Conceptualizing the Discourses of Vulnerability and Resistance in Contemporary Fictional Narratives: A Critical Insight

Description

Page: 07-11

Pratap Kumar Dash (Department of English Rajendra University, Balangir, Odisha)

Literary writings have focused on the topics of vulnerability, resistance, vulnerability and resistance, and vulnerability in resistance variously. In the contexts of poverty, illiteracy, war, migration, political turmoil, colonial and postcolonial impacts, the play of power games, discrimination, natural disasters and so many similar things have been stirring human civilization from time to time. These chosen incidents and experiences are delineated or scripted in the literary writings. It accounts for how in the course of time such social plights become a permanent construct in the social life of people. In some other cases, literary writings reflect on how the Darwinian concept of mutual adaptability, struggle for existence, and the survival of the fittest become the way of life of many. Not only human for beings but also it has become a reality for animals and plants from the viewpoints of ecological crisis. In this context, a conceptual thematic mapping has been done in the paper considering the well-known social-cultural, political, economic, colonial, naturally vulnerable, and resistance-related phenomena that become documents in fictional narratives. At least nineteen such themes have been chalked out with reference to literary narratives across the world. They are: feudalistic systems, consequences of partition, colonial impacts, suffering of the marginalized, patriarchal dominance, suffering of the displaced, evil consequences of prolonged war, trauma of war, plights of the apartheid, postcolonial inter-ethnic matrices, racial discrimination, complexities in Black American social life, trauma of refugees, class struggle, identity crisis in diaspora narratives, religious hypocrisy, hazards of climate change, vulnerability in the narratives of health humanities, and technological vulnerability. It aims at giving a precise critical insight into the modalities of virtues and vices, and the voices and visuals of the existence of the victors and victims of this world.