dramatic recreations or presentations of conflict as a basis for the development of a narrative. Cultural conflict may be overt, as in the violence of crime, family conflict, and war, or more covert, as in culture shock such as can be found in an inter-cultural work like the novel Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee in which a young woman flees the problems she faces in India and finds a new set of problems in Iowa. The idea of the journey is used in this novel as a means of expressing the spiritual journey taken by this young woman as she seeks to find herself and her place in the world, a place far from where she was born. There is a cultural clash inherent in the underlying comparison between Hindu culture and American culture, between a strongly patriarchal culture with a long history and a more egalitarian and democratic society that is relatively new but high in achievement. Such a journey is important and one that is taken by women who make the journey inward only and not across three continents, and the issues involved could be and have been examined in an essay, a book, a tract, or some other medium. By shaping the issues in a novel, though, Mukherjee makes them both more palatable and more personal, for the audience becomes enmeshed with the life of this woman as they never would with a treatise or non-fictional analysis. This is an essential element in popular culture--it appeals directly to the emotions and engages the mind indirectly but powerfully at the same time.
In Mukherjee's novel, the conflict is between different cultures. In many works, the clash may be between different elements within a culture--rich against poor, black against white, old against young. The conflicts can be examined by use of semiotic signs which convey meaning and which often create a short-hand version of the conflict. The signs conveyed in popular culture, as Maasik and Solomon note, often "conceal some interest or other, whether polit...