Browsing by Author "Ponnamperuma, P"

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Open Access
Depiction of the American Myth in Contemporary and Postmodern Literary Narratives: A Comparative Study of Charles Bukowski’s ‘Ham on Rye’ and Chimamanda Adichie’s ‘The Thing Around Your Neck.’
(Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Humanities and Sciences, SLIIT, 2025-10-10) Ponnamperuma, P
The American myth promotes the idea that everybody has access to all opportunities in the US if they are willing to work hard for it. The immigrants in the US passionately hold on to that belief. Based on Charles Bukowski’s ‘Ham on Rye’ and Chimamanda Adichie’s ‘The Thing Around Your Neck’, which both capture the contemporary situation with immigrants entrapped in the American dream from a postmodernist point of view, this paper attempts to investigate the reality behind the American myth as exposed by these two authors. The characters in both narratives arrive in the US under a grand deception about the American myth. They are first fascinated by the beauty of America. The methodology uses a qualitative research design where the two narratives are subjected to a ‘textual analysis’ from the dimensions of unemployment, poverty, and disillusionment, in a setting where the immigrants are bluntly marginalized and alienated. The findings reveal how Charles Bukowski provides an insight into the influence of the American myth on an immigrant family during the Great Depression and how Chimamanda Adichie depicted its impact on an immigrant working woman froma developing country who flies to the US in order to pursue her dreams. They reveal the patterns followed by the American myth during its journey under the contemporary postmodernist influence.
Open Access
Emily Brontë’s ‘Sense of Place’ as Portrayed in Her Literary Works
(SLIIT City UNI, 2025-07-08) Ponnamperuma, P
‘Sense of Place’ is a theory that defines the emotional attachment individuals develop with specific locations, encompassing both positive and negative feelings. It can be directly applied to the analysis of the Victorian writer Emily Brontë’s portrayals of her house in Yorkshire moors where she grew up. It is reported that she loved her house, and it provided her with a constant back drop for her imaginative thinking and creative writing. It is assumed that the landscape seen through its windows and the sounds heard while being inside it frequently inspired most of the locational portrayals in her poetry and fiction. In consideration of Emily Brontë’s romantic attachment to her home, the present study intends to explore her own sense of place as portrayed in her works. Accordingly, it pursues the research questions, “How is Emily Brontë’s sense of place portrayed in her works, ‘Wuthering Heights’, ‘Remembrance’ and ‘Fall, leaves, fall?’ The methodology involves a thematic analysis of her biography by Edward Chitham, ‘A Life of Emily Brontë’ under the three themes, ‘Emily Brontë’s sensitivity towards nature and the environment,’ ‘Emily Brontë’s emotional intensity,’ and ‘her imaginary encounters with recurring patterns of the orphans and abandoned characters.’ The findings of the present study foreground that Emily Brontë’s was heavily influenced by her romantic perception of the beauty of nature and her identification of the therapeutic power of nature as portrayed through her characters. According to her, nature tends to improve the quality of relationships among humans while showing the ways in which their deterioration starts due to the imbalance of their emotions including the sense of being abandoned.