This major research paper explores the representations of depression and anxiety, as a consequence of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, in Bo Burnham’s 2021 musical comedy special Inside. I argue that pandemic-induced depression and anxiety are represented through the symbiotic relationship between its formal elements, such as editing style and setting, and its performative content, such as song lyrics and monologues. This relationship between form and content serves to break down the binary between artificial performance and vulnerable, real-life mental illness, thus bringing the two conflicting states together. As opposed to typical inaccurate/negative portrayals of mental illness in North American cinema, Burnham’s Inside demonstrates the experience of mental illness can be normalized in any given context, even within the theatrical artifice of a performance during a global crisis. This normalization furthermore emphasizes the voice of the individual sufferer, thereby outlining the potential of accentuating the individual’s voice in a post-pandemic, mental health care paradigm.

This major research paper explores the representations of depression and anxiety, as a consequence of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, in Bo Burnham’s 2021 musical comedy special Inside. I argue that pandemic-induced depression and anxiety are represented through the symbiotic relationship between its formal elements, such as editing style and setting, and its performative content, such as song lyrics and monologues. This relationship between form and content serves to break down the binary between artificial performance and vulnerable, real-life mental illness, thus bringing the two conflicting states together. As opposed to typical inaccurate/negative portrayals of mental illness in North American cinema, Burnham’s Inside demonstrates the experience of mental illness can be normalized in any given context, even within the theatrical artifice of a performance during a global crisis. This normalization furthermore emphasizes the voice of the individual sufferer, thereby outlining the potential of accentuating the individual’s voice in a post-pandemic, mental health care paradigm.

Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny” deals with strange occurrences and events which is beyond the realm of what we understand as familiar or known. Literature has often transgressed the known universe and has created places which are very different from the one in which we live. Using Freud’s theory, I would like to critically examine the two novels, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The novels trace the lives of upper-class aristocratic men who deviate from their normal existence as they discover ways to unleash their desperately evil nature without facing any consequences. But their actions ultimately catch up to them, bringing them down. Uncanny plays out in these novels in the way these men change, their actions becoming foreign to their close friends and even to themselves and them losing a part or whole of their identity to their destructive selves which they are unable to tame or control until that finally takes over. What also happens in the course of the novels is the blurring of the binaries between good and evil until they are merged into one person. A human being can never be a complete saint or be completely evil. It is always a mixture of both, and as a person matures, they learn to distinguish between these two traits, and that is what creates a functioning society. But a person might not always choose to listen, or sometimes they are compelled to do the wrong. In my paper, I would explore the split of a person between their good and evil selves, how they are affected by their transformation into a psychological double which is the evil self and yet unable to resist it.

Online Queer blogs have opened up spaces where alternative and non-normative sexual and gendered subjects articulate personal accounts of their sexual experiences, their queer love, desires, subjectivities, struggles and coming-out stories, etc. with vivid details. This paper will focus on and explore such non-canonical texts i.e. the virtual personal accounts in a few newly emerging video blogs (vlogs) on YouTube posted by Indian female queer subjects. It aims to understand how these narratives by non-heterosexual Indian women engender a queer practice that is concomitant with the claim: ‘the personal is political’. This will help locate the personal narratives of female queer sexualities in the broader context of queer politics in India. As community formation and community-belonging constitute a large part of any identity- politics, this paper also seeks an explanation of how a virtual queer community for women is formed through the sharing of personal accounts with an invisible (and often unknown) audience who often share similar subjectivities, desires and inscribes comments.

Memory and identity are intrinsically linked in the world of literature. On the one hand, identity consists of the memories, experiences, connections, and values contributing to a person's sense of self. On the other hand, memory is connected to many other cognitive states, including self-awareness, specialised knowledge, intelligence, and the sense of the perception of time. This fusion generates a consistent sense of one's identity across time, even when new characteristics are produced and absorbed. These two constructs, memory and identity, become inevitably connected when autobiographical allusions are considered. When a person writes his or her autobiography, he or she engages in the process of remembering and forgetting. Padma Sachdev is a big name in the Dogri poetic world. She was the first modern woman poet in the Dogri language, and at 31, she received the Sahitya Academy Award. Her autobiography, A Drop in the Ocean, is the story of a Dogri girl from Jammu who struggled against the traditional and male-dominated culture. This paper explores how an individual's identity is formed and aligned through his/her retention of memories and experiences.