Smruti's Blog

  The Haunting of History: A Psychoanalytic and Gothic Critique of Toni Morrison’s Beloved Introduction Toni Morrison’s 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Beloved , stands as a monumental pillar of American literature, a work that forces the reader to confront the "unspeakable" legacies of slavery. Set in the wake of the Civil War, the narrative follows Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman who is literally and figuratively haunted by the ghost of the daughter she killed to save from a life of bondage. While the novel is a searing historical document, a deeper critical analysis viewed through the lenses of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the American Gothic  reveals it to be an intricate study of fragmented identity, the failure of repression, and the reclamation of the black body. In Beloved , history is not a linear sequence of past events; it is a living, breathing entity that must be exorcised before the future can begin. 1. The "Unspeakable" and the Rememory Central to...

The Language of Tyranny: A Post-Structuralist Critique of Animal Farm George Orwell’s 1845 novella, Animal Farm , is frequently taught as a straightforward historical allegory. We are told the animals are the proletariat, the pigs are the Bolsheviks, and the ultimate corruption is the result of revolutionary zeal turning to greed. However, when viewed through a post-structuralist and linguistic lens , the text reveals itself to be a study of how power is maintained through the manipulation of language . The tragedy of Animal Farm is not merely that the pigs become the humans, but that they successfully rewrite reality by deconstructing the definitions of "freedom" and "equality." 1. The Linguistic Shift: From Maxim to Manipulation At the inception of the rebellion, Old Major provides the animals with a clear ideological framework. Following his death, this is distilled by Snowball into a single, rhythmic maxim: "Four legs good, two legs bad." — Chapter 3 ...