'Listen, Rama’s Wife!’: Maithil Women’s Perspectives and Practices in the Festival of Sāmā-Cakevā

As a female-only festival in a significantly gender-segregated society, sāmā cakevā provides a window into Maithil women’s understandings of their society and the sacred, cultural subjectivities, moral frameworks, and projects of self-construction. The festival reminds us that to read male-female relations under patriarchal social formations as a dichotomy between the empowered and the disempowered ignores the porous boundaries between the two in which negotiations and tradeoffs create a symbiotic reliance. Specifically, the festival names two oppositional camps—the male world of law and the female world of relationships—and then creates a male character, the brother, who moves between the two, loyal to each, betraying, in a sense, each, but demonstrating, by his movements, the currents and avenues of power. This article makes available to other scholars of South Asian culture and society an extended description and analysis of this distinctive festival, while also contributing to the scholarly discussion of women’s expressive traditions.

Aporias of Trauma in Joyce's Ulysses and Faulkner's Light in August

In this thesis, I explore the relationships between trauma, memory, and narrative, particularly the ways in which trauma simultaneously disrupts and engenders narrative structures. I consider various trauma theories by authors such as Cathy Caruth, Judith Herman, Ruth Leys, and Dominick LaCapra. I also consider how psychoanalytic theory and criticism, specifically the writings of Sigmund Freud, inform the study of traumatic experience from both literary and personal perspectives. Furthermore, I consider theories regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative by authors such as Peter Brooks and John Pilkington. James Joyce��¿s Ulysses and William Faulkner¿s Light in August serve, for my purposes, as trauma-texts and reflect the ways in which trauma might complicate the simultaneous destruction and creation of narrative strategies. Reading Ulysses and Light in August as trauma-texts that are both in mourning and melancholic gives us complementary, and contradictory, reasons for why we enjoy them. Mourning constructs a relationship between victim and witness, in which we can hear the voice of trauma and engage it in discourse. Conversely, melancholia creates a relationship between performer and spectator, in which we experience, and are fascinated by, the spectacle of another¿s trauma. Laughter, perversity, sorrow, and respite engage the reader in both texts, and raise questions about how one `remembers-to-forget¿ traumatic experiences. The narratives of each text¿s characters offer unique performances of mourning and melancholia. Thus, while this thesis engenders more questions than answers, I hope to argue that Ulysses and Light in August are significant literary works because each engages the reader in traumatic discourse, entertains the reader with the traumatic spectacle, and enlightens the reader on the complex relationship between trauma and narrative.