Asian Journal of Humanity, Art and Literature

18-29

Authors: Tharindu Dananjaya Weerasinghe

Breakfast is an important constituent of any person's daily food concerto. It contributes to provide the base of nourishment for the entire day. Skipping the breakfast directly affects to health, performance, satisfaction and too many physical and psychological matters of a person. The university arenas represent the final opportunity of health and nutritional education for a large number of young undergraduates in Sri Lanka. Thus, this study was conducted with the purpose of investigating the prevalence & determinants of breakfast omission of undergraduates in Sri Lanka. The study was conducted as a cross sectional field study among a sample of 502 undergraduates in Sri Lanka. Convenience sampling was applied to select the sample and investigation was carried out in all the faculties of four public universities in Colombo, Sri Lanka.Self administered, pre - tested questionnaire which met the accepted standards of validity and reliability was used to collect data. It is found that prevalence of breakfast omission is high among Sri Lankanundergraduates thought it is understood that omission of breakfast affects to undergraduates' health status and ultimately to the academic performance. Findings revealed that accommodation, frequency of skipping the dinner, fast food habits, academic year, daily academic time table, smoking and financial difficultiesare significantly affect to omit the breakfast. Undergraduates stay in own houses are less likely to omit the breakfast in comparison to those who stay in hostels and bodings. Third years and final years are more prone to omit the breakfast while smokers are less likely to omit. No significant relationship is found between gender, consumption of nutritional supplements, time taken for traveling and ethnic group with prevalence of breakfastomission. Health awareness programs or education of healthy eating guidelines must be initiated for both undergraduates and food caters in Sri Lankan universities. The quality and price of supplied foods in state universities must also be frequently reviewed. Key Words: Breakfast omission, Sri Lankan undergraduates, Food habits

41-47

Authors: Fadhila Sidi-Said

This paper proposes to explore gender relations in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Operating from the knowledge that gender is culturally determined feminists criticize male-dominated patriarchal societies, which they argue marginalize or discount women by limiting their opportunity for self-definition and self-actualization. The question that needs to be addressed, then, is: Is gender relation in The Secret Agent constructed around stereotypical representations? Or can this work be read otherwise? Our assumption is that Conrad’s criticism of such patriarchal system is done through irony. The ‘Edenic home’ that would embody Conrad’s cherished ideals is, as we know, a home browbeaten by a political exile. We shall argue that Conrad deals narratively with his own traumatic history by displacing it onto Winnie’s otherness. This traumatic event is ironically expressed in the falling down of the novel’s house, the house of an overweening, unquestioned patriarchy. On one hand, the fallen house symbolizes the ‘idealization’ of the Western society. On the other hand, it raises ideological issues in relation to the “Other”, the oppressed. We shall argue that the evidence of his biography, correspondence, and the fictional work under study suggest a complex relationship between the writer, the women in his life, and the fictional female characters. The importance of the female character, Winnie Verloc, may be explained by the fact that women played a vital role during his youth in Poland. In a letter of 1900 to Edward Garnett, Conrad himself remarked on the benefit he had received from the close bond and the extraordinary ‘sister-cult’ established amongst the Bobrowski women.