Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IITH) is a premier institute of science and technology established in 2008. IITH has been consistently ranked in the&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/reports/" rel="noopener noreferrer">top 10 institutes</a>&nbsp;in India for Engineering&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nirfindia.org/2021/EngineeringRanking.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">according to NIRF</a>&nbsp;making it one of the most coveted schools for science and technology in the country.

IITH offers&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/academics/under-graduate/">undergraduate programs</a>&nbsp;in all the classical engineering disciplines, applied sciences, design, as well as several modern interdisciplinary areas. Students are given a flexibility to explore a broad set of areas, and potentially pursue a minor or double major in a discipline that is not their own. Students who wish to seek a deeper understanding of their own discipline are strongly encouraged to get involved in cutting-edge research with the help of a faculty to mentor them, and earn an Honors in their own field.

The very foundation of IIT Hyderabad is based on&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/research/">research and innovation</a>. The vibrant research culture is evident from the number of patents and publications that IITH produces consistently every year. IITH offers&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/academics/programmes-offered/">graduate programs</a>&nbsp;at both a masters, and a doctoral level, in several diverse areas. There are separate programs for technology, design, science, and liberal arts. The&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/academics/post-graduate/">MTech program</a>&nbsp;is offered in various modes and durations to cater to the ever-growing need of postgraduate level professionals in the country.

IITH encourages and supports&nbsp;<a href="https://iic-iith.netlify.app/index.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">innovation and entrepreneurship</a>&nbsp;at every stage. The minor program in entrepreneurship is open to all students of IITH, and many of the courses are offered by industrialists who are entrepreneurs themselves. There are various&nbsp;<a href="https://iith.ac.in/research/centres-incubators/">innovation centers and incubators</a>&nbsp;that promote entrepreneurship and help mentor young innovators. IITH has been very successful in building tie-ups with leading academic institutions around the globe.

IITH enjoys a very special relationship with Japanese universities and industries that goes beyond academic and research collaborations. In fact, some of the iconic buildings in IITH campus will carry the signature of Japanese architecture.

IITH creates a unique holistic ecosystem for education that offers interactive learning, a very flexible academic structure, cutting-edge research, strong industry collaboration, and entrepreneurship. This is an environment which enables students and faculty to translate their dreams into realities.

IIT Hyderabad

This essay argues that Mona Simpson’s Anywhere but Here (1986) sustains a path breaking debate on maternity vis-à-vis female autonomy. It examines how in a narrative spatiotemporally located in America’s Midwest during the conservative eighties, the nurturing and selfless maternal figure of white middle-class Christian homes is replaced by a self-seeking maverick, Adele, who uncompromisingly embodies the hopes and aspirations of the contemporary everywoman. By underscoring how Adele rejects domesticity, rewrites male quest narratives, and survives her ambitious journeys with the help of the bond she shares with her daughter, Ann, this essay claims that Simpson’s fictional mother radically subverts all conventional caregiving practices. Further, by highlighting the seemingly conflicting discourses of maternity and autonomy which characterize Adele, this essay with the help of matricentric feminist theorists and post-Freudian psychoanalysts establishes that Anywhere but Here redefines not only the mother-child bond but also the maternal figure to engender a compelling narrative on women’s empowerment that resonates deeply with current conversations surrounding motherhood. © 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

World University root node

Department of Liberal Arts

Critique - Studies in Contemporary Fiction

Between Maternity and Autonomy: Radical Mothering in Mona Simpson’s Anywhere but Here

This study aims to critically analyze the problem of the beauty bias prevalent in contemporary India with the help of popular postmillennial Hindi television serials. It begins with a review of literature on television’s social impact and then demonstrates how representations of women on Indian television have historically been deeply interwoven with hegemonic perceptions of appearance. It then examines as case studies five popular tele serials which, while trying to be forward-looking attempts at critiquing beauty norms, in actuality reinstate normative ideals of appearance or a globally dominant beauty myth. The findings of this study indicate that most so-called progressive serials implicitly endorse casual sexism against female bodies and/or subject the purportedly unattractive female protagonist to a life of injustices owing to her lack of proverbial good looks. Accordingly, this study claims that popular television dramas instead of empowering women often uphold the beauty bias so as to attain mass appeal along with sponsorships and high target rating points. Finally, this study hopes that its findings will provide inputs for television producers and policy makers who may not only prevent body shaming and appearance discrimination, but also promote nuanced and inclusive representations of female embodiment on Indian television. © 2021 Asian Media Information and Communication Centre.

Media Asia

Television culture and the beauty bias problem: an analysis of India’s postmillennial television serials

This essay considers three unexplored late novels by Joyce Carol Oates, namely, Man Crazy, The Gravedigger’s Daughter, and Little Bird of Heaven which powerfully represent negative father complex through fictional daughters who struggle to escape the shadow of their overbearing daddies. It examines how the daughters–Ingrid, Rebecca, and Krista–hailing from disenfranchised backgrounds and broken families endure traumatic circumstances as a result of their father fixation and often develop self-effacing and masochistic tendencies. Further, it analyses how the atrophied psyche of these daughters upon losing the father compels them to go searching for surrogate daddies and predictably invite catastrophic outcomes. It then turns its focus on how by reconnecting with their hitherto unavailable mothers, Oates’ daughters undergo an integral female rite of passage to eventually overcome their psychological conditioning and attain independence and self-actualization. By drawing upon Jungian theories and feminist psychoanalysis, this essay therefore treats negative father complex as a disturbing yet necessary element in Oates’ novels, especially her underrated late novels. Finally, this essay argues that by overcoming their daddies Oates’ fictional daughters not only conquer their psychological demons but also attest to the author’s liberal feminist sensibility by moving from chaos to clarity. © 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Overcoming Daddy: The Daughter’s Rite of Passage in Joyce Carol Oates’ Late Novels

This essay reads evolving cultures of white American middle-class masculinity in tandem with ekphrastic symbolisms of domestic architecture in Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread. It interprets the text as a subversive narrative where if hegemonic gender norms oppress women and children, they also often confine men primarily to the role of a provider and alienate them from their own shelters. Accordingly, by focusing on the profound connection between masculinity and domestic architecture in A Spool of Blue Thread, this essay argues that Tyler’s postmillennial novel systematically debunks several conventions associated with both gender norms and domestic spaces. In sum, this essay—with the help of masculinity studies and space theories—suggests that by establishing how preservation, husbandry, and care over cold rationality and calculated aggression are elemental to constructions of both ideal masculinity and ideal homes in the current millennium, A Spool of Blue Thread necessitates conversations on changeovers that create felicitous domestic spaces for both men and women. © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

English Studies

“The Trouble Goes Back to Your Grandfather’s Time”: Masculinity and Domestic Spaces in Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread

ANQ - Quarterly Journal of Short Articles Notes and Reviews

The Female Prophet and Religious Re-visioning in Marilynne Robinson’s Lila

South Central Review

Of pandemics and pilgrims: Reconciling grief and death in cormac mccarthy's the road

This article reads how obesity in Sapphire’s Push (1996) becomes a composite cultural metaphor for Gothic excesses. By critically analysing Claireece Precious Jones–the adolescent overweight African American protagonist of Push–with the help of contemporary Gothic theories of horror and excess this article makes a case for interpreting her fat body as a repository of cultural hatred, anxieties, and violence characterising the intersectional oppressions of appearance, gender, class, and race. Further, with the help of critical race theories, fat studies scholarship, and social studies research on poor black populations it reads how Precious’ obesity is not merely a physical condition but also a symbol of wasteful excesses that is vilified and abused, both sexually and otherwise, by her own family as well as the society at large. Appropriately, it suggests that Precious’ obesity coupled with her mental derangement becomes symptomatic of a Gothicized world which belies promises of progressivism and harbours uncontrollably violent forces against disenfranchised fat black women. This article, accordingly, focuses on Precious’s overweight body as a site and symptom of Gothic excesses that provides a vocabulary for examining the horrific rationalities celebrated by contemporary America. © Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 2021.

Journal of Language, Literature and Culture

Obesity, Contemporary Gothic, and the Rhetoric of Excess in Push

This essay analyses the changing politics of beauty labour and female body image in Indian cinema. It begins by discussing how beauty, a social capital for women, is a measuring rod with which their bodies are both assessed and objectified. It claims that cinema being a visual medium demands some aesthetic capital from actors, and the beauty of leading ladies portrayed on screen often adds to the spectacle. Focusing on mainstream Bollywood films produced especially over the last two decades, this essay examines narratives upholding the beauty ideal both as a cinematic necessity and also as a plot point. Tracing developments in cinematic representations of female beauty, it then examines select postmillennial films (both mainstream Bollywood as well as regional productions) to suggest that a maturing trend in representing female bodies is emerging in Indian cinema where instead of the prettified heroine one increasingly encounters protagonists who refuse to agonize under beauty labour. Finally, it argues that owing to global debates and critical feminist interventions on female body image, a radical shift is palpable in postmillennial Indian films which showcase women who either reject or redefine the politics of beauty labour. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

South Asian Popular Culture

The changing politics of beauty labour in Indian cinema

Fictive Kinship in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

The English Paradigm in India: Essays in Language, Literature and Culture

Cultural assimilation and the politics of beauty in postwar American fiction by ethnic women writers

Explicator

Apocalyptic imagery in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping

Mina Loy's PARTURITION and Lécriture Féminine

Paul Auster's travels in the scriptorium as a critique of the hyperreal

Tyranny of the beauty myth in Joyce Carol Oates's my sister, my love

Survival, a signature theme in Margaret Atwood's works, is once again celebrated in The Handmaid's Tale (1985) wherein the narrator protagonist transforms herself into a chronicler and using her narrative sustains herself in a fictionalized dystopic world-Gilead. The present paper claims that the protagonist, Offred, in negotiating her agency as a chronicler in a totalitarian phallogocentric world, adopts the role of a 'hysteric'. This argument is premised on Juliet Mitchell's psychoanalytic concept of the hysteric which claims that for a woman to produce her narrative in a phallogocentric world, she has to be a hysteric. Furthering this thesis, Offred's past and present in the novel are compared to the Lacanian Imaginary and the Symbolic, thereby demonstrating that the narrator protagonist's life is never free from the dictates of phallogocentric law. In order to survive such oppression, Offred, in The Handmaid's Tale, becomes a hysteric chronicler whose narrative simultaneously becomes the symbol of her resistance and her means to survive. © 2013 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

IUP Journal of English Studies

The hysteric as a chronicler in Margaret Atwood's the Handmaid's Tale

Oates’s first love

Joyce Carol Oates has often been charged with sensationalizing and commercializing issues of poverty and violence. The present paper seeks to prove that Oates's powerful depictions of America's disenfranchised and violence-ridden world is no mere ploy of sensationalism or catharsis but a leitmotif that enables her to expose the lack of dignity and the absence of basic human rights in the lives of the powerless. In her recent novel, The Gravedigger's Daughter (2007), Oates forcefully articulates the problematic of racial discrimination, economic deprivation and violence that characterized the status of immigrant Jews in post-World War II America. The despicable condition of the Schwart family in The Gravedigger's Daughter is strikingly similar to what developmentalists like Martha Nussbaum call the absence of all 'capabilities'. Nussbaum's 'capability approach', which assesses human development not through crude measures such as Gross Domestic Profit (GDP), but by measuring an individual's growth vis-à-vis the quality of life, can be seen as an appropriate tool in the analysis of literary texts such as Oates's, which often deal with economic and cultural deprivations. By reading The Gravedigger's Daughter in tandem with Nussbaum's development ethics, the present paper seeks to establish how Oates's radical social critique calls for reinstating the basic rights of the poor and an immediate revision in the field of human development. © 2009 IUP. All Rights Reserved.