Vol. 5 No. 2 (2020): Literature and Popular Culture

ISSN No: 2583-4347

Editorial

In this number of Samyukta, with its focus on Literature and Popular Culture, we have included papers on the unsung heroes battered by the bigotry of mainstream culture, A Ludo-Narrative Analysis of The Construction of the Cyborg Player in Transistor, and the Representation of Cannabis in Selected Hindi Film Songs.

However, the highlight of this issue is a hermeneutical analysis of the art and craft of photography. As a medium of representation, photographs capture our attention and constantly confront us at emotional, rational, physical and interpersonal levels. The paper Pause, Click: Photography, an Introductory Reading by Farah Zachariah primarily sees photographs as visual texts and looks into how readers or viewers negotiate meanings from them. It  analyses a set of photographs on conditions of violence and trauma by engaging the principles of critical hermeneutics to interpret and give scope for multiple readings. As mentioned in the paper, “Photography can be treated as a language, acquiring meaning through the cultural conventions, and conscious and unconscious processes, which cannot be merely reduced to subject matter, visual style and authorial intentions”.

Any discussion of popular culture, at present, would appear incomplete without looking into Harry Potter both as a fictional text and cinema. We have included in this number two papers on the ‘magic’ of the Harry Potter narratives, House-Elves in Harry Potter: Slaves by Themselves by Annu Sabu Palathingal and Locating the Grotesque: A Meta-theoretical Reading by Prasida P. The objective of Annu Sabu Palathinga’s paper is to understand and examine why the house-elves remain as slaves to wizards even though they have superior magical capabilities.  The article by Prasida P. seeks to comprehend the multidimensional understanding of the term ‘grotesque’ with reference to the different ideologies, disciplines, thought practices and representations in sync with the spirit of the age it is associated with. For such representations, the ‘grotesque’ is artfully brought to fore as an adept tool by authors and artists, as the most efficacious artistic weapon for mirroring the intricate reality and inherent contradictions in human life.

G. S. Jayasree
Chief Editor
Samyukta: A Journal of Gender and Culture
https://samyuktajournal.in