Arbaayah Ali Termizi

Death and Dying as a Literary Device: A Reading of Selected Works by Contemporary Malaysian Writers

There is no reliable information of death as an experience and it remains until now as an unknown but trustworthy mystery. Hence death has to be encountered in ways known to readers via the help of fiction. In literature death, both physical and physiological exists at many levels. Though the idea of death is infinite, it never fails to provide meaning to the development of a narrative because it contributes to the emotional effects, plots twists, suspense and mysteries. In addition it adds closure to the plot, a closure which is not alien to most detective / crime fiction and horror / ghost stories. Presumably death has to be meaningful in these genres in order to be treated as an important part of human existence and thus elevated its status as a significant literary device. What about other genres? Is it justifiable to use death as the ultimate fear in order to tighten the plot or add weightage to the drama in genres other than the ones mentioned earlier? Thus this paper aims to analyse how death is employed as a literary device by contemporary Malaysian writers and to study whether the fear of death (or the dead) as expounded by Freud is necessary in these works. It shall focus on the ways of dying, the disclosure of death news and other character/s reaction towards the news in selected works in order to answer the research questions. Preliminary findings from this paper are expected to establish the utilization of death as a literary device in works by contemporary Malaysian writers.

The butterfly effect hits Complicité: a chaotic reading of Mnemonic and A Disappearing Number

The middle ground chaos theory secures among other gigantic scientific theories to describe the world has brought it to the fore lately. It neither declines the Newtonian clockwork model completely nor promotes the quantum indeterministic model entirely. It preaches that the world is both ordered and disordered, and man is both bound and free. Unlike relativity and quantum physics, it is neither busy with massive objects nor preoccupied with tiny ones, the atoms. It simply works in between, our world. Thus, it spreads and is widely utilised in a variety of disciplines, including literary and cultural domains. Conversely, Theatre de Complicite promotes nonlinearity and fragmentation for structure, and physicality and visual imagery for performance. It does not prefer pre-written texts rather favours devising its own through a lengthy process of improvising and rehearsing. It believes that the world is no longer a world of a single story. It cannot be encompassed within one philosophy or viewpoint. Mnemonic and A Disappearing Number suggest human body within the context of origin as a collective identity, and math within the context of infinity as a path for eternity. Hence, chaos theory is deemed to be the appropriate choice for analysis as it can provide an avenue of escape from the soul-crushing mechanical view of the world dominated most critical approaches for decades and can also furnish an alternative language and scope for literary interpretation. Keywords : chaos theory; butterfly effect; strange attractors; recursive symmetry; nonlinearity and fragmentation