25th Annual Student Research Conference
Getting Back to Our Roots: a New Historical Reading of Agha Ali's Cracked Portraits
Arianna L. Horstman
Dr. Hena Ahmad, Faculty Mentor
This paper focuses on a New Historical analysis of Agha Ali's poem Cracked Portraits (1987), which traces through past generations of an unnamed family as a means to illustrate the evolution of societal values over time. By comparing the past men of the speaker's family to his grandfather's grandfather, whom he crowns as the paragon of their bloodline, the poem demonstrates a clear distaste for the direction that the following generations have taken in terms of life choices and moral values. I will use these images to illustrate the emphasis Ali places on the importance of following tradition, and how his poem represents a larger critique on modern Indian culture as a whole whose younger generations, as Ali illustrates, have also began to stray from old traditions.
Keywords: New Historicism, Poetry, English
Topic(s):English
Presentation Type: Oral Paper
Session: 312-4
Location: VH 1408
Time: 1:45