a spatial world-vision. Both authors domesticated and “colonized” in a very easy and concrete way the aerospace : the vault of heaven, the air, and the clouds, transforming them into their own, private heterotopias.

Amitav Ghosh, perhaps Asia's most prominent living author, moves among many genres and across vast territories. His fiction—The Circle of Reason(1986),The Shadow Lines(1988),The Glass Place(2000),The Hungry Tide(2004), andThe Ibistrilogy—takes us from Calcutta where he was born in 1956 to the Arabian Sea, Paris, London, and back again to the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal, and beyond. His nonfiction—In an Antique Land(1992),Dancing in Cambodia and at Large in Burma(1998), andCountdown(1999)—rests on a PhD in social anthropology from Oxford. He went to Alexandria, Egypt, for his dissertation research. His science fiction,The Calcutta Chromosome, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1997. His essays—published inThe New Yorker, The New Republic, andThe New York Timesand collected inThe Iman and the Indian(2002)—address major issues such as fundamentalism. Indeed, most of his work addresses big questions, exploring the nature of communal violence, the traces of love and longing across generations, manifold religious manifestations, and the systematic pain of colonial oppression. The deep and abiding theme of many works is anthropogenic environmental damage, now boldly and directly addressed inThe Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable(2016). Married to accomplished fellow author Deborah Baker, whose work traces the Asian peregrinations of Allen Ginsberg, the literary milieu of Laura Riding, and the complexity of Islamic conversion, Ghosh has taught at Harvard, Columbia, Queens College, and Delhi University. He has won more prizes and honorary doctorates, and been a fellow at more famous institutions and a distinguished visitor in more far-flung places, than you can shake a stick at. He even has two homes: Brooklyn and Goa. In short, Ghosh's profile makes you wonder if there might not be more than one of him.

In a letter to Erasmus dated 3 September 1516, Thomas More wrote: ‘I am sending you my “Nowhere”, which is nowhere well written’. More's use of the Latin word ‘nusquam’ in this sentence (not ‘Utopia’, as one might have expected) made explicit what would have been apparent to any reader of the book with a knowledge of Greek: that the island of Utopia which the character Raphael Hythloday describes is ‘nowhere’. The name ‘Utopia’, those readers would have known, was a compound of the Greek adverb ‘ou’, meaning ‘not’, with the noun ‘topos’, or ‘place’. The non-existence of Utopia operates throughout the work as a joke with at least two dimensions. On one level, the story Hythloday tells is ostensibly presented as fact, whereas humanist readers with a knowledge of Greek would have known it to be fiction. But additionally, Hythloday's argument (against the objections to communism voiced by ‘More’) that communal living really does work in Utopia is ironically undercut by the fact that Utopia is nowhere at all. Why More should choose to make this second joke is in a way the most fundamental question for the interpretation of Utopia, for if we do not understand why More thinks it is important that the commonwealth Hythloday describes is ‘nowhere’, we will not be able to understand what More is doing in the work as a whole.

Published in 1994, Louise Erdrich’s The Bingo Palace traces the journey of Lipsha Morrissey, who is called to return to his childhood home, a fictional Ojibwe reservation, after years of living off-reservation with his father. Upon his return, Lipsha becomes enamored with a young woman, Shawnee Ray, and entangled in conflict with Lyman, Lipsha’s uncle, half-brother, and the father of Shawnee Ray’s child, who plans to build a glamorous “Bingo Palace” on reservation land to bring wealth to the Ojibwe people. As Lipsha struggles to reconcile his conflict with Lyman, he faces questions of identity, family, and an ethical dilemma: would the economic benefits of a “Bingo Palace” outweigh the cultural costs?

Danish-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose called these commandments “the Jante’ Law,” so-named for his protagonist's fictional Danish home-town in the semi-autobiographical novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks (orig. pub. 1933; English trans., 1936:77-78). Over the years this ironic credo of elder-dominated communal living has expanded and acquired a special resonance with respect to Swedish cultural self-image. Today in Sweden, the Jante Law occupies a place in the popular imagination as a descriptor of a specifically Scandinavian attitude, a subtly enforced culture of moderation and humility.

San Francisco, AK Press, 2007 Full Text You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere. -Shevek, in The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin In a testament to his ability to draw on diverse authors and theories, Bob Torres opens the final chapter of Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights with a quote from a science fiction novel, and in so doing he successfully draws together many of the themes of his work. LeGuin's character Shevek hails from a society organized by property-less relationships, complete gender equality and communal living. Shevek travels to the capitalist planet Urras and finds a materially wealthy society plagued by repression, alienation and radical inequality. His revolutionary ideas are quickly shot down. For Torres, Shevek represents a social anarchist perspective that entails a daily commitment to living and embodying the principles that one wants to see practiced in the world. Far from beginning his academic career as an animal rights activist, Torres, assistant professor of sociology at St Lawrence University and co-host of the popular Vegan Freak Radio podcast, originally studied agricultural science. It was a "dairy production" class that initially led him to think more seriously about animal oppression, and the logistics of the commodification of sentient beings under capitalism. Torres was taught to view animals as producers. He learned how a farmer survives in the "go big or go home" world of agribusiness: by squeezing every last bit of production out of animals for the least possible input. Capitalism relies on alienation between "producers" (in this case, cows) and their "products" (their calves, their milk, and eventually, their own bodies), creating a mental distance between consumers and producers that obscures underlying power relations and exploitation. Torres' experiences with production agriculture disrupted this mental distance by revealing the process by which sentient beings become "living machines" for the profit and enjoyment of humans. Torres situates his analysis of animal exploitation and advocacy within broader discussions of Marxist political economy, social ecology, social anarchism, and abolitionist animal rights theory. He challenges all of his readers, regardless of their political inclinations and thoughts on the status of nonhuman animals, to make connections between different forms of oppression, and to examine the power relationships that underlie their attitudes and consumer choices. He implores the Left to consider animals within broader liberation struggles but reserves some of his most powerful critique for the "animal rights" movement itself. He chastises animal advocates who fail to work in solidarity with other anti-oppression movements and whose means are inconsistent with their desired ends. Torres maintains that if capitalism, commodification, and property relations are inextricably linked to animal exploitation, then working from within this paradigm is not a recipe for effective activism. According to Torres, the animal rights movement in its current incarnation as the "Animal Rights Industry" has lost sight of itself and its long-term goals and has been co-opted to the point where it can no longer target exploitation at its foundation. He argues that the movement has become dominated by multi-million dollar organizations with enormous operating budgets that work directly with agribusiness in pursuit of endless welfare reforms. He points to the ongoing "love affair" between animal protection organizations and corporations like Whole Foods, and argues that these alliances actually make animal exploitation more profitable. Despite all of the rhetoric about "compassion", corporations' primary responsibility is towards shareholders. For example, rather than encouraging concerned consumers to stop eating animal products, Whole Foods caters to a niche market willing to pay a premium for "happy meat". Drawing on the abolitionist animal rights theory of Gary Francione, Torres shows how this phenomenon actually perpetuates animal exploitation by reinforcing the idea that animals are property, thereby legitimating their commodification. As the (legal and conceptual) property of humans, animals' subjectivity, their interests in not suffering, and the fulfillment of their natural needs and behaviours all become secondary to the interests of property owners. For these reasons, welfare reforms and anti-cruelty laws inevitably fail to protect the interests of animals. Having argued that we cannot buy a revolution for animals by donating to our favourite animal protection corporation or by purchasing ever more "humane" animal products, Torres maintains that anyone can use their own strengths and talents to bring about social change - all that is needed is a commitment to making a change consistent with one's own principles. Torres empowers his readers to seek affinity with other social movements and to strive for fundamental societal change that strikes at the roots of all hierarchy and domination. Recognizing animal exploitation as a needless form of domination, Torres advocates veganism as a direct refusal to participate in the consumption, enslavement, and subjugation of animals for human ends. Veganism is a daily, lived expression of that ethical commitment, and it embodies the change that animal rights movement seeks to implement.

After the end of World War II, the British colonial grip loosened, and many independent countries emerged. In August 1947, two countries got their independence: India and Pakistan, which were created on the basis of the religious majority in each part. The following days saw one of the biggest migrations of human history as Many Muslims from India tried to migrate to newborn Pakistan and vice versa. The whole subcontinent fell under fire, and violence erupted in many places. Stories of murder, rape, beating, forced conversion, kidnapping, and property grabbing emerged in various corners, especially in the frontier zones. As a survivor of partition ensued violence, Khushwant Singh describes the mayhem he witnessed, in a fictional term in his novel Train to Pakistan. He modelled Mano Majra, a small peaceful village in the Punjab frontier, as a miniature of the society and showed how the poisonous communal hatred had engulfed the whole place, where people were living in peaceful harmony for thousands of years, and made it a fireball. This paper is going to explore Singh’s picturization of Violence and atrocities in post-partition India through the fictional village Mano Majra.

The importance of food as a material object in fictional texts has attracted attention of literary scholars. The interest in the materiality of food helps to analyze the historical and cultural contexts, described in literary works. Moreover, the physicality of food in literature and the way of its consumption leads to a better understanding of individual and collective identities. Food and its rituals constitute the significant part in migratory novels. Customs and traditions surrounding food provide the unity of immigrant communities threatened by the disconnection from a native country. Communal dining ensures the affirmative experience of foreigners in host countries. The focus of this article is concentrated on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel ‘Americanah’ (2013). Food and food-related practices presented in the novel disclose several problematic layers: globalization and food, soul food and immigration, food and class, food and a migrant’s identity. As the narrative evolves the main protagonists go through their emigration from Nigeria to the USA and Great Britain. They experience new tastes and dishes in host countries as well as new cultural and racial realities. Soon they realize that their idealized images of the West do not have correlatives in the reality. The hardships and frustrations of immigrant life led them to either deportation or reverse migration. One of the main characters, Ifemelu, after thirteen years of living in the USA, comes back to Nigeria. The narrative discloses the possibility for her to assume an identity that is both “American” and ethnic at the same time. The rigid dichotomy between Americanness and racial Otherness is overcome through the mixing of tastes and culinary preferences.

John Cheever is a remarkable American short story writer and novelist. He is recognized as one of the most significant short story authors of the previous century. His themes mainly involve the duality of human nature which is usually illustrated through the chasm between a character's comme il faut communal character and interior degradation. Most of his works also reflect nostalgia for a disappearing life style, demonstrated by following cultural customes and a deep communal feeling, in contrast to the estranging nomadism of contemporary backstreets. Being Cheever's most popular story, The Swimmer (1964) represents these backsteet stories, which discover the glory and sufferings of people living within the chaos of a so-called peaceful American suburbia. Mostly considered as Cheever's best work, The Swimmer mixes legend and reality while narrating Neddy Merrill's realtivley long trip along the pools of Westchester County. In this study, The Swimmer will be analysed in terms of major narrative theories in order to examine how authorial preferences support major themes and motifs within the short story. To do so, the study sets out to reveal narrative agents and their voices, analyse representation of consciousness, and finally discuss post-modern reality in American fiction.

This chapter focuses on a village in peri-urban Guangzhou that stubbornly refused to be relocated to state commodity housing. It examines how the regulatory equation of “urban” with “state ownership” in China entrenches a social fiction that occupants of collective land suffer from an innate rurality ill-suited to the conditions of modern living. The chapter's account shows how villagers, without directly challenging state policy, mobilize a quality-driven language emphasizing “the sanctuary of the collective” (jitidebihu) as a communal way of being that fosters a vitality (renqi) that villagers and other urban outcasts otherwise consider absent from the homogenized commodity world taking over the city. Refusing to become urban — despite the economic and environmental hardships associated with this refusal — reinforces the fiction that collective land holds back China's modern future but also enacts a critique of the glass towers now symbolically dominating the urbanizing landscape. Ultimately, the chapter argues that the moments of debate, negotiation, and struggle in this section clearly reveal the absurdity of the idea that urbanization and marketization are capable substitutes for collective landownership and relationships.

This research explores the farming landscape and village life in Kampos, a village on the Greek island of Tinos. Tinos is an Aegean island with a long history of agriculture. In Kampos, one of the oldest farming villages of Tinos, boundaries created by low stone walls and alleyways primarily define the farming landscape that permeates village life and its structure. The landscape appears semi-artificial, given the construction of countless rows of cultivation ridges and terraces. Boundaries on the island appear through texts, space, movement and habit, thus creating. a series of liminal spaces. They represent areas – or rather situations – allowing for multiple co-existing levels of interaction, which are both ambiguous and can be transformed through negotiation. Negotiation would not be possible without language and narrative: Language arises through communal metaphors, stories, and fictional beliefs that bind and connect a small community together in a farming landscape, a community that has retained a quality of life closely connected to nature, architecture, and private and public realms, all by exhibiting features that can be found in a contemporary way of living. Objectified and non-objectifiable boundaries – in relation to the villagers’ land, water, private and public spaces –, their absence, their negotiation, the life that flourishes in-between them, and their relationship to men and women, ownership, and bonding, are important aspects examined in research. The presence, the lack of, and the negotiation of these boundaries, all unfold through fictional stories, narratives and interviews of villagers from Kampos. Through these narratives, I argue that when boundaries are obscure or create an in-between space of negotiation and communication, when they become a liminal space, then a different situation of ownership and bonding arises. Here, the villagers claim their properties’ boundaries, and negotiate these and sometimes fall into conflicts. Conducting this research, I determined that stories created from the villager’s life, space, and landscape consist of a series of metaphors that define ‘dwelling’ in this part of the world, in this specific landscape, which has a contemporary way of living, but still connected with tradition and the past as an action mimetic of the present.