Literary Druid
A Peer-Reviewed International Journal of English Language and Literature
Volume- 8, Issue- 2, April-2026
1. A Comparative Study of Minimalism, Emotional Realism, and Postcolonial Spectatorship in Global Auteur Cinema and the Films of Balu Mahendra
S. Balasubramani, PhD Research Scholar, Drama and Theatre Studies, School of Journalism and New Media Studies, Tamil Nadu Open University, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India.
Dr. C. Karthikeyan, Research Supervisor, Assistant Professor, Drama and Theatre Studies, School of Journalism and New Media Studies, Tamil Nadu Open University, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India.
Professor Dr. S. Nagarathinam, Co-Guide, Head & Chairperson, Department of Communication, Madurai Kamaraj University, Tamil Nadu, India.
Abstract
This article offers a comprehensive comparative analysis of literary style and cinematic aesthetics in global auteur cinema and the films of Balu Mahendra, situating his work within broader traditions of cinematic minimalism, contemplative realism, and postcolonial visual culture. Major international auteurs such as Robert Bresson, Andrei Tarkovsky, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Yasujiro Ozu transformed cinema into a philosophical and literary medium through silence, visual austerity, fragmented narration, and contemplative temporality. Their films privilege stillness over spectacle, existential inquiry over narrative closure, and metaphysical reflection over melodramatic emotionality. Within modern film discourse, these auteurs established minimalist cinema as a serious artistic practice capable of representing memory, alienation, spirituality, and the phenomenology of lived experience. In contrast, Balu Mahendra localised and transformed these global minimalist traditions through a distinctly Tamil and postcolonial cinematic sensibility. Rather than employing minimalism solely as philosophical abstraction, Mahendra infused cinematic restraint with emotional intimacy, domestic realism, sensory immersion, and affective vulnerability. His films derive poetic significance from ordinary spaces, middle-class anxieties, interpersonal silences, and the emotional fragility of everyday life. Through natural lighting, ambient soundscapes, restrained performance, and contemplative pacing, Mahendra developed a cinematic language in which silence becomes emotionally inhabited rather than metaphysically empty. Through detailed comparative analysis, case studies, and theoretical interpretation, the article demonstrates that Mahendra expands auteur cinema beyond Eurocentric philosophical abstraction toward emotional ethics and postcolonial sensory realism. His films establish a uniquely Tamil cinematic modernism where realism becomes affective, minimalism becomes emotional, and ordinary life becomes poetically cinematic. Finally, this study affirms Balu Mahendra as a major contributor to global auteur discourse whose work offers an alternative framework for understanding cinematic minimalism, spectatorship, and emotional realism within world cinema.
Keywords: Auteur Cinema, Balu Mahendra, Cinematic Minimalism, Emotional Realism, Phenomenology, Tamil Cinema, Postcolonial Realism, Spectatorship, Domestic Realism.
2. Mahamarineru: Examining Imogen S’Jet’s Journey as Fleet Command in Homeworld 3 through a Kristang Creole/Indigenous Cosmological-Archetypal Lens
Kevin Martens Wong Zhi Qiang, 13th Kabesa or Indigenous Chief of the Kristang People
and National University of Singapore.
Abstract
This paper analyses and comments on Imogen S’Jet’s journey in Homeworld 3 as Fleet Command aboard the Khar-Kushan Mothership from a unique and little-studied but very significant perspective: that of someone, the author, a creole/indigenous scholar-practitioner who holds the same role in the creole/indigenous Kristang culture as Kabesa or leader of not just the Kristang community but of what in Kristang is called Gaia Tonakodra, the reawakened collective unconscious of the entire living planet, itself a fleet of individuated beings and collectives of individuated beings or eleidi in Kristang. Also analogous to the Cylon Hybrids of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series, both Imogen and I, together with Karan S’jet and Tiaa’Ma, appear to be what both the Homeworld series and Kristang culture call Navigators or Mahamarineru – people who make a wilful and deliberate choice to sacrifice some of their own individual freedom to connect and immerse themselves fully, while still lucid and awake, into a collective unconscious to guide it forward and support it on an unconscious level. I here thus explore Imogen’s journey in comparison to my own in real-life, providing some insight through the Kristang cosmological-archetypal lens of Mahamarineru that emerges from this comparison into Imogen’s own psychoemotional individuation or development of herself as the Mahamarineru of the Khar-Kushan fleet, and the unique underlying challenges or struggles that she might face as Mahamarineru that are emergent in the Homeworld 3 narrative but not always fully concretised.
Keywords: Homeworld, Indigenous, Archetype, Kristang, Cosmology, Mahamarineru.
3. The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on LSRW Skill Development among Visually Impaired Learners
S. Maheshraja, Research Scholar, Kalasalingam Academy of Research and Education,
Anand Nagar, Krishnankovil-626126, Tamil Nadu, India.
Dr. K.Gurusamy, Associate Professor, Department of English, School of Arts and Special Education, Kalasalingam Academy of Research and Education, Krishnankoil, 626126, Tamil Nadu, India.
Abstract
Around the world all students who learn their mother tongue, second and third languages through a step by step method that is called LSRW. This is nothing but Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing of any language to make the students understand a language properly. In ELT (English Language Teaching) also this method is considered as the fundamental level. Teaching these levels to the visually impaired students is a kind of challenge, because such students are not able to learn English like the normal students. But the technology offer a helping hand to the teachers and visually impaired learners with assistive tools along with AI to maintain their way of learning as equal as normal learners. The growth of AI has turned the life of visually challenged people unlike anything. Even their canes and glasses have voice guidance support that removes the dependency of a person or a dog. This paper is about to perform qualitative researches to explore the role of AI assistive tools such as screen readers, TTS systems, speech recognition software, and large language models in enhancing the LSRW competencies of visually impaired students. This paper also explore about the freedom and improvement of visually challenged students in continuing language learning process without the support of anyone but technology. This kind of teaching process is recently growing in ELT pedagogy. However, this paper is about to identify the challenges like accessing technology with affordable condition, awareness on pedagogy, implementing them in institutions to enhance the experience in ELT.
Keywords: LSRW, visually impaired, artificial intelligence, ELT.
4. Subverting the Male Gaze on Stage: A Feminist Critical Approach
to Caryl Churchill's Theater
Dr. Nassima Nouioua, University of Mostaganem, Algeria.
Abstract
This article examines Caryl Churchill's theatrical oeuvre through the lens of feminist critical theory, with particular attention to Laura Mulvey's concept of the male gaze and its subsequent elaborations in performance studies and gender theory. Churchill's drama constitutes one of the most sustained and formally innovative critiques of patriarchal structures in twentieth and twenty-first-century English-language theatre. Through close readings of Top Girls (1982), Cloud Nine (1979), Vinegar Tom (1976), and A Number (2002), this study analyses the dramaturgical strategies that Churchill employs to dismantle, expose, and redirect the visual economy that undergirds conventional representational regimes. The article argues that Churchill's use of cross-gender casting, temporal and spatial fragmentation, collective theatrical forms, and the deliberate disruption of narrative pleasure constitutes a coherent and radical poetics ofcounter-spectatorship. By repositioning the female figure as a site of political contestation rather than aesthetic consumption, Churchill's theatre performs what this study terms a "dramaturgy of refusal" — a systematic rejection of the visual and ideological conventions through which patriarchy reproduces itself on stage and in society. Drawing on the frameworks of Laura Mulvey, Jill Dolan, Elin Diamond, Sue-Ellen Case, and Judith Butler, this article situates Churchill's theatrical practice within broader debates concerning feminist epistemology, performativity, and the politics of the visible.
Keywords: Caryl Churchill, Feminist Theatre, Gender Performativity, Dramaturgy, Counter-Spectatorship, Top Girls, Cloud Nine, British Drama.
5. Dissensus and the Sensible: Reading Morrison’s Beloved through Rancierean Aesthetics and Politics
Partha Sarathi Mondal, Assistant Professor, English Department, Shibpur Dinobundhoo Institution (College), Affiliated to University of Calcutta, Howrah, West Bengal, India.
Abstract
This paper examines Beloved by Toni Morrison in the context of Rancierean aesthetics and politics by analysing how the novel enacts dissensus in the realm of what Ranciere calls the distribution of the sensible. Ranciere’s ‘aesthetic regime’ opens up a terrain on which issues of visibility, voice and historical memory are put to the test and reallocated(18). By introducing the subjectivity of Black people, trauma, and silence and emphasizing them as a force that needs to be heard, Morrison challenges dominant systems of representation. Belovedresists belonging to the canon of classic literature due to its disjointed narration, voices of the ghosts, poetic interruptions, and the lack of intelligibility. My paper uses the Rancierean theories of dissensus, aesthetics, and politics as a critical lens to suggest how Morrison’s aesthetic choices dismantle the stereotypes of literature, questioning who can speak, making silent pain talk, and bringing forgotten past legible. As such, this paper aims to engage the reader in reconsidering literary criticism as a realm of struggle, justice, and aesthetic dissent.
Keywords: Beloved, Ranciere, Dissensus, Aesthetics, Politics.
6. The Interplay of Love and Wisdom in Shakespearean Tragedies
Dr. Rekha Tiwari, Professor, Department of English, Techno NJR Institute of Technology,
Udaipur, Rajasthan, India.
Abstract
William Shakespeare is one of the most influential writers in the history of the English language, with much of today's vocabulary tracing back to his plays and sonnets. He is famous for his sonnets, tragedies, and comedies, and he created a collection of classic plays whose characters remain culturally relevant even centuries later. Among all his works, his tragedies are generally considered his greatest achievement. Shakespeare structured his tragedies around three recurring patterns: a historical or social tragedy based on real events, a tragedy focused on the conflict or separation of lovers, and a tragedy in which the hero is taken from a familiar setting and placed in an unfamiliar one. Iconic figures like Macbeth, Hamlet, and Romeo have become enduring symbols in popular culture. Two themes that prominently recur throughout Shakespeare's tragedies are wisdom and love. Each is depicted as both a positive and a negative force capable of fostering relationships and wise decision-making, but also capable of leading to ruin and death. Analyzing how Shakespeare addresses love and wisdom in both their positive and negative aspects suggests that he intended these themes to serve as layered explorations of human psychology, with their positive sides acting as rewards and their negative sides presenting potential dangers. Hence, this article traces the interplay of love and wisdom in the tragedies of Shakespeare.
Keywords: William Shakespeare, Interplay, Love, Wisdom, Tragedies.