Proverbs are important cultural products that both reveal and direct the values, behaviour and world view of a particular culture. This article relates the proverbial collection of two particular cultural groups, the Malays and Chinese of Malaysia, to workplace attitudes. After reviewing more than 2000 proverbs, we identified those that were most pertinent to the Malaysian workplace, based on two key categories: (i) the portrayal of work in the lives of the Malays and Chinese and (ii) the approach to workplace etiquette. Local proverbs portray hard work as an admirable quality among not only the Chinese but also among the Malays, despite suggestions to the contrary by some writers. Regarding workplace relations, proverbs again constitute a vital source of guidance for both groups, particularly the high regard for 'face'.

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Tennessee Williams"s plays have frequently been criticized for overt use of poetic language and his constant focus on poetic devices such as alliteration and metaphor, as well as tropes like violence and feminine madness. A psychoanalytic study of his famous drama Suddenly Last Summer (1958) will enable us to explore the qualities of unresolved psychological complexes in the characters and also in the author himself, as the play is believed to draw strongly upon the playwright"s own biography. Towards this end, an intertextual interpretation serves to reflect upon the semiotic disposition of author and characters, which figures out a paradigm of the "transcendental ego" (Moi, 1986, p. 28). This analysis therefore aims at projecting the unconscious of the characters and the author through language, while examining how language can represent characters" identities and their hidden complexes through fragmentation of their identities. Through the analysis it will be shown how the interpretation of poetic language uncovers the unconscious via the effects and affects of devices such as metaphor, metonymy, replacement and condensation. Using a Kristevan interpretation of poetic language and its revelation of the semiotic, this paper therefore attempts to show that violence presented in the text is rooted in the fragmented identities of the characters and their creator and ultimately, it suggests the potential to recover one"s identity through poetic language. It may thus offer some clues to puzzling issues that have been misunderstood with regard to the recurrent poetic language and images in Suddenly Last Summer.

The buoyant shift from form and structure to the fluid constructs of meaning turned discernible in Jacques Derrida’s Deconstruction. Meaning or reality that had so long been enjoying a fixed and definite status was worn out with the advent of the theory of deconstruction. The turnaround of what was considered real or true became subjacent while challenging all the existing binaries that had been hegemonizing human comprehension of the world (Derrida, 1997). Relying on the theory of deconstruction by Jacques Derrida, the study examines the shift from form and structure to the text itself regarding its privileged and marginal aspects of meaning with particular reference to the novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes. The study suggests that the interplay between privileged and marginal aspects of meaning can constructs multiple meanings and interpretations of a single text. It has further been added that the nature of the theory of deconstruction—change in the fixed status of meaning/reality—at the same time, is a representation of the indefinite nature of modern man who has experienced a bumpy ride of social and religious values resulted due to the political, industrial, economic and technological revolutions. The paper finds that the fluidity of meaning that is the sole characteristic of the theory of deconstruction traverses the contemporary Pakistani fiction in its dealing of the sensitive matters such as religious extremism and dictatorship etc., and Muhammad Hanif’s selected novel is the perfect example of it.

The panoptic gaze is vested in with a constitutive impact upon the subjectivity of individuals. Feminist scholars like Luce Irigaray have charged that the metaphor of vision is intimately connected with the construction of gender and sexual difference. By pointing to the masculine logic of Western thought, Irigaray confirms that a woman's entry into a dominant scopic economy signifies her inevitable confinement to passivity. This essay aims to examine the sexual politics of metaphors of vision in a literary text that is controversially argued to be a voice for the subordinated Indian immigrant women in the US. As one of the most influential schools of thought in Western philosophy, the Sartrean paradigm of sexual difference is employed to investigate this allegation by identifying the latent binary system at work in the fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri, who has garnered substantial yet controversial critical attention over her representations of gender. Specifically, this essay focuses on Lahiri's prefatory story to her Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (2000), to unravel the manner her exercise of vision in this narrative perpetuates the dichotomies of a male subject and a female object pre-established in the traditional hierarchies of gender in the West. In this story, Lahiri (un)wittingly privileges masculinity over femininity and reduces the latter to a typically disgusting Sartrean female body of holes and slime. Hence, notwithstanding infrequent emasculated images of the male subject, it is ultimately the masculine that, in the battle of looks between male and female, nihilates the Other to the state of "being-in-itself" and enjoys supremacy over the feminine.