Kevin George

https://doi.org/10.64823/ijepp.2601009

This commentary offers a fresh reading of Robert Frost's A Minor Bird by arguing that the poem's ethical force resides not only in the speaker's final act of self-correction but also in the significance of its title. Rather than treating "minor" as an objective description of the bird, the essay contends that it functions as a subjective act of classification that reveals the speaker's hierarchy of value. Through a close reading of the poem, it demonstrates how Frost shifts responsibility from the bird to the observer, exposing the ways in which seemingly innocent linguistic judgments precede attempts to silence unwanted voices. The movement from the speaker's private irritation to the universal assertion that there is "something wrong / In wanting to silence any song" transforms a domestic complaint into a broader meditation on language, perception, and ethical responsibility. Ultimately, the commentary argues that Frost presents moral growth as the recognition and rejection of the classificatory habits that diminish others before excluding them.

https://doi.org/10.64823/ijepp.2601006

This essay examines the Indian humanities classroom as both a site of postcolonial critique and a space in which the authority structures that postcolonial theory seeks to dismantle are frequently reproduced. Drawing on the work of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Audre Lorde, Derek Walcott, and Mikhail Bakhtin, it argues for a dialogic pedagogy that holds teachers accountable to the critical commitments their discipline professes. The essay proceeds through three movements: an opening reflection on the gap between scholarly self-representation and pedagogical practice; an account of classroom encounters — at a slum outreach school in Chennai and at Saint Berchmans College, Kerala — in which genuinely dialogic moments emerged; and a concluding argument for the postcolonial classroom as a site of ethical as well as intellectual responsibility. The essay notes, finally, that Kerala's pedagogical tradition offers a partial but instructive counterexample to the broader tendency of Indian higher education to reproduce the monologic classroom it nominally opposes.

Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights has traditionally been examined through the critical frameworks of Gothic fiction, Romanticism, psychoanalysis, feminism, and class relations. While these approaches have illuminated the novel's emotional intensity and symbolic complexity, comparatively less attention has been devoted to its recursive narrative architecture. This article argues that repetition functions as the novel's primary structural principle, shaping both character development and narrative progression across successive generations. Employing qualitative textual analysis and close reading, the study examines the recurring emotional, spatial, and relational patterns embodied by characters such as Catherine Earnshaw and Cathy Linton, Heathcliff and Hareton Earnshaw, and the symbolic interplay between Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. Rather than presenting these parallels as mere instances of psychological doubling or inherited temperament, the article demonstrates that Brontë systematically reconstructs earlier conflicts in modified forms, producing a cyclical narrative that resists linear development. The second generation simultaneously repeats and revises the emotional trajectories of the first, suggesting that recurrence becomes the novel's organizing principle rather than a stylistic device. By foregrounding narrative recursion as a structural phenomenon, this study offers an alternative perspective on Brontë's artistic method and contributes to ongoing discussions of nineteenth-century narrative form, character construction, and the enduring complexity of Wuthering Heights.