Introduction
Shortly speaking, The Sheltering Sky (1949) – hereafter is referred as TSS – is an existential novel by the American writer Paul Bowles in which a married couple (Port and Kit) originally from New York along with their friend (Tunner) travel to the North African desert shortly after World War II to resolve their marital difficulties. But by their ignorance of local culture and imminent dangers around them they soon fall prey and the trip becomes treacherous. It is a fiction of post-colonial alienation, culture clash and existential despair that was a great success and sold well. Time magazine introduced the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. In 1990 the novel was adapted by the stellar director Bernardo Bertolucci into a notable film with the same title.
Paul Bowles was an “American novelist, poet, [classical music] composer, translator, short-story writer,” and film scorer who married the novelist Jane Auer (Birch and Hooper 82). He was a harsh critic of western civilization, Americanization, technology, “mechanization, pollution, noise – all the things that twentieth century has brought and scattered over the world” (Caponi, Conversations 184). This made him to remove himself physically and psychologically from America (Perlow 189) and establish himself in 1947 in Morocco, because it seemed to be more aloof from the modern world. After 1948 the couple lived intermittently in Tangier and thus the place changed to a spiritual zone for hippies and members of Beat Generation1 because Bowles’s version of existentialism was central for them.
Author Norman Mailer once wrote in Advertisement for Myself that “Paul Bowles opened the world of Hip. He let in the murder,...
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Pages one to sixty- nine in Indian From The Inside: Native American Philosophy and Cultural Renewal by Dennis McPherson and J. Douglas Rabb, provides the beginning of an in-depth analysis of Native American cultural philosophy. It also states the ways in which western perspective has played a role in our understanding of Native American culture and similarities between Western culture and Native American culture. The section of reading can be divided into three lenses. The first section focus is on the theoretical understanding of self in respect to the space around us. The second section provides a historical background into the relationship between Native Americans and British colonial power. The last section focus is on the affiliation of otherworldliness that exist between
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Firstly, the group of friends and writers most commonly known as the Beats evolved dramatically in focal points such as Greenwich Village and Columbia University, and subsequently spread their political and cultural views to a wider audience. The three Beat figureheads William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac each perceived an agenda within American society to clamp down on those who were in some way different from the accepted ‘norm’, and in response deliberately flirted with the un-American practices of Buddhism, drug use, homosexuality and the avant-garde. Ginsberg courted danger by lending a voice to the homosexual subculture that had been marginalised by repressive social traditions and cultural patterns within the United States.
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In the essay “In Praise of Margins,” the author Ian Frazier explains the idea that margins
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