Structural and Coherence Analysis Towards The Renunciation
Abstract
While many researchers have paid attention to Rabindranath Tagore's poems, few have analyzed his short stories, still less on a specific story, like The Renunciation. The fiction critiques the caste system of Hinduism and portrays a unique female character. This paper proposes that structural and coherence analysis can assist in a better appreciation of the story. The disruption of the timeline emphasizes the importance of a series of events occurred in the past. Coherence relations within them are established and analyzed so that the caste system's role as the origin of perpetuating tragedy among Hindus is explicitly revealed. The blank in the timeline along with the nightingale which appears throughout the novel indicates the plight of women in Hindu society. Analyses in this paper provide argumentation for views proposed in previous studies, namely Tagore's firm stance against the caste system and his empathy for suffering women, from a new angle. It also demonstrates the feasibility of linguistic theories’ appliance to the field of literary criticism.
References
- Sen, N. (2016). Women and Gender in Short Stories by Rabindranath Tagore: An Anthropological Introspection on Kinship and Family. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 25(2), 94–115.
- Maitra, S. (1957). Short Stories of Tagore. Indian Literature, 1(1), 15–26.
- Deb, I. and Tagore, R. (2008). The Renunciation. Indian Literature, 52(2 (244)), 155–160.
- Hunter, J. and Thompson, K. (2022). On the Role of Relations and Structure In Discourse Interpretation. In D. Altshuler (Ed.), Linguistics Meets Philosophy(pp. 139–175). chapter, Cambridge.
- Kehler, A. (2019). Coherence relations. In: Truswell R (ed) The Oxford handbook of event structure. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 583–604.
- Asher, N. (1993). Reference to abstract objects in discourse. Springer, Dordrecht.
- Asher, N. and Lascarides, A. (2003). Logics of conversation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
- Asher, N. and Vieu, L. (2005) Subordinating and coordinating discourse relations. Lingua 115:591–610. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2003.09.017
- Hunter, J., Asher, N. and Lascarides, A. (2018). A formal semantics for situated conversation. Semant Pragmat. https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.11.10
- Afantenos, S., Asher, N., Benamara, F., Bras, M., Fabre, C., Ho-Dac, L-M., Draoulec, AL., Muller, P., Pery-Woodley, M-P., Prevot, L., Rebeyrolle, J., Tanguy, L., Vergez-Couret, M. and Vieu, L. (2012). An empirical resource for discovering cognitive principles of discourse organisation: the ANNODIS corpus. In: Nicoletta, C., Khalid, C., Thierry, D., Mehmet, UD., Bente, M., Joseph, M., Asuncion, M., Jan, O. and Stelios, P. (eds) Proceedings of the eighth international conference on language resources and evaluation (lREC'12). European Language Resources Association, Istanbul, 2727–3274.
- Altshuler, D. and Kim, CS. (2023). Towards a Typology of Narrative Frustration.Topoi. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09942-1
- Choudhuri, A. D. (1976). Tagore’s Short Stories. Indian Literature, 19(5), 72–79.
- Tompson, E. (1926). Rabindranath Tagore, Poet and Dramatist. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
- Hobbs, J. and Violi, P. (1990). Structuring in Nerval’s Sylvie. In: Literature and cognition. CLSI, 121–130.
- Jasinskaja, K. and Karagjosova, E. (2020). Rhetorical relations. In Daniel, G., Lisa, M., Cécile, M., Hotze, R. and Zimmermann, TE. (eds) Companion to semantics. Wiley, New York. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118788516.sem061
- Hobbs, J. (1990). Literature and cognition. CSLI, Stanford, CA.
- Bose, A. (1983). The Bengali Short Story. Indian Literature, 26(4), 48–65.
- Lago, M. M. (1977). Tagore’s Liberated Women. Journal of South Asian Literature, 12(3/4), 103–107.