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Research in Contemporary World Literature/ Pazhuhesh-e Zabanha-ye Khareji (25887092) 20(2)pp. 355-373
In his collection North, Heaney mythologizes the contemporary history of the people of Northern Ireland through conflating the mythological history of the people of Ireland, with the 1960s Troubles in Northern Ireland. Used by the modernist poets, the method of representing the contemporary history through recourse to mythology have been also favored by poets who have experienced colonial and postcolonial conditions. Though this method helps the people who live in postcolonial conditions to re-construct their ruined history through recourse to the past and national myths, it problematizes their understanding of the contemporary times, as the identification of the past and myth with the present undermines the distinctions which exist between the causes of murder and violence in the past and in the present. Hence, Not only Heaney’s mythologizing the present which conflates modernism with postcolonial historiography cannot resolve the socio-political problems in Northern Ireland, it reinforces violence in the society.
3l: Language, Linguistics, Literature (01285157) 31(1)pp. 183-196
A man of business and poetry, Wallace Stevens is a peculiar master who combined a love of poetry and money in his life, overriding the gap between literature and economy, imagination and reality. Examining "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" and "Six Significant Landscapes" in the light of New Economic Criticism, we attempt to expound on the different rhetorical techniques and particular language and style Stevens has used to create an artistic product with economic value. We seek to explicate how Stevens's interest in money, power, prestige, and security as an insurance-poet man pertains to the accumulation of various types of capital ‒ cultural, economic, social and symbolic in Bourdieu’s sociological framework. Also examined is how Stevens borrows artistic devices/conventions ‒ like light/shadow imagery, repetition and geometric shapes ‒ from painting schools like impressionism, cubism and oriental paintings to ensure the exchange value of his poetry in the modernist marketplace. Furthermore, this interdisciplinary study explores the relationship between language and the economic system, focusing on Stevens's particular economy of language displayed in simple, short, declarative and ironic statements; the economy of imagery is present in precise and sharp images and haiku forms as it appears in imagism; and economy of space pictured in simple locations. The exchange between ideologies of the East and West also merits special attention. © 2025 Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. All rights reserved.
Research in Contemporary World Literature/ Pazhuhesh-e Zabanha-ye Khareji (25887092) 30(1)pp. 25-48
The discourse of Zionism has had a significant impact on Western culture since World War II, which has been particularly evident in contemporary literature, especially in America and Britain. This influence is further amplified by the Zionist dominance of the cultural industry and the historical context of the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel in 1948. These factors have led to a massive production of artistic and literary works by both Jewish and non-Jewish artists and writers, exploring these themes and their implications. Of special interest in this regard is the way the so-called liberal writers have tackled what has come to be referred to as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Western media. The present article aims to look into the representation of the aforesaid issue in Via Dolorosa (1998) and Wall (2009) by David Hare, a liberal writer with (previously) leftist tendencies. Drawing on the views of a number of theorists and historians such as Edward Said and Ilan Pappé, the writers highlight how Hare’s account contradicts his liberal claims of avoidance of prejudice, pursuit of justice and advocacy of human rights. This study argues that Hare’s seemingly documentary narratives, supplementing each other, turn into propaganda-like pieces whitewashing a long history of occupation and atrocities by the Israeli regime. © The Author(s).
ANQ - Quarterly Journal of Short Articles Notes and Reviews (0895769X) 38(2)pp. 242-247
Ilha do Desterro (01014846) 77
This article aims to explore the affective structure of the narrative universe in Richard Ford’s Canada (2012) through the lens of Patrick Colm Hogan’s affective narratology. We look into the affective responses provoked through the story-discourse distinction by virtue of Dell Parson’ experientiality, both functioning as the narrating self (the narrator) and the experiencing self (the focalizer) in the novel. By way of considering the story(world) of the novel (what is told) with deliberate emphasis on the characters and the setting, we will also examine the discourse as the reconstruction of the story (how it is told) which crucially comprises the plot or emplotment and narration. The objective is to shed light on the importance of the emotional affordances of experience as reflected in Ford’s novel. © 2024 Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. All rights reserved.
European Journal of American Studies (19919336) 19(2)
This article sheds some light on ethical issues in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge from the cognitive poetic perspective, especially Marie-Laure Ryan’s theoretical framework of the Possible Worlds Theory. It is argued that Miller’s play could be considered as cognitive ethical narrative as it highlights ethical considerations (centrally, issues of right and wrong, value and choice) in relation to the cognitive valences of the characters as well as those of the readers (who are steered to imaginatively apprehend the possibility that narrative actions and values may occur in the real world). As such, viewing the play through the lens of cognitive poetics can illustrate its ethical affordances, particularly with respect to the issue of choices, which ultimately endow human life with meaning. Adding some reflections on the philosophical implications of Sartre and Levinas, it is proposed that the protagonist’s act of betrayal is circumstantially complex. The conflict of values it involves could be illuminated through the consideration of the conflicting anguished W-world/Social O-world of the protagonist and the Communal O-world/hospitable W-world of the community in which he lives. © 2024 European Association for American Studies. All rights reserved.
Journal Of Applied Linguistics And Applied Literature: Dynamics And Advances (28208986) 12(1)pp. 207-226
Bessie Head's A Question of Power intricately weaves existential philosophy into the tapestry of its narrative, so that the novel becomes a suitable venue to apply Emmanuel Lévinas’ philosophy of Self-Other relationship. The novel unfolds against the tumultuous backdrop of apartheid-era South Africa, with Elizabeth's journey serving as a poignant exploration of Lévinasian concepts. Lévinas, a philosopher of profound influence, posited that true ethical growth arises from direct encounters with the Other. This exploration dissects crucial aspects of Lévinasian philosophy mirrored in Elizabeth's trajectory across interconnected parts. One part contrasts Lévinasian ethics with Kantian and Hegelian philosophies, emphasizing the transformative power of encounters with the Other, evoking a "traumatism of astonishment" and calling for the embrace of otherness. The other section delves into Elizabeth's ethical journey, scrutinizing her struggles and moments of growth through the lens of Lévinas' concept of transcendence. Finally, the last part explores Elizabeth's transformative journey to Botswana, examining her encounters with the face of the Other and the symbolic dismantling of oppressive binaries within the Lévinasian framework. This analysis unravels how Head's narrative can mirror Lévinasian philosophy, unveiling the philosophical intricacies interwoven with the novel's literary fabric. As we embark on this journey through philosophy and literature, we peel back the layers of Elizabeth's narrative to reveal how it is possible to apply Lévinasian ethics on identity, connection, and the pursuit of transcendent wisdom to her painful interpersonal maturity in a world marked by division and inequality. © 2024, Azarbaijan Shahid Madani University. All rights reserved.
ANQ - Quarterly Journal of Short Articles Notes and Reviews (0895769X) 37(3)pp. 347-353
ANQ - Quarterly Journal of Short Articles Notes and Reviews (0895769X) 37(4)pp. 597-607
Text Matters (20832931) (14)pp. 451-469
Drawing on the notions of “disnarration” (telling what did/does not occur) and “denarration” (cancelling or negating what has occurred) as theorized by, respectively, Gerald Prince and Brian Richardson, this paper examines the narrative structure of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (1939). We focus on textual details to explain how the disnarrated and the denarrated in O’Neill’s play are mostly manipulated as narrative as well as thematic devices to mark the consoling and soothing illusions of the “pipe dreams” which give meaning to the lives of the bar’s regulars. Central to our analysis is how the self-deluded tavern loafers, of whom Hickey is a paragon, resort to a whole spectrum of narrative negations because to them truth is too painful to bear. We argue that the use of disnarration and denarration by Hickey and the other characters in the play helps to create an all-protective world of non-being furnished with an illusion of safety and a false sense of contentment masking feelings of fragility and meaninglessness. These narrative features are central, whether we take Hickey to be a character who is genuinely suffering from mental illness or a cunning criminal who has killed his wife in cold blood. © by the author.
Critical Survey (17522293) 35(1)pp. 94-105
This article aims at a comparative reading of a selection of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Mawlana’s ghazals from a Levinasian perspective. We will argue how Shakespeare and Mawlana (Rumi) both represent an ethical relationship with the Other in their poems, where the needs and demands of the Other are prioritised. We will also contend that although Shakespeare’s sonnets are not exclusively concerned with secular love or eroticism, they are closer to the Levinasian notion of desire or a-satiable desire in which transcendence becomes possible through need. On the other hand, Mawlana’s ghazals in which need and erotic feelings are disparaged also warn about satiable desire and need. This is not to suggest that the results of this comparison can be extended to Shakespeare’s sonnets and Mawlana’s ghazals in general, but that a similar Levinasian reading is occasionally possible and might shed new light on connections between English and Persian lyric poetry. © The Author(s)
Explicator (1939926X) 81(1)pp. 24-27
This article offers a reading of Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man” in terms of its affective affordances. It is argued that the poem rhetorically imagines the possibility of having “a mind of winter” as being incapable of affect, that is, being inhuman. Thus, the central theme of the relation between mind and world is cast as a double encounter between the human and non-human as well as the inhuman and the non-human. © 2023 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
ANQ - Quarterly Journal of Short Articles Notes and Reviews (0895769X) 36(2)pp. 270-272
FOLIA LINGUISTICA ET LITTERARIA (18008542) (44)pp. 253-263
In the late medieval England, the long futile wars, famine and death tolls caused by the plagues highlighted the value of laboring bodies. Attitudes to labor changed, especially labor for food production. The attitude of the clergy, however, was paradoxical towards labor. According to the Christian doctrine and ethics, work was a virtue, but, practically speakin, in the feudal system of the medieval period, manual work was allotted to the peasants. To cope with this ideological flaw, the clergy triumphed in their (non-productive) clerical labor and services, meditative and ascetic life. Failure in achieving these ideals is depicted and satirized in the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales, by the pilgrim-Chaucer's highlighting the significance of both food and food -makers.
Primerjalna Knjizevnost (3511189) 45(2)pp. 187-207
This article reads Susan Howe's poem "Periscope" (2017) to examine how it challenges liberal humanist strands of thinking about the supposed centrality and privileged position of humans while opening up new ways of representing humans vis-a-vis the non-human. Drawing on Rosi Braidotti's concepts of "nomadic subjectivity," "figuration," and "transversality," Bill Brown's "Thing Theory," and Pieter Vermeulen's "Posthuman Affect," the study looks into how the poet's preoccupation with the agency of the other-than-human species depicted in the poem leads to a posthumanist interpretation. It also examines how the narrator questions the boundaries between human and non-human, animate and inanimate in order to evoke uncanny effects that are best realized in the form of post-human defiant challenges to liberal humanist models of subjectivity. The poet, it is argued, creates a suggestive visionary engagement and encounter with the natural world and "anthropomorphized things" in an attempt to awaken historical consciousness to give voice to the non-articulated Other. © 2022 Slovensko Drustvo za Primerjalno Knjizevnost (Slovene Comparative Literature Association). All rights reserved.
American, British and Canadian Studies (18411487) 38(1)pp. 201-223
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, first appearing as the opening poem to Lyrical Ballads, has proved to be highly enigmatic since its publication. The blending of supernatural and reality along with the intricacy of the underlying structure seem to have added to the complication. The present article is an attempt to read the poem through the lens of Algirdas Julien Greimas's actantial model and semiotic square to shed some light on the semantic richness of the poem. The results seem in line with Coleridge's idea of imagination as the Mariner's imagination in co-presence with his will, along with the Moon as the source of Nature's benignity and his muse, assist him with his object-value: the unity between man, Nature, and the Creator. Moreover, the Mariner's suffering and atonement could be attributed to his moments of reasoning and free-will, devoid of imagination or spirituality and associated with the presence of the sun or diurnal elements. Greimas's model offers the possibility to elucidate the moments of confusion as 'void' or 'all' phoric states of passion in which the absence of diurnal and nocturnal elements or their co-presence could justify the Mariner's wanton murder of the Albatross or his survival. © 2022 Fateme Rahmani et al., published by Sciendo.
Anuario de Estudios Filologicos (2108178) 45pp. 261-284
With the publication of Philip Larkin’s letters, his claim to celebrate the common reader and the common English lifestyle, in contrast to modernist elitist’s attitudes, was revealed to be not quite sincere. Some poems in his The Whitsun Weddings collection particularly depict Larkin’s ambivalence toward issues of social class, habitus, and distinction. Deploying Pierre Bourdieu’s theorization of society and culture, this article explores issues of social class, the embedding of characters in their social class and habitus, and forms of capital figuring in four poems in Larkin’s collection. Four poems («Mr. Bleaney», «Dockery and Son», «For Sidney Bechet» and «The Whitsun Weddings») are examined to see how Larkin attaches common characters to their social space through describing the kinds of capital they possess or lack, and how, ironically, the speakers attempt to keep their distance –to mark out distinction– while professing sympathy and understanding. Thus, some light is shed on Larkin’s ambivalence about common people and lower classes as well as toward the very idea of distinction. © 2022 Instituto Teologico de Caceres, Universidad de Extremadura. All rights reserved.
Brno Studies in English (18050867) 48(1)pp. 201-218
This article rereads J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) and its intertextual bond with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) in the framework of cognitive poetics to shed light on the complex issue of canonicity in terms of content and form/style in Foe. To this purpose, Marie-Laure Ryan’s notions of textual actual world (TAW) and accessibility relations are used along with Barbara Dancygier’s concept of narrative space construction to examine how Susan Barton’s narrative (the postcolonial account) anchors/accesses the already consolidated TAW of Robinson Crusoe (the colonial text) to dislocate the colonizer’s secluded, monologic text by superimposing another psyche, through cognitive blending, upon it. Susan’s narrative incorporates her constant awareness of the social mind to assimilate – rather than push aside – the colonizer’s narrative by driving it out of its monologic state toward a dialogic, multivocal exchange in the contemporary postcolonial world where Cruso(e)’s story becomes a part of Susan’s story. © 2022 Masarykova Univerzita. All rights reserved.
Critical Survey (17522293) 34(1)pp. 45-55
Liturgies are communal in nature, and in the context of the medieval Christian economy of time they are developed and utilised to quantify, consecrate, control, utilise and unify time for the comprehensive end of the welfare of the society, both in the Here and in the Here-after. The liturgy was a social institution, and functioned for anniversaries, holy days, holidays and rituals that were the means of medieval social integrity. In the economy of socio-political and ethical life, the medieval Church linked the sacred to the secular by means of the liturgy. They were used for meditation, as well as a measurement of time, and arguably they were manipulated to parody or satirise the strictly hierarchal estates of the medieval society. Though one of the least liturgical books of his time, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is framed by the liturgical institution of the pilgrimage. Actually a pilgrim travelogue, it depicts the secularisation of liturgy and its appropriation for social control, and paradoxically, a carnivalesque celebration of the reversal of social hierarchy. © 2022 Berghahn Journals, Ltd. All rights reserved.
In Esse: English Studies in Albania (20787413) 13(1)pp. 23-50
This article studies a number of William Shakespeare’s works with a focus on night as a metaphysical aspect from a phenomenological perspective. After presenting an introduction on the literary and philosophical significance of night as a (non)phenomenon (while also referring to the scarcity of research in this field) and of alterity on a metaphysical scale, we will try to discuss the ways in which Shakespeare, from the beginning of his poetic and theatrical career, seems to have been interested in night and the various effects he wished to achieve through invoking this (non)phenomenon. We will trace the growth of Shakespeare’s thought on the metaphysical aspects of night from his sonnets and poems (Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece) to some of his more mature theatrical works (chiefly A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet and Macbeth). Our aim is to show, with the help of a phenomenological treatment of Shakespeare’s language and theatre, how he moulds what can be termed a metaphysics of alterity as a literary and philosophical aspect of his work. © 2022, Albanian Society for the Study of English. All rights reserved.
In Esse: English Studies in Albania (20787413) 13(2)pp. 59-78
Writing in the context of an increasingly godless age, Philip Larkin and Thom Gunn poignantly reflect on the experience of going to church in modern times. Focusing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of capital, habitus, and distinction, this article offers a sociological reading of “In Santa Maria del Popolo” by Thom Gunn and “Church Going” by Philip Larkin. Larkin concludes that despite its terminal decline, the churchstill socio-culturally matters and will continue to matter, whereas the speaker in Gunn’s poem offers a cynical take on the very viability and relevance of faith in modern times. Atissue in both poems is the symbolic and cultural cachet of the church in relation to art. The poems address the religiousaffordances and the socio-cultural relevance of art differently. While Gunn’s poem puts on display the decline of religioussensibility in modern times through the decline of the symboliccapital of religious art, Larkin’s poem intimates that the churchcontinues to matter, if only symbolically. © 2022, Albanian Society for the Study of English. All rights reserved.
Teaching English Language (2538547X) 16(1)pp. 119-139
With the advent of technology, blended learning (also known as hybrid learning), as an approach to learning has become a common feature of education across the world. Considering the importance of learners' attitudes toward learning environments, in this study, an attempt was made to investigate the impact of the blended learning model on Iraqi students' achievement in an English literature course as well as their attitudes toward blended learning. In doing so, a total number of 50 English Literature BA participants took part in the study. The participants were subjected to a pre-test and a post-test after their homogeneity was confirmed using the Oxford Placement Test. In the next step, the students were interviewed to help the researchers gain a deeper understanding of the learners' perspectives on blended learning. The results of the repeated measures analysis suggested that blended learning could improve EFL learners' literary knowledge, especially in the genres of short fiction and drama. Moreover, it was found that the learners had a positive attitude toward this learning method since they considered it a new form of learning that could heighten their motivation, improve their participation, and provide the chance to be autonomous learners. These findings are discussed and conclusions obtained from the results are put forward. © 2021 – Published by Teaching English Language and Literature Society of Iran.
Humanities Diliman (16551532) 18(2)pp. 137-159
Time and again Tom Wolfe has been criticized for holding conservative attitudes. Wolfe’s third novel, IAm Charlotte Simmons, published in 2004, has been considered by many critics as obvious evidence of his antipathy to political correctness, sexual liberty, and the American liberal education system in general. The few sympathetic critics who share Wolfe’s anxiety over the life of young Americans at colleges assume that neuroscience—with its emphasis on the materiality of the mind and, consequently, the rejection of free will—has been partly responsible for the creation of conformist young people. In this article, however, we suggest that Wolfe’s anxiety is not so much about neuroscience than the way it is taught at colleges and received by the public. We also show that Wolfe’s criticism of liberal education rests mainly on the claim that it fails to cultivate autonomous, self-conscious students capable of critical thinking and instead fosters an egoistic, self-centered freedom which negates the Other. Here, it seems that Emmanuel Levinas’s “Pedagogy of Becoming,” based on his ethics of alterity, is most relevant to the idea of the desire for improving the education system. © 2021 University of the Philippines. All rights reserved.
Target (09241884) 33(3)pp. 436-463
Seeking to fill the gap in economics-related research in the subfield of translator studies, this article aims to identify the best approach to estimate the earnings penalty and forgone income of Iranian professional literary translators. The data were collected through interviews with 118 Iranian professional literary translators. A multiple regression analysis done to estimate the translators’ annual income equation shows that male Tehran-based literary translators who have no other jobs and spent less time on higher education earn more than their colleagues who are female, do not live in Tehran, have other jobs, and spent more time on higher education. However, the multiple regression analysis for estimating the average forgone income equation of the interviewees indicates that the more experience and the fewer award jury/editorial board memberships female non-Tehran-based literary translators have, the more they suffer from earnings penalties. Building on these findings, the article highlights the implications of cultural economics research for translator studies. © John Benjamins Publishing Company
Humanities Diliman (16551532) 18(2)pp. 120-136
A Lie of the Mind (1985) is arguably one of Sam Shepard’s most complex family plays. It displays Shepard’s experiments with a fluid use of stage space and storytelling that is visually quite uncanny. In this study, we will attempt to shed light on the impossible along with the possible worlds projected in a textual fictional world in Shepard’s play. Also examined are the “narrative spaces” and the “impossible/fantastic spaces” constructed in the play. Deploying Marie-Laure Ryan’s views on space and possible worlds and Patricia García’s model of space and its transgressions, we analyze space in the play, by and large, from two distinct perspectives: 1) the environment in which narrative is physically set up, or, to put it another way, as the medium in which narrative as a storyworld is projected and appreciated, and 2) the fantastic postmodern dramas that picture impossibilities. By deconstructing objective mapping, we argue that A Lie of the Mind’s postmodern mapping aims to critique the earlier belief in claims of “truth of space” and tries to construct a totally subjective reality or architecture which summons the reader’s mental activity to picture such a reality. © 2021 University of the Philippines. All rights reserved.
American, British and Canadian Studies (18411487) 36(1)pp. 67-86
Twentieth-century drama has made the stage a site for reflecting on science. Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, considered by many as one of the most striking contributions to "science plays,"portrays the elusive yet crucial short meeting of the two pillars of quantum physics, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, in the autumn of 1941. The play employs 'real' scientists as characters that recurrently refer to and explain their scientific ideas such as uncertainty and complementarity, recognized as the Copenhagen Interpretation. Adopting the approach of possible worlds theory, this article analyses the concept of 'possible worlds' as projected in Copenhagen in light of the idea that physics itself has proposed a proliferation of parallel universes (multiverse). In fact, our main thesis is that the play offers an alternate history and brings about a myriad of counterfactuals that are tested as "drafts." © 2021 2021 Omid Amani et al., published by Sciendo.
Primerjalna Knjizevnost (03511189) 44(3)pp. 115-130
This article applies the theory of possible worlds to the field of translation studies by examining the narrative worlds of original and translated texts. Specifically, Marie-Laure Ryan’s characterization of possible worlds provides an account of the internal structure of the textual universe and the progression of the plot. Based on this account, one of the stories from Rumi’s Masnavi is compared to Coleman Barks’s English translation. The possible worlds of the characters and the unfolding of the plots in both texts are examined to assess the degree of compatibility between the textual universes of the original and the translated texts and how significant this might be. It also examines how readers reconstruct the narrative worlds projected by the two texts. The analysis reveals some inconsistencies in the way the textual universes of the original and translated texts are furnished and in the way readers reconstruct the narrative worlds of the two texts. The inability of translation to fully render the main character results in some loss in terms of the pungency and pithiness of the original text. It is also shown that the source text presents a richer domain of the virtual in comparison, suggesting a higher degree of tellability in the textual universe of the Masnavi's narrative. © 2021 Slovensko Drustvo za Primerjalno Knjizevnost (Slovene Comparative Literature Association). All rights reserved.
Ilha do Desterro (01014846) 74(1)pp. 499-515
Figurations of psychological problems, mental illness, boredom, depression, addiction, and medication abound in post-postmodern fiction. David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and The Pale King and Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections are cases in point. Apparently, what these works share in common are the material and psycho-biological explanations that they hint at or provide for the various mental problems and disorders experienced by the characters. These pertain to the specific socioeconomic and cultural mode characterizing the contemporary scene. Drawing on the insights provided by Franco Berardi the present article tries to shed light on the significance of such figurations. © 2021 Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. All rights reserved.
ANQ - Quarterly Journal of Short Articles Notes and Reviews (0895769X) 34(1)pp. 11-14
Pirnajmuddin, H. ,
Amani, O. ,
Alizadeh, G. ,
Amani, O. ,
Pirnajmuddin, H. ,
Alizadeh, G. ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries (15818918) 18(2)pp. 71-84
Sam Shepard’s Cowboys #2 (1967) belongs to his first period of play writing. In this phase, his works exhibit experimental, remote, impossible narrative/fictional worlds that are overwhelmingly abstract, exhibiting “abrupt shifts of focus and tone” (Wetzsteon 1984, 4). Shepard’s unusual theatrical literary cartography is commensurate with his depiction of unnatural temporalities, in that, although the stage is bare, with almost no props, the postmodernist/metatheatrical conflated timelines and projected (impossible) places in the characters’ imagination mutually reflect and inflect each other. Employing Jan Alber’s reading strategies in his theorization of unnatural narratology and Barbara Piatti’s concept of projected places, this essay proposes a synthetic approach so as to naturalize the unnatural narratives and storyworlds in Shepard’s play. © 2021, Ljubljana University Press, Faculty of Arts. All rights reserved.
Neohelicon (15882810) 47(1)pp. 315-330
DeLillo’s fiction is postmodern mostly in that it addresses the major aspects of what has been called the postmodern condition. Mao II, published in 1991, voices concerns about the menace of terrorism. It also deals with the issue of the position of the novelists/the novel in an age dominated by the media. Paul Virilio has also paid particular attention to such aspects in his theories. The novel published about three decades ago and the theories first presented around that time have proved to be prophetic today. Reading the American author in the light of the theories of the French thinker better illustrates the status of both as figures warning against the daunting realities of our age. This article attempts a reading of Mao II in the light of Virilio’s theories about war of images or info war, tele-presence, polar inertia, and the substitution of actual reality by the virtual. © 2020, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary.
English Text Construction (18748775) 13(1)pp. 22-45
This article traces the textual elaboration and expansion of dreams as embedded narratives in J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). Drawing on Marie-Laure Ryan's modal system, the objective is to lay bare Coetzee's staging of the possibility of encountering the other in the world of dreams as the only domain that is not controlled by territorializing forces of the imperial state. Ryan's modal system is used to differentiate the fantasy universe (F-universe) of the protagonist's dreams as the only possible venue for such an encounter with the other. We suggest that such unauthorized (I-Thou) encounters - which closely accompany (and interact with) the events in the textual actual world (TAW) - widen the doubtful magistrate's horizon of vision and facilitate his liberation by disconnecting him from the imperial state. © John Benjamins Publishing Company
Research in Contemporary World Literature/ Pazhuhesh-e Zabanha-ye Khareji (25887092) 25(1)pp. 183-208
This article tries to examine Ian McEwan’s Saturday in terms of its ideological orientation. The writers argue that Saturday’s essentially pro-war – pro-Establishment – stance can be explained in terms of liberal humanist views which the novel by and large espouses. The novel, the writers contend, in a sense reflects and is inflected by all the main features of liberal humanism: secularism transformed in the New Atheist militant stance against religion, scientism, rationalism, pluralism, emphasis on the centrality of man and his liberties and rights, emphasis on the human relations and glorification of art and literature as humanizing achievements. However, considering the post-9/11 context, the writers seek to shed light on the connection between this liberal humanist tendency and neo-orientalism (with Islamophobia as one of its main features). As such, despite the liberal humanist emphasis on avoidance of prejudice and considering all sides of an issue, the novel fails to ask the essential questions about the condition of the contemporary world – the real causes of terrorism – and in effect by justifying an imperialistic war, rather unabashedly, serves power. © 2020, Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Tehran. All rights reserved.
Anafora (24595160) 7(1)pp. 145-164
John Updike's Rabbit, Run addresses the human condition under the reign of capital in the context of a society in transition toward a neoliberal state. By depicting a protagonist preoccupied with desire and consciousness through recounting his immediate experiences, the narrative delineates the confusion inherent in the capitalistic state for the protagonist in search of a way out toward self-actualization. Through the application of possible world theory, it is argued that the imbalance between Rabbit's counterfactual possible worlds and his actual world accounts for the failure he experiences in his quest. As such, the possible worlds' disequilibrium, we argue, ultimately leads to Rabbit's bitter failure in his search; too many possible worlds in their counterfactual state produce a kind of counter-reality where there are too many fantasy/wish worlds, but few obligation worlds, a situation that leads to all the inevitable consequences we witness at the end of Book One of the Rabbit tetralogy. © 2020 University of Osijek - Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. All rights reserved.
Research in African Literatures (15272044) 51(4)pp. 190-210
Using Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), we examine J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) to explain how the conceptual metaphor “ARGUMENT IS WAR” is central to the novel’s thematics and to the fictional “staging” of debates concerning authorial emplotment through the workings of the “social mind”-here the prospective readership. We focus on the inter-character discourse staged during the civilized confrontation between Susan Barton (the character attempting to be an author) and Daniel Foe (the author) in an attempt to have their intended stories told. Thus the socially aware minds of both parties involved greatly contribute to the formation of the well-known plot of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). As a result of this argumentative path (ARGUMENT IS WAR), Susan and her framing narrative lose ground to the impositions by Foe and the exigencies of the social mind. A reading of the novel in terms of social mind with a focus on CMT reveals the cognitive complexity of the functioning of the social mind as a controlling medium in Foe. © 2020, Indiana University. All rights reserved.
Orbis Litterarum (16000730) 75(6)pp. 298-306
The allusion in the opening of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2007) to Georges Bernanos’s The Diary of a Country Priest (1936) might merely indicate the similarities between the two novels: the diary format, the meditative mood, sermon-like qualities, and the two dying priests’ susurrus during their last days. This article offers insight into the further implications of this reference, how it relates to Robinson’s revisionary thought and her understanding of the notion of “grace.” The allusion to the French novel, we argue, contributes to the way the novel in English probes into interrelated themes of cultural memory, mediocrity, and science/materialism/rationalism vis-à-vis faith as well as the reconsideration of the history of abolitionists. Furthermore, the reference helps define the social and cultural position of Robinson as a national prophetic writer. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons A/S. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Critique - Studies in Contemporary Fiction (00111619) 61(5)pp. 518-533
Associated with feelings of woe and wonder in the face of something that is too complex to comprehend, the sublime is still a highly relevant concept in contemporary fiction. Philip K. Dick’s speculative novels are filled with high-tech entities and futuristic worlds, as manifestations of posthumanist discourses, that instill a sense of bewilderment in the readers. Dick’s “fictional” domains and characters progressively challenge our very definition of humanity and reality providing us with an updated transformed version of the sublime we will refer to as the posthuman sublime. The novels are saturated with baffling worlds within worlds that are home to beings who can no longer be easily categorized as either human or non-human. Dickian posthuman entities, then, are located not so much in a borderless dimension but on the very borders themselves. An encounter with such indeterminacies that defy human understanding leads to an overwhelming feeling of awe, wonder, and even parodic confusion, characteristic of the kind of sublime we find in Dick’s world. This article attempts to explore the modality of the posthuman sublime in one of Dick’s well-known, yet under-researched, novels Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said in the light of theories of the sublime and posthumanism. © 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
English Text Construction (18748775) 12(1)pp. 1-28
This article explores the politics of J. M. Coetzee's writing style in Disgrace. Drawing on Marie-Laure Ryan's theory of textual universe and Barbara Dancygier's narrative space construction strategies, we argue that Coetzee's narrative is set up to expose David Lurie's deliberately distorted selfrepresentation. Indeed, the conflict between the protagonist's private worlds and the textual actual world (TAW) results from the protagonist's distorting of the TAW by his deliberately distorted self-representation clouding his judgment and, accordingly, his so-called knowledge worlds (K-worlds). Also discussed is the process through which the protagonist is brought to a reckoning - not grace - through ontological re-orientation by undergoing a three-step process of social stigmatization, recognizing his vulnerability and situatedness, and coming to terms with his actual environment (TAW). © John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Text Matters (20832931) 9(9)pp. 356-373
Don DeLillo's White Noise depicts a world of rapid techno-scientific and economical changes. Paul Virilio's concepts of dromology and speed, as well as his notions of accident and technology, seem to be the most relevant in order to examine a novel centrally concerned with change, speed and technology. This article first offers an analysis of White Noise in the light of Virilio's concept of integral accident in relation to the negative consequences brought about by industrial and technological progress. This is followed by a discussion of the relevance to the novel of Virilio's theories about architecture and space. Finally, Virilio's theories about the replacement of conventional war with pure and info wars are discussed in the context of the central event of the novel. Reading the American writer through the lens of the French theorist can shed light on the enduring relevance of both. © 2019 Hossein Pirnajmuddin et al.
Miscelanea (11376368) pp. 33-50
This paper offers a reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald's “Winter Dreams” (1922) in the light of Pierre Bourdieu's theorization of forms of capital. Fitzgerald's story is centrally concerned with social class and addresses the rise of consumer culture in the 1920s. It is about a Midwest American trying to improve his economic and social status to win the hand of a wealthy girl he loves. At issue here are different types of capital (economic, social, cultural, symbolic), hence the relevance of Bourdieu. Thus, we explore in Fitzgerald's story the way characters are engaged in everyday practices as social agents competing with other social agents to accumulate 'capital'. In the process of socialization, the economic capital provides the protagonist with luxury but the lack or shortage of other forms of capital -especially cultural capital- cause him to fail in the pursuit of his heart's desire. © 2019 Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza. All rights reserved.
Miscelanea (11376368) 60pp. 33-50
This paper offers a reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald's “Winter Dreams” (1922) in the light of Pierre Bourdieu's theorization of forms of capital. Fitzgerald's story is centrally concerned with social class and addresses the rise of consumer culture in the 1920s. It is about a Midwest American trying to improve his economic and social status to win the hand of a wealthy girl he loves. At issue here are different types of capital (economic, social, cultural, symbolic), hence the relevance of Bourdieu. Thus, we explore in Fitzgerald's story the way characters are engaged in everyday practices as social agents competing with other social agents to accumulate 'capital'. In the process of socialization, the economic capital provides the protagonist with luxury but the lack or shortage of other forms of capital -especially cultural capital- cause him to fail in the pursuit of his heart's desire. © 2019 Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza. All rights reserved.
Humanities Diliman (16551532) 16(2)pp. 159-175
In this paper the authors apply Marie-Laure Ryan's Possible-Worlds theory to Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest to show how the characters' different conceptions of the world define and build up the narrative structure of the novel. The objective is to look into how the characters in Kesey's novel fall into different types of alternative possible worlds, namely Knowledge worlds, Prospective Extensions of Knowledge worlds, Intention worlds, Obligation worlds, Wish worlds, and Fantasy Universes. Also examined is the internal structure of the fictional worlds or, in Ryan's terminology, “the textual actual world,” to explicate the internal conflicts between the actual domain and the private worlds of the different characters. The paper finally concludes with some reflections on these worlds' interactions and their conflicts, and on the way they contribute to plot development and consolidate, in Ryan's terms, its “tellability”. © 2019 University of the Philippines. All rights reserved.
Interpreter and Translator Trainer (1750399X) 13(2)pp. 132-151
While enacting innovative learner-centered practices has been reported to instigate, at least initially, student negative responses in diverse contexts, studies in translation education adhering to teaching approaches informed by social-constructivism have paid no great attention to student resistance, as one potential threatening factor, in response to the newly employed approaches. This study aims at addressing this under-researched but important aspect in the design, development, and implementation process. In a course redesign plan aimed at advancing towards a learner-centered approach in the course literary translation, we found student resistance as one major threat to the plan’s ultimate success. Although attempts were made to anticipate student resistance and enact several prevention strategies, by mid-semester we found the majority of the students still resistant. An investigation into student resistance types and sources revealed that the majority of the students did not perceive the problem as being instructor-owned. Data collected through the questionnaire on students’ characteristics alongside follow-up interviews highlighted students’ lack of motivation as one important variable worth investigating in the first place. Results from the analysis of motivational factors better justified student resistance. Implications were discussed in the light of the relevant literature for our pedagogical purposes in the upcoming semester. © 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Cogent Arts and Humanities (23311983) 6(1)
In this article, we have focused on the narrative features and cinematic techniques of Bharati Mukherjee’s short story “The Management of Grief” to examine the construction of identity in “the third space” in the age of immigration. The narrator-focalizer, Shaila Bhave, who has just lost her husband and two sons in the terrorist attack on the Air India, tells her story in the form of a diary with each part written at a distinct moment in time; as a result, the narrating “I” of each section is different from other parts, providing an opportunity for self-improvement. Shaila’s perspective, however, is not the only one in the story and irreconcilable perspectives and worldviews are revealed through dialogues. These perspectives and the dialogic nature of the story can help readers discern three governing chronotopes (time-space), that is, the chronotope of homeland, the host country and the third space, typical of most diasporic narratives. Analysis of the chronotopes and the cinematic features of the story would enhance one’s understanding of Shaila’s quest for identity and her maturation from a naive self-confident person to someone who is aware of the instability of her identity in the third space. Mukherjee’s dialogic story, then, deftly throws into high relief the dialogic nature of human identity, offering “dialogue” with others and with one’s selves as a way of “managing” humanity’s “grief.”. © 2019, © 2019 The Author(s). This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.
ANQ - Quarterly Journal of Short Articles Notes and Reviews (0895769X) 32(1)pp. 12-15
Research in African Literatures (15272044) 50(4)pp. 87-107
Using conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) and possible worlds theory, we examine J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) to explain how conceptual metaphors, especially the war metaphor, are central to the novel’s thematics and to the fictional “staging” of debates concerning politics, his-tory, society, ethics, and the very fiction of the writer. The war metaphor, for instance, functions on two levels of the private and public within the textual actual world (TAW) and discourse worlds—which rhetorically mirror TAW. The public discourse of war, introduced by Joll, is conducted through the LIFE IS A PLAY metaphor and strengthened through reinscribing colonial distinctions and interpellating SOCIETY AS A BODY. The magistrate’s framing narrative, however, constantly challenges the war narrative by exposing imperial strategies through ARGUMENT IS WAR in private and public discourse worlds with Joll. Thus, a cognitive poetic reading of the novel with a focus on CMT reveals the cognitive complexity of an appar-ently simple allegory of colonialism. © 2019, Indiana University. All rights reserved.
Neohelicon (15882810) 46(2)pp. 739-752
The main focus of this article is the term “unnatural” in a narratological analysis of Sam Shepard’s Mad Dog Blues (1971) in the light of ‘possible worlds’ theory. The term is recently coined and, in Jan Alber’s definition, designates those physically, logically, and even humanly impossible scenarios and events—according to the cognitive model of possible worlds—that challenge our real world knowledge. Mad Dog Blues is deemed to be one of the most complicated, fast-moving, and vividly imaginative but also obscure and puzzling of Shepard’s plays. The play in postmodernist fashion teems with a simultaneous collage-like collection of different types of unnatural narratives and storyworlds. It starts with a self-reflexive postmodern list; confronts us with unnatural characters; deconstructs our real-world knowledge about time and temporal progress; and presents us with impossible spaces. The analysis of the play in this essay is based on Jan Alber’s reading strategies which are meant to naturalize the play’s unnatural narratives. © 2019, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary.
Babel (05219744) 64(1)pp. 63-80
Borges' works deconstruct the time lag conceived in the binaries such as the work's production vs. its criticism, the original text vs. its translation, the source text vs. the derivative nature of the target text, and reality vs. fiction. Benjamin, as Borges' near contemporary, echoes rather the same idea in his post-Nietzschean philosophy of translation. Focusing on the similarities between the views of Benjamin on translation and those of Borges as reflected in his stories as well as his essays, particularly in his well-received essay on translations of Thousand and One Nights and in his meta-fictional short story 'Pierre Menard': Author of the Quixote, this paper aims at bringing the two scholars together in the context of literary translation studies in the postmodern era, where intersemiotic and intertextual collage (in Eco's terminology) and mimicry bear witness to the claim that translation, like other intertextual enterprises, is neither inferior to the other intertextual undertakings such as writing, nor is it detached from language as post-structurally conceived. Furthermore, another core objective of this study is to show how Borges' 'Menard' heralds and truly represents the translation theories built upon the underlying assumptions of deconstructionism since the 1980s. It is concluded that as far as postmodern and poststructuralist theories are concerned, both Borges' and Benjamin's works had predicted the future of literary and translation theories in which the decisive role of translation and translator in the construction of culture and identities cannot be denied. © John Benjamins Publishing Company.
XLinguae (13378384) 11(2)pp. 303-319
Literature on translation education over the past two decades covers studies that report on the successful application of teaching and learning practices informed by social-constructivism. These studies, however, do not give a clear report on the way the tenets of social-constructivism have been applied in the design of the teaching and learning activities used. This study attempts to demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of Fink's (2013) integrated course design, which has been built upon his taxonomy of significant learning experiences (2013), in filling the gap. Within this framework, therefore, we have presented the structure of the units and materials designed for an undergraduate literary translation course, in an Iranian educational context, and outlined through sample materials the steps we took in developing activities aimed at achieving Fink's significant learning. © 2018, Slovenska Vzdelavacia Obstaravacia. All rights reserved.
Neohelicon (15882810) 45(2)pp. 789-806
Conrad’s Falk portrays the act of cannibalism of a white man to propose that even resorting to cannibalism can find its moral justification within the society that abhors such actions. This effect is achieved by means of simultaneous narrative distance and involvement created through both deictic shifts in various narrative spaces (embedded within the main narrative space and constituting the textual world, subworlds and possible worlds with multiple spatio-temporal shifts) and delayed decoding which results in imperfect knowledge worlds delivered by the personal, justifying viewpoint of the intradiegetic narrator. As such, both deixis and delayed decoding, we argue, are ultimately related to the manipulation of narrative distance; they produce a kind of uncanny effect of simultaneous immediacy and distance which is fittingly in line with epistemological doubt as an aspect of modernist sensibility. © 2018, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary.
Gema Online Journal Of Language Studies (16758021) 18(4)pp. 186-200
This paper examines Jonathan Franzen’s particular version of realism in The Corrections in terms of a number of seminal concerns including the discourse of ethics, cognition, and social minds. As a (post-)postmodern writer, Jonathan Franzen conflates contemporaneity, timelessness, placelessness and nonbelonging of his time with naturalism’s determinism and realism’s detailed description to offer a new version of realism called neorealism or, in his own words, tragic realism. Central to this new version of realistic fiction is the illustration of a complicated network of community, place, and the individual. The Corrections, in this regard, is a novel whose humanistic aspects show Franzen’s faith in the possibility of certain kinds of ‘corrections’ and hence changes in the ethical and moral conditions of the characters. Franzen’s tragic realism, despite showing the tragic and deterministic aspects of life, makes his readers and characters rethink what has long been taken for granted about familial, communal, and generational relationships. Thus it rekindles hopes in the possibility of mutual ethical (re)cognition of the other attainable via retrospective questioning made possible in the individuals’ oscillations between certainty and doubt (i.e. epistemic imbalance). Franzen achieves these effects through displaying the complexity of the ordinary aspects of the lives of ordinary people to revive faith in ethical, humanistic and even empathic responsibility, through describing the characters’ appreciation of the ethics of complexity. These relations often involve accepting or tolerating human flaws as the juxtaposition of tragic and realism suggests. © 2018, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Press. All rights reserved.
Explicator (1939926X) 76(2)pp. 78-83
Atlantis (2106124) 40(2)pp. 45-62
This article discusses the way Cormac McCarthy (1933-) represents the "natural sublime" in The Border Trilogy (1992-1998), where the notion is by and large distinguished as a kind of nostalgic experience on the part of characters insofar as the writer foregrounds the unattainable "natural sublimity" of the Wild West as well as its charming pastoral scenes. Drawing on theories of the sublime, particularly those of Edmund Burke (1757), an attempt is made to shed light on the modality of the merging of the sublime with an inconsolable sense of pastoral loss. Foregrounding the characters' desire to live a bucolic life, McCarthy dramatizes the very process of experiencing the sublime on their part. The modality of the protagonists' response to this experience, it is argued, becomes an index of character. The essay also reveals the importance of style in representing the "natural sublime" in these novels, arguing that stylistically their rendering of the "natural sublime" approaches what could be called the "artistic sublime." In this sense, the artistic representation of the object is no longer distinguished from the nature of the object in one's sensation. The sublime, therefore, grounds consciousness in the subject, making that subject believe that sublimity is concerned with the way one apprehends the world or, simply put, the quality of a person's experience. In The Border Trilogy, the writer foregrounds the "artistic sublime" by focusing on the loss of the pastoral vision. In this way, McCarthy presents wilderness as the ideal pastoral space of nature. © 2018 Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies.; En este trabajo se estudia la manera en la que Cormac McCarthy (1933-) representa la "sublimidad natural" en The Border Trilogy ["Trilogía de la Frontera"] [(1992-1998), donde esta noción se establece a partir de la experiencia nostálgica de los personajes, en tanto en cuanto el autor sitúa en primer plano la inalcanzable "sublimidad natural" del salvaje Oeste, así como sus fascinantes escenas pastoriles. La revisión de algunas teorías de lo sublime, en particular las de Edmund Burke (1757), permitirá entender cómo la sublimidad se combina con un sentido inconsolable de pérdida de lo pastoril. McCarthy recrea en primer plano el deseo de los personajes de una vida bucólica y, de este modo, escenifica su propio proceso de experimentación de lo sublime. El modo en que los protagonistas de estos relatos responden a esta experiencia es entendido en el artículo como un índice de caracterización. El artículo desvela también la importancia del estilo en la representación de la "sublimidad natural" y propone que la proyección estilística de esta deviene en "sublimidad artística." Así, la representación artística del objeto no es percibida sensorialmente de forma distinta a su naturaleza. Lo sublime instala la consciencia en el sujeto hasta el punto de hacerle creer que la sublimidad es un modo de aprehender el mundo o, de manera más sencilla, es una cualidad experiencial de la persona. En The Border Trilogy, McCarthy ha llevado al primer plano la "sublimidad artística" centrándose en la pérdida de lo pastoril; de este modo, el autor representa la naturaleza salvaje como el espacio natural ideal. © 2018 Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies.
Cogent Arts and Humanities (23311983) 5(1)
Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003) portrays, among other things, New York as a postmodern city. DeLillo’s fiction above all probes how contemporary American consciousness is largely shaped by the incursion of technology into daily life. In DeLillo’s novels, technology figures as largely determining the possibilities of action and influencing the very nature of perception. As such, we argue, Cosmopolis could be read rewardingly through Paul Virilio’s theories. The objective is to examine the portrayal of New York as a postmodern city in the novel through Virilio’s theorization of technology and its concomitant dromology. © 2018 The Author(s). This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.
Journal of Language, Literature and Culture (20512864) 65(1)pp. 1-10
This paper offers a reading of Meena Alexander’s Nampally Road (NR) (1991) in the light of Homi K. Bhabha’s theorisation of the relation between nation and narration. For Bhabha, the nation is narrated through narratives which are unstable and inconsistent. These narratives, based on the past or established regularly in the present, are relentlessly refashioned. Negotiating the questions of personal and national identity, Meena Alexander’s novel delineates a post-independence Indian society, dominated by an ‘imagined’ political narrative. Throughout the novel, the protagonist’s observations of the nation and its cultural bases lead her to a redefinition of her national self. Furthermore, the novel exorcises Indian history from the shadows of colonial narratives and reconstructs an alternative postcolonial account. The marginalised female voices, resisting victimisation through their search for selfreconciliation in the interstices of memory and culture, empower a new discourse of the nation in the hybrid realm of culture. NR, it is argued, offers an image of national consciousness as achieved by undermining the hegemony of the past and the tyranny of the present. It tries to give voice to the subaltern by imaginatively and socially engaging them in the national, political, cultural and social narratives of their nation. © Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 2018.
Humanities Diliman (16551532) 15(2)pp. 177-194
Don DeLillo has been called a great postmodernist due to the plethora of postmodern features that he has employed in his novels. However, because of his nostalgia for transcendence and "lost assurances," he has become associated with modernism as well. Living in an increasingly secular, image-conscious society, DeLillo's characters look for comfort and reassurance in the good old days, hence the reemergence of a more traditional mode of sublimity—the modernist's "nostalgic sublime"—in his works. The recurring moments of spirituality, mystery, and communion show the yearning for meaning beyond the white noise of consumption. The moments of implied transcendence and sublime spirituality in DeLillo's fiction, however, do not seem to originate from a higher being or an inaccessible divinity, but from the very ordinary and familiar sources around us. Drawing on the ideas of the major theorists of the sublime such as Kant and Lyotard, this paper focuses on Don DeLillo's White Noise (1984) and Cosmopolis (2003), and attempts to shed light on the relationship between nostalgia for spirituality and the sublime. © 2018 Humanities Diliman. All rights reserved.
3l: Language, Linguistics, Literature (01285157) 23(2)pp. 14-26
Donne's strategies to win the authority of the 'domain' of love in his poetry are attempts to claim a personal domain for himself. This essay focuses on this personal domain in order to analyse the concept of self in Donne's poetry. Lakoff and Johnson's discussion about the basic metaphors embedded in our childhood by which we conceptualise the notion of self presents the cognitive bases of Donne's different metaphors of self. Significantly, as a poet of late Renaissance, Donne's metaphors have close association with imperial and colonial patterns. Combining insights from cognitive poetics and Edward Said's views about culture and imperialism, the writers try to look into the way the poet uses these metaphors to fashion a sense of communal/national identity. The essay will further focus on the multiple representations of self in Donne's poetry and the paradoxical signification of his identity.
Gema Online Journal Of Language Studies (16758021) 17(2)pp. 69-83
The present paper attempts to address Sam Shepard’s treatment of American family in Buried Child focusing on ‘world construction.' In order to explore the process of world creation in the play, the writers draw on the works of Marie-Laure Ryan, a key theorist in ‘possible worlds theory,' one of the orientations in cognitive poetics. Considering Shepard’s highlighting of the bonds among the family members figuring in his plays, the interactions of characters with Textual Actual World (henceforth TAW) are of paramount importance and contribute to what Ryan calls ‘tellability.' Central to our analysis is the consideration of the characters’ private worlds’ interactions and their intrafamilial and extrafamilial conflicts. Shepard is also centrally concerned with American (popular) culture and its underlying myths, hence the prominence of the theme of American Dream in his oeuvre. As such, the projection of the characters’ wish worlds is central in Shepard’s play. Considering these “wish worlds” in terms of possible worlds-theory could be rewarding. Many of these wish worlds, it is argued, hinge on the notion of American family whose consideration by Shepard stems from his interest in the questions of origins, identity, selfhood, and autonomy. © 2017, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Press. All rights reserved.
Journal of English Studies (16954300) 15pp. 279-294
Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop's by William H. Gass addresses the human condition in terms of desire and consciousness in fiction by depicting characters that are being suffocated under the force of circumstances. Application of Lacanian theories to Gass's novella sheds some light on the unconscious features of its main character, Emma, whose neurosis caused by her father's extremism in acting out his patriarchal role is presented in the form of disparate, metonymical chunks 'disseminated' through the narrative - itself fragmentary. Broken pieces of Emma's narrative put together through the medium of language highlight how her actions stem from her unconscious pathological motivations. Also discussed is the process through which she manages to find a way out of her plight.
3l: Language, Linguistics, Literature (01285157) 22(3)pp. 49-63
Mandelblit's cognitive translation hypothesis investigates the translatability of metaphors at the conceptual level by considering two possible alternatives of same mapping condition (SMC) and different mapping condition (DMC) facing translators. His model incorporating other ideas about cultural models presumes conceptual metaphors as intertwined with cultural models. Additionally, in philosophy aesthetics has been defined as a way to access truth (constructed, situated and embodied rather than absolute). Therefore, the aim of the present study is to aesthetically evaluate Khayyam's Rubayyat and its English translation by Whinfield as a case study in order to gauge the issue of aesthetic equivalence with regard to the integrated model based on ideas of Mandelblit, Tabakowska, and Al-Zoubi et al. Thus, firstly, SMCs and DMCs are investigated in Whinfield's translation and secondly, aesthetic experiences of the two cultures involved are evaluated in terms of conceptual metaphors; finally, an attempt is made to modify the integrated model in terms of aesthetics. The research findings reveal that the translator has been mostly successful in maintaining conceptual equivalence by changing generic schemas and cultural models compatible to his Western community in cases of DMCs. This indicates the interrelation of conceptual metaphors and cultural models and demonstrates the overall applicability of the integrated model. Also confirmed is the necessity of supplementing the said model by factoring in aesthetics, defined by Heidegger and Nietzsche as the very understanding of a community about realities.
Papers on Language and Literature (00311294) 52(3)pp. 230-254
Asian Social Science (discontinued) (19112025) 12(9)pp. 99-106
Paul Virilio is the theorist of speed or “dromology”. In his terminology acceleration is relevant to time and space. Virtualization is also another seminal concept in his theory which is of course essentially related to his conception of time-space. In this essay, we argue that human perception as pertaining to speed-space and light-space as well as the different versions of reality arising out of different ways of body positioning is one of the major themes of Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001). In McEwan’s novel both architecture and art mislead Briony. Paradoxically, however, Briony also attempts to overcome her trauma through the art of writing in which several versions of reality emerge out of shattered images of the past. The novel foregrounds issues of art, perception, time-space, speed and their interrelations and as such a Virilian reading would be most relevant. © 2016, Asian Social Science. All Right Received.
3l: Language, Linguistics, Literature (01285157) 22(2)pp. 67-79
One of the concerns of Cognitive Poetic critics has been with the issue of how literary authors make meaning by means of metaphor. Building on the Cognitive Linguistic theories of metaphor, the field of Cognitive Poetics has been concerned, among its many diverse areas, with the studying of metaphor in literary texts. Proposing the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argued in Metaphors We Live By that our conceptual system is metaphorically shaped. In addition, they claimed that the metaphoric linguistic expressions are the manifestation of the fundamental conceptual metaphors forming individuals' cognitions. Conceptual metaphors were defined as the underlying structures of these expressions by means of which people comprehend intangible concepts through more tangible ones. Using the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), the present essay explores the conceptual metaphor of LIFE IS A PLAY in David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago and Glengarry Glen Ross. In these plays, Mamet depicts a world in which performance, in its theatrical sense, becomes the characters' survival strategy and a manner of living. As one of the most influential playwrights of his time, Mamet has always been concerned with the issues which most afflict America. He finds the ills of his society manifested in the relation among people. An attempt is made to explain the ways in which life-as-play finds expression both linguistically and thematically in the different contexts of these works.
American and British Studies Annual (27882233) 9pp. 118-133
A relatively new discipline, Cognitive Poetics is concerned with the process through which meaning is shaped and analyzed. What is known as the American model of Cognitive Poetics makes use of the theories of Cognitive Linguistics to provide a fresh outlook for reading literary texts. One of the concerns of this model is with studying metaphor as an important means of meaning-making. In proposing the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), George Lakoff and Mark Johnson assert that metaphor is not just a matter of words, rather it is inherently conceptual. They claim that our conceptual system is metaphorically shaped and the conceptual metaphors which shape our understanding affect not only our language but also our behavior as well as how we make sense of the world around us. Lakoff and Johnson define conceptual metaphors as our means of understanding one concept in terms of another. They argue that conceptual metaphors help us comprehend abstract concepts in terms of more concrete ones. Using CMT, this article attempts to read David Mamet's Oleanna in terms of two of the most common conceptual metaphors, namely LIFE IS A PLAY and ARGUMENT IS WAR. It intends to explain how these conceptual metaphors become the underlying structure of the characters' interaction throughout the play; a play which takes place in an academic setting. The article demonstrates how words become weapons in the hand of characters to obtain power over one another. They are entrapped in a language which does not allow them to behave beyond the confines of a performance or a verbal battle.
NJES Nordic Journal of English Studies (15027694) 15(4)pp. 236-255
Zygmunt Bauman uses 'waste' as a metaphor to speak of those human beings considered as redundant, dysfunctional and unnecessary in the 'liquid' modern world. This notion could also be traced in the works of contemporary writers of fiction. A case in point is Cosmopolis (2003) by Don DeLillo. This essay is an attempt to discuss the novel in terms of the 'liquid' modern notion of waste and the fear / threat of turning into it. The protagonist of DeLillo's novel, Eric Packer, is thus considered as an agent of capitalism whose novelistic encounters could be examined as projecting the ruinous consequences of his selfcenteredness and indulgence. It is the nemesis of his wasteful life that meets this man of capital in the end and finally speaks back in dialogue to him. The voices of the wasteful and the wasted resound through the pages of DeLillo's fiction. It is due to this quality that we may call DeLillo a recycler of what has been marginalized, jettisoned and left unnoticed in the contemporary 'liquid' times.
Gema Online Journal Of Language Studies (16758021) 16(1)pp. 183-197
The sublime figures significantly in Don DeLillo’s novels. Transformed into what has been termed postmodern sublime-disposing of transcendence in favor of immanence - it is considered to be more of a hollow, confusing and overwhelming phenomenon rather than an elevating and empowering one. Moreover, the multiplicity of prior representations and the exhaustion of the possible have undermined the authenticity and power of the sublime, turning it into pseudo-sublime and mock-sublime. As such, it has moved ever closer to the realm of the ridiculous to the point where it is rather a question of co-existence and co- implication between them rather than an opposition. This can be phrased the ridiculous sublime. This paper focuses on DeLillo’s White Noise (1984) and Cosmopolis (2003) by drawing on major theorists of the sublime like Kant, Jameson, Zizek and, most notably, Lyotard, in an attempt to shed light on the modality of the merging of the sublime and the ridiculous. Our analysis shows that in DeLillo’s fiction, White Noise and Cosmopolis, the events and phenomena that transpire to convey a sense of sublimity are almost always interrupted and tarnished by an implication of the grotesque and the ridiculous. This transformation of the concept of the sublime reflects the decline of metanarratives and the exhaustion of possible experiences as the hallmarks of the postmodern era. © 2016, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Press. All rights reserved.
Kemanusiaan (21804257) 21(1)pp. 41-51
This article offers a reading of Haruki Murakami's Dance Dance Dance in terms of its ontological concern with the postmodern condition. The authors attempt to shed light on the modality of Murakami's critique of capitalism in its latest phase (Japan as an "advanced capitalist society"). Focusing on the potent symbolism of the title running through the novel, it is argued that Murakami presents characters who are paradigmatically "dancing with shadows", the shadows of a postmodern simulacral world. Even the idea of redemption through love turns out to be an illusion in this world, one whose messiah (the Sheep Man) can only offer passivity ("wait and see"). The authors expatiate on Murakami's uncanny deployment of parody to demonstrate how the ideology of capitalism makes people "dance" with the incessant, ubiquitous, vertiginous flow of images/phantoms of capitalism. © Penerbit Universiti Sains Malaysia, 2014.
3l: Language, Linguistics, Literature (01285157) 20(3)pp. 39-50
Tom Wolf once more in his last novel Back to Blood (2012) has taken the issue of race and ethnic tensions as one of its primary themes and this time he has chosen the city of Miami, home to the highest proportion of foreign-born residents of any US major metropolitan area. This novel looks into the interethnic relationships among the Cuban immigrants, Haitians, and American whites and blacks. Applying Emmanuel Levinas's theory of alterity and ethics of sensibility to Back to Blood could be rewarding since it sheds light on the interethnic tensions present among different groups of people whose only concern is their own 'blood' and their own race. We argue that Wolfe's novel, read in terms of ethics of sensibility, with its emphasis on the responsibility of one for the naked, universal Other, reveals how altericide and indifference towards the plight of the Other lie at the heart of most interethnic tensions and conflicts.
Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences (discontinued) (20392117) 5(7)pp. 609-614
Most of Graham Greene's novels are ample fields for examining notions in postcolonial studies. In this essay the notion of hybridity, focal in colonial and poscolonial studies, is probed in two of Greene's novels, The Quiet American (1955) and The Comedians (1966). These two novels, it is argued, are centrally concerned with the theme of identity in the context of colonialism and imperialism. The characters in these novels are essentially diasporic and their sense of identity could be best described as 'hybrid'.
Explicator (1939926X) 71(3)pp. 153-156
3l: Language, Linguistics, Literature (01285157) 19(3)pp. 35-46
In Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw deals with the social function of language (linguistic competence) as one of the markers of social status and as a source of social power. Pygmalion's plot revolves around the linguistic idea of the critical period hypothesis. The linguist in the play bets that the phonetician cannot change the flower girl into a lady by teaching her a genteel language. The phonetician intends to flaunt his power and skill in fashioning a new 'self' for the florist girl through linguistic retraining, even though her 'critical period' is over. Though this acculturation leads to a crisis of personality for the girl, Shaw's play goes against the hypothesis of 'critical period' by showing the possibility of the language retraining of a grown-up girl. Drawing on the theories of Roland Barthes, this article examines the relation between education and the issues of social mobility and cultural codes in the class-conscious society of Pygmalion. Pygmalion could be read as indicating that culture does not come by nature and it is made of codes, which can be taught and learned. Shaw suggests that it is possible to educate lower class people in upper class cultural codes. Moreover, he demonstrates that culture is time-bound and the boundaries between lower and upper class cultural codes were fading at the time so that it was difficult to distinguish a real upper class agent from a fake one.
3l: Language, Linguistics, Literature (01285157) 19(1)pp. 51-64
The present article attempts to explore the effect of translator's ideology on the translated text by focusing on the English translations of two Qura'nic verses from surah Al-Taubah (Repentance) and surah Al-Anfal (The Spoils of War) that are most often referred to with the purpose of imaging Islam as the religion of violence and intolerance. Two parts of the article are devoted to definitions of ideology and the relationship between ideology and translation. The last part takes on board the works of four translators with different religions and ideologies who lived in different time periods and are as follows: one Iranian Muslim translator (Tahereh Saffarzade); one English Muslim translator (Mohammad M. Pickthall) and two English Christian translators (Arthur J. Arberry and George Sale). It is argued that Saffarzadeh as a Muslim and the most recent translator among the ones discussed seems to have been more aware of debates on these verses in comparison with others and as a result more careful in rendering them while Sale's translation is the most ideologically-biased one. The result is indicative of the fact that not only the translators' attitude towards Islam but also the social context around them can subtly display itself in the renderings.
Research in Contemporary World Literature/ Pazhuhesh-e Zabanha-ye Khareji (25887092) (62)pp. 7-7
In the present paper, syntactic omission convections in English are investigated on the basis of Dixon (2005) in translations from Persian for their being rendered explicit through translation. The data of the study entails Persian literary texts from different literary genres, namely fiction, poetry, and drama. The study is in line with that carried out by Olahan (2001) which explored syntactic omission conventions in the translated English corpora of BNC and TEC. The present research is an attempt to investigate the findings presented by Olahan yet across three literary genres and to inspect the behavior of optional syntactic explicitation pertaining to fiction, poetry, and drama translations. The results of the study revealed that explicitation of syntactic optional structures is a prevalent norm in modern Persian-English translations of literary texts and that among the proposed conventions, explicitation of the complementiser THAT followed by that of relative pronouns proves the most frequent in all literary genres; yet, in other sub-categories, our findings do not confirm Olahan's. The findings reveal that explicitation is applied as a literary device in literary translation.
Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences (discontinued) (20392117) 3(3)pp. 525-530
Postmodern literature is founded upon the assumption that the symbolic order of the pre-capitalist era has been transformed by mass media and information technologies into a society inundated with decontextualized signs. Fragmentation of authentic meanings, eclipse of real objects by 'hyperreality' and dissolution of subjectivity, identity and religion are grounded, according to Jean Baudrillard, in the contemporary 'semiurgic' culture. The present paper aims at examining the applicability of Baudrillard's ideas concerning the dominant cultural atmosphere in the postmodern era to Brian Moore's Fergus (1970). In Moore's novel a consumerist society is delineated in which the infinitely reproduced objects and commodities threaten the individuality and identity of modern man. Besides, the novel depicts a world in which the 'auratic' value of art, human relations and religion are replaced by their simulated counterparts.
Explicator (1939926X) 70(3)pp. 226-230
Research in Contemporary World Literature/ Pazhuhesh-e Zabanha-ye Khareji (25887092) (63)
The post-9/11 fiction is regarded as one of the indispensable parts of contemporary American literature. Prominent novelists such as Martin Amis, John Updike, and Don DeLillo have directly addressed the 9/11 terrorist events in their fiction. DeLillo's novels, however, have been of especial interest to the literary circles due to their decades-long preoccupation with the issue of terrorism in its different forms. For instance, Mao II is particularly described to be the historical prescience and anticipation of the 9/11 attacks. In this article, the writers explore the re-inscription of the dominant discourse of neo-Orientalism in Mao II and make a comparison between some of the dominant accounts of the 9/11 event and what is being introduced as terrorism through the framework of Orientalist discourse within the novel. The objective is to expose the roots of the novel's "anticipations" of the 9/11 and thereby de-mythologize the author's status as a guru of terrorist novel.© All rights regarding this web site are reserved for University of Tehran.
Explicator (1939926X) 70(1)pp. 36-38
Research in Contemporary World Literature/ Pazhuhesh-e Zabanha-ye Khareji (25887092) (61)
This paper is an attempt to shed light on how Michael Ondaatje has tried to rewrite Western history in his Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient (1992). In the light of Colonial and Postcolonial theories and Hayden White's theory of narrativity of history, which regards historical accounts as metaphorical statements, the researchers try to show how Ondaatje challenges the authenticity of history written by Westerners about the Orientals. Ondaatje, as a migrant postcolonial writer, breaks the long-imposed silence of the marginal people by giving them access to speech whereby to express their own perceptions of reality. He also gives them access to the medium of writing to break the monolithic status of Western historiography (also reflected in Western literary works). Moreover, Ondaatje blurs the borderline between history and fiction in The English Patient to challenge the pseudo-scientific status of history, and presents fiction as a medium through which history is rewritten from the perspective of the 'Other'.
Theory and Practice in Language Studies (20530692) 1(12)pp. 1861-1864
Translating for children requires special considerations particularly in terms of style. This study addresses use of idioms as a stylistic device and the way they are translated in a children's fiction. Choosing Hooshang Moradi-Kermani's Khomre and its English translation by Teimoor Ruhi, the following research questions were formulated: 1. What procedures are used to translate idioms in children's literature? 2. What is the most frequent procedure used in translating idioms in Khomre as a children's book? 3. What is the translator's preferred strategy in translating Khomre as a piece of children's literature? In order to answer the first and second questions and find out the procedures opted for in translating children's literature, Baker's (1992) proposed procedures were taken as the framework of the study. And to answer the third question venuti's (2004) model of domestication and foreignization strategies was adopted as the framework. To collect and analyze the data, first, the Persian idioms occurring in the book Khomreh as a piece of children's literature and their English translations given by Teimoor Ruhi were identified and paired. Next, the procedures used by the translator were identified and their frequency and percentage were calculated, the results were presented in a table and a chart for subsequent analysis and discussion. Then the general translation strategy related to each example and procedure was identified. The analysis revealed that in the English rendering all the procedures proposed by Baker (1992) as well as a combination of some of the procedures were used. The most frequent procedure was paraphrasing and the general translation strategy applied was that of domestication. © 2011 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland.
Theory and Practice in Language Studies (20530692) 1(7)pp. 851-860
One of the elements present in almost all literary texts causing intercultural gaps is allusion. This study addresses allusion, as a form of intertextuality, in translation. An attempt has been made to look into the strategies the translators have used in translating into Persian four types of allusive PNs(proper names) and KPs (key-phrases) (religious, political, historical and mythological) in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This comparative study is done on the basis of the strategies of translating allusions suggested by Leppihalme (1997) to find whether the Persian translations follow these strategies or not and to find the frequency and efficiency of each strategy. The three Persian translations are by Manouchehr Badi'ei (1380), Parviz Dariush (1370) and Asghar Jooya (1382). The strategy of 'retention of the given name' was of the highest and 'omission' of the lowest frequency in the translations studied. Badi'ei's translation proved to be the most attentive to allusions and the most successful in rendering them. © 2011 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland.
Research in Contemporary World Literature/ Pazhuhesh-e Zabanha-ye Khareji (25884131) (56)pp. 181-196
Paradise Lost incorporates many references to the East. The Orient figures prominently in the vast scope - the "imaginative geography" - of the poem. This paper attempts a survey of what, following Edward Said, has been termed orientalist discourse in Milton's epic poem. It is argued that this discourse has to be considered in the context of Milton's essentially religious and anti-monarchical stance. Associating the Orient with evil and the Satanic regime Paradise Lost cannot be wrested from latent orientalism but it is shown that issues such as aesthetic considerations, a cosmic setting, drawing on the authority of history, classicism, an encyclopedic scope, an essential antimonarchism and above all a profound process of displacement whereby comments on contemporary issues are displaced onto the Orient all help compound the representations of the East in this text. The result is an ambiguous and multi-faceted orientalist discourse.
Explicator (1939926X) 67(3)pp. 183-186
Explicator (144940) 66(2)pp. 68-71
Explicator (1939926X) 64(3)pp. 132-133
Spenser Studies (01959468) 20pp. 145-167
As part of a larger project investigating the figurations of Persia in Renaissance English Literature, this essay traces the matter of Persia in The Faerie Queene and attempts to address some of the issues that compound any reading of the matter of the East in the light of Edward Said's notion of orientalist discourse. I suggest that whereas Persia figures as an imperial realm of pompand glory in The Faerie Queene, the representation of Islam is adversarial in character. The paper addresses how and why it is so. © 2005 by AMS Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
