University Employed Women’s Perspective on Societal Attitudes Towards Their Employment

This descriptive quantitative research paper attempts to explore how women employees at one of the public universities in province of Sindh perceive their profession and societal attitudes including those of colleagues, family and neighbours towards these professional women and their profession. The target participants of this study were academic and non-academic women who had minimum 5 years work experience. Through random sampling technique 100 women (50 from each category) were selected for taking part in survey questionnaire. Findings suggest a positive shift in societal attitude towards professional women in general and working in universities in particular. Interestingly, non-academic respondents perceived societal attitude more positive and supportive than those of academic.

Modes of Cultural Representation of the Subcontinent: A Critical Study of William Dalrymple’S Travel Writing

As an established literary genre, in which the factual and the fictive narrative conventions intersect, travel writing, with its vivid descriptions of people and places has had a consistent ethnographic focus. Literary and cultural theory during the last three decades, has led to critical debates over the definition of cultural boundaries and the aesthetics and politics of cultural representation. In representing a cultural space, the contemporary travel writer recognises that stories and histories are complexly interwoven across geographical and national boundaries. He therefore has to engage with the realities of transculturation, cultural displacement, and cultural hybridity as distinctive features of a complex global world. William Dalrymple‘s travel writing is reflective of this engagement at both the thematic and the stylistic levels. It marks a sustained interest in the study and representation of the many layered cultural landscape of the Indian subcontinent, both in terms of historical legacy and the dynamism of current social and political change. With a repertoire that draws extensively on archival research, intertextual reference and on direct observation and personal interaction during his travels across India and Pakistan, Dalrymple combines various narrative strands and gives authority to multiple voices. The research study contextualizes Dalrymple‘s travel narrative as a polyphonic cultural representation Towards this end it attempts to explore his use of the historical and ethnographic modes through which a range of articulations serve to represent the cultural diversity of the subcontinent.