Suchergebnisse

This is a picture of one of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' "No Trespassing" signs.

This research paper aims to explore the cultural, political, and social realities of Pakistan in Uzma Aslam Khan's novel Trespassing. The ethnic conflicts which engulfed Karachi in the 1990s in the aftermath of the Afghan War and Gulf War are also depicted. Mixed approach has been used as a tool in order to highlight different aspects of real life presented in the novel. These approaches are critical discourse analysis, punctuation as prosody of language, code mixing, and color semiotics. Code mixing in the novel gives a glaring picture of Pakistani culture and traditional values at the major level by the use of Urduised words. The application of critical discourse analysis in Trespassing reveals the political unrest, corruption, fantasy for America, individualism and ethnic conflicts which swamped the whole country. The prosody of punctuation illustrates the hidden meanings of the sentences more explicit thus making the societal issues more protuberant. The prosody is concerned with the semantic meaning rather than rhetorical meaning. Color semiotics of both eastern and western culture also objectified and presented a more comprehensive vision of the culture, ideas, and feelings in the novel. Trespassing is a book which is realistic and in all sense an essence of Pakistan and its people.

The purpose of the article is to discuss, based on chosen examples, whether the intercultural understanding is possible and what are the limits of it. Firstly, in a short introduction, the tools which the Europeans elaborated in order to understand Indian texts, which were mainly grammars and dictionaries, are discussed. Then, the Sanskrit terms such as "dharma," used to express the most important ideas of Indian culture, are analyzed. This discussion is followed by the analyse of the noun "vana." Its most typical English equivalent used in translations is "forest." However, after deeper consideration, it appears that the understanding of this term differs depending on particular cultural roots. The next noun to be discussed is "lotus" as used in the European texts in which these Indian flowers are shown. In Sanskrit works of literature the European word "lotus" has more than one equivalent and the differences among Indian lotuses are of importance in the process of creating appropriate poetic images. One more example of potential "intercultural walks" described in the article is the presentation and comparison of the reception of two versions, an Indian and a European one, of the Mahabharata epic as arranged and received in modern times.