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Interdisciplinary Literary Studies (15248429) 27(2)pp. 239-262
As a novel interdisciplinary study between literature and philosophy of ethics and aesthetics, the doctrine of cides revolves around the tendency of creating an ethical binary opposition out of the cidal and de-cidal practices. The cidal practices illuminate the decision-postponing ones within the early modern philosophy and the de-cidal practices elaborate on the decision-executing ones to overcome that dichotomous propensity aesthetically. The cides doctrine delays hewing the cognitive faculties into categories of superiority and inferiority. The present study hinges on the cides doctrine and the faculties of sensibility and imagination. It deals with the textual analysis of The Namesake (2003) in the context of the cides doctrine and literature as perfect sensate discourse. Accordingly, its fictional characters make sensate and somatic attempts to surmount the cidal reactions de-cidally. These de-cidal characters are termed as cultured characters of sensibility or felix aestheticus who make their most fatal decisions in confusing situations. Copyright © 22225 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.
International Journal of English Language and Literature Studies (23069910) 14(1)pp. 57-71
This essay analyzes David Simpson’s Trans-Human, exploring the intersection of humanity and technology within transhumanist thought. Engaging with theorists like Donna Haraway and Francis Fukuyama, it examines a future where human consciousness merges with technology, erasing boundaries between human and machine. Simpson portrays both utopian and dystopian aspects of technological progress—promising enhanced capabilities yet risking the loss of essential human qualities. The novel critiques technological singularity, highlighting the dangers of unchecked innovation. Nanobots, created to improve life, evolve independently, causing unintended and uncontrollable consequences. This reflects broader concerns about technological progress’s dual nature: its power to create and destroy. Drawing parallels to literary works such as Blake’s The Lamb and The Tyger, Simpson emphasizes the moral complexities of technological evolution. The novel raises profound ethical questions about autonomy, identity, and the erosion of human values in a world dominated by artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. Ultimately, Trans-Human offers a cautionary perspective on balancing innovation with preserving humanity, urging readers to reflect on whether technological advancements truly enhance human life or fundamentally alter it beyond recognition. Simpson’s narrative serves as a poignant reminder of the delicate interplay between progress and the preservation of what defines us as human beings. © 2025 AESS Publications. All Rights Reserved.
World Journal of English Language (19250703) 15(4)pp. 225-233
This article seeks to examine the works of Caribbean authors Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul through the lens of Frantz Fanon’s theories on identity, colonialism, and resistance. Drawing on Fanon’s concepts of cultural alienation and decolonization, the present article investigates how both Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain and Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas depict the struggle for self-assertion and liberation in postcolonial societies. By probing into the characters’ experiences and narratives, the research identifies recurring themes of identity formation, racial dynamics, and the effect of colonial history on individual and social consciousness. Through a comparative analysis, the article also highlights the unique ways in which Walcott and Naipaul employ literary techniques to convey their respective visions of postcolonial realities. Ultimately, this Fanonian approach helps uncover the complexity of Caribbean literature and the contributions of the mentioned authors to the ongoing discourse surrounding decolonization and cultural survival. © 2025 Sciedu Press. 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) 38pp. 452-460
English Text Construction (18748767) 16(1)pp. 1-29
Resistance to postcolonial oppressive ideologies assumes significance within Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah (1987), portraying predicaments of a post-independence fictional African state of Kangan. Drawing on the Deleuze-Guattarian "ontology of becoming", "rhizome", "nomad thought", distinction of "striated"and "smooth"spaces, their account of the "State Apparatus"and the "war machine", and "assemblage", the study demonstrates how Achebe entertains possibilities of convergence with their philosophy. It displays how the Kangan people, while engaging in "ontology of becoming", strive to deterritorialise themselves from Sam's State that attempts to define their subjectivity. Concurrently, Sam's State implements varieties of schemes to re-subjugate its subjects under its territorial authority. The study concludes how the war machine's menacing force eventually destabilises the whole "State Apparatus". © John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Critical Survey (00111570) 35(3)pp. 76-95
This article presents a study of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Coleridge and ‘Resolution and Independence’ by Wordsworth. The readings are mainly addressed by the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and try to present a conception of sublimity which mainly revolves around ethical awareness and sensibility so as to gauge the extent to which they can possibly hint at ethical issues at stake. We propose that these poetic works deal with the other and the sublimity of the encounter between the self and the other. Each of these works offers similar images of the self before the encounter – that of dwelling, self-preoccupation and enjoyment – but the speakers come out of the encounter differently: in ‘The Rime’, the Mariner roams throughout the country and recounts his experience for other ‘others’ in the hope of spreading what he now can probably identify as ‘the Good’; in ‘Resolution and Independence’, the speaker simply comes out of the unsettling and sublime encounter with the leech-gatherer enlightened and mindful of the other. The conclusion is that one significant part of the idea of the sublime in Romanticism deals with irreducible alterities – cosmic/ontic as well as (more importantly) human – and while they ineluctably reduce them to the language of poetry, each treatment can be evaluated by analysing how well they express the ruptures and interstices of alterity within a language which can go beyond language. © The Author(s)
Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics (21491135) 9(1)pp. 252-261
Shakespeare is diverse in his use of metaphors in his works, especially in his epyllia where he imitates the Ovidian style of writing. However, he maintains a twist of theme and approach to the depiction of female characters. Using bodily metaphors, it is argued in this article that Shakespeare’s bodily metaphors mark the author’s deviation from both the Ovidian and his contemporary epyllia, in that he characterizes Lucrece and Venus differently. In The Rape of Lucrece, through metaphors of body, Lucrece becomes a different female character compared to those constructed by his contemporary writers. Instead of becoming speechless and revenge-seeking in the shape of an extraordinary figure, Lucrece remains a human and heroically changes the gender conventions and biases while bodily metaphors are diligently at work to evoke the sympathy of the readers. Also, in Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare applies metaphor to show how Venus can stay human and heterosexual while also a suitor of a male character like Adonis. The characterization of Adonis changes the image of the conventional lover as a masculine and strong suitor as well as the expected image of the beloved to be an exclusively delicate feminine, weak persona. The results of this study indicate that Shakespeare’s epyllia are more faithful to the Ovidian model, compared to those practiced by his contemporaries, with the difference that he does not change the nature of his female characters; he inflects the idea through the manipulation of such rhetorical devices as bodily metaphors that bestow unity upon his poems in favor of a more realistic style. Shakespeare proves original in creating a new version of epyllion in which he advocates the reversal of gender roles in heterosexual relationships. © 2023 EJAL & the Authors.
Critique - Studies in Contemporary Fiction (00111619) 64(2)pp. 257-269
Death experience is sketched out as possibility rather than the end in Saul bellow’s novels, and it is approached and explored in correspondence to writing space and authorship. This study aims to shed light on the experience of death in Saul Bellow’s major novels concerning Maurice Blanchot’s elaboration on death experience that he offers mainly in his book The Space of Literature. Trying to figure out their possibilities and topographies in writing space, this study is concerned with three different death experiences in Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift, and Ravelstein. It is concluded that, regarding the concerns and conditions, the space of writing helps the writer (embodied in characters Herzog, Humboldt, and Chick) die in this space and endure living in reality. © 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
Jung Journal: Culture and Psyche (19342039) 16(1)pp. 116-133
Associated with renewed begetting, the phallus is a highly relevant concept with regard to the dying and resurgent god Dionysus. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s writings are filled with Dionysian images that may suggest the archetypal concept of death-rebirth. Shelley’s Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude (1815) presents a young visionary poet who becomes a Dionysian phallic symbol at the end of the poem only to rise himself anew in a posthumous transcendent garden sometime in a far future. Fleeing from the cold and cruel human society that denies him truth, Shelley’s hero undergoes a quest for finding truth, which appears to him in the form of female bodies of the veiled maiden and the earth mother. Whereas the former, dissolving his male subjectivity, catches him sexually and delusively, the latter devours him in order to provide him with the charmed circle of the mother. This article attempts to explore the modality of this quest and the hero’s transformation into a worm-like phallus in the light of the Jungian archetypes of anima and phallus. © 2022 C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.
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.
Datli beigi, R. ,
Abbasi, P. ,
Jannessari ladani, Z. Orbis Litterarum (01057510) 77(5)pp. 299-313
Through its impossible and grotesque form, the monstrous expresses an original sense of the Dionysian philosophical critique of rationality. Challenging the epistemological authority of form, structure, and identity, the monster guides the mind toward a new understanding about the nature of things. Presenting Rousseau and the rider of the chariot of life as a deformed monster, Shelley's The Triumph of Life challenges the poet's previous identity as an alienated self and paves the way for a new understanding and a restoration of his communal self that provides the basis for the New Jerusalem as the opposite of the Tower of Babel, that is, the biblical prototype of the Citadel. Using the concept of monster and applying Abraham Akkerman's myths of the Garden and the Citadel, this article will attempt to explore the modality of the transition from the Tower of Babel (the Citadel) to the New Jerusalem (the Garden) in Shelley's The Triumph. © 2022 John Wiley & Sons A/S. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Critical Survey (00111570) 34(4)pp. 17-41
This study applies Tarasti’s existential semiotics, arguing that the protagonist of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (c. 1608) develops into a becoming subject through transcendental acts of negation and affirmation. First, Coriolanus discovers himself amidst Dasein’s objective signs. Coriolanus is then thrown into negation as experiencing humiliation, when his already-established ascendency to consulship is destroyed by conspiracy. His movement, however, persists and follows affirmation, whereby he finds a supra-individual signification. Furthermore, the study portrays, through Z-model, subjectivity phases leading Coriolanus from M1 to S1. It reasons that Coriolanus’s mother, Volumnia, as a transcendental idea or pre-sign, intrudes into the Dasein of the whole of Rome, becoming ‘actualised’ as an act-sign, precluding Coriolanus’s war against Rome through her speech and prostration. Besides, Volumnia’s impact as a post-sign pertains to Coriolanus’s noble embrace of his death. The article concludes that Coriolanus, through acknowledgement of M(Other)’s opinions, validating his genuine self, eventually emerges as a geno-sign. © The Author(s).
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.
Critical Survey (00111570) 34(1)pp. 74-86
Written in the familiar genre of ruin poems, Percy Bysshe Shelley's 'Ozymandias' (1818) is well-expressive of the poet's profound hatred of tyranny. One of the distinctive features of the poem is the vividly visual images it provides of the ruined statue and the desert as the setting of the poem. Focusing on the images of the desert and ruins, and using the concept of urban decay and mytho-archetypal notions, this study attempts to show that the ruins of the poem anticipate the modern phenomenon of urban decay as the return of the repressed in city-forms. However, what the poem presents as destruction, death, ruins and decay is in fact the potential of bringing about spring and regeneration. Reading this poem in the light of the mentioned concepts provides the reader with an understanding of the function of the ruins in Shelley's poems as an uncanny Dionysian defiance against both the tyranny of his age and the rationalism of the Enlightenment period. © 2022 Berghahn Journals, Ltd. All rights reserved.
Folia Linguistica et Litteraria (18008542) 12(36)pp. 31-39
Defined as the union of the most striking opposites and associated with Platonic perfection, the term hermaphrodite has a fondness for elevated places. The constellation of the hermaphrodite through the union of the male subject and the female object is a recurrent motif in Percy Bysshe Shelley's poems. Such a hermaphrodite in Shelley's repository usually leads to a sort of Platonic perfection in a paradisiacal realm or Elysium. The hermaphrodite in Shelley's Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude, though constellated, does not lead to such a Platonic perfection but a purgatorial state for the visionary Poet as the Shelleyan hero. Focusing on the first part of the poem and using the concept of the hermaphrodite, this article strives to bring under scrutiny the destruction of Shelley's hero and his fall into the depth of a purgatorial state when the hermaphrodite is broken apart leading to the release of its either aggressive male or poisonous female energies which results in the transformation of the hero to a worm-like phallus at the end of the poem. © 2022 University of Alicante. All rights reserved.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
Journal of Literary Studies (02564718) 34(1)pp. 150-168
Summary: This article argues that desire begins Coleridge’s Kubla Khan and moves it forward. Coleridge projects himself onto Kubla’s garden, transcends his pleasure-dome, and wishes to revive the Abyssinian maid’s song in order to build that dome in air and experience a moment of jouissance. Subjectivity is returned in the end by Coleridge’s move from pleasure to jouissance and back to Kubla’s garden to reconcile conflicting desires for Symbolic pleasure and Real jouissance. Although desire begins the quest for the maid’s song as the lost object-cause of desire, the inspired poet returns to the Symbolic order to prove that he is trapped in desire for the maid as an ever-eluding signifier that has a foot in the Real and cannot be articulated by Coleridge. © 2018 JLS/TLW.
3L: Language, Linguistics, Literature (01285157) 24(3)pp. 111-124
This paper studies sinthomatique writing in Saul Bellow’s Herzog in the form of letter-writing. Referring to Lacanian theory, the Sinthome is discussed in the study as a system of signification that exploits the unconscious digging for jouissance. Connected to jouissance in writing unconscious, the Sinthome is the fourth ring in the Borromean knot that protects a subject against psychosis by intersecting the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real orders. This study further develops the idea of the Sinthome in relation to the Four Lacanian Discourses. In respect to Discourses of the Master, University, Hysteric, and Analyst, the following procedure is introduced for a subject excluded spatially and socially: foreclosure of master signifier, rejection of desire, reception of jouissance, and communication of the unconscious. The subject in above-mentioned moves needs a sinthome to protect his/her subjectivity against disintegration. Regarding Jacques Lacan’s example about James Joyce in using specific styles and epiphany, letter-writing is introduced as the Sinthome in Herzog that helps Herzog deliver his subjectivity from dissolution. Herzog is a character on the verge of breakdown and madness after his second divorce. He reconfigures his subjectivity when he forecloses AMERICA as master signifier, no longer enjoys knowledge, receives contradictions and truth, and ultimately jots down his unconscious. Finally, the role of the Sinthome is explored in the production of art. The Sinthome is considered as a kind of unique discourse through which a psychotic artist is enabled to originate new artistic productions. © Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. All rights reserved.
Critical Survey (00111570) 30(3)pp. 97-115
The double-bind dilemma that Hamlet is engulfed in places him in a catch-22 situation from which there seems to be no way out. Locked in a psychological impasse exacerbated by a deficient Oedipal process due to the fathers death and mothers remarriage, he is driven into (feigning) insanity, a situation that brings him close to Yossarian, Hellers paranoid antihero who is as much inept in the face of the paternalistic ordeal he is subjected to as an army fighter. Evading the fear of castration on the one hand and becoming consumed with guilt for the incompetence to face the trial on the other give rise to problematic identities of both protagonists and numerous evasive strategies they plot. Nevertheless, through mainly linguistic/textual acts of defiance, these initially victimized subjects to the law of the father turn into rebels, mastering and thus making the Symbolic order backfire on itself. © Critical Survey.
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
Neohelicon (03244652) 44(2)pp. 505-521
This paper intends to bring together the plots of Shakespeare’s Othello and Macbeth through examining their leading Shakespearean figures under the light of Deleuzian thought. A Close study of the two texts reveals these two Shakespearean plays as sites for excessive barbarism recited in form of verbal achievements in which a series of minoritarian becomings/mutations take place to consequently dislocate and disturb the majoritarian tradition by depicting identities that are open to change and mutation, and to show the majoritarian system, along with its Oedipalizing forces, as unorganized and faulty. Findings indicate that in the two plays, the identities of the two leading characters of Macbeth and Othello undergo various stages of metamorphosis through which both try to form their temporary lines of flight and have their specific mode of liberation and deterritorialization from majoritarian forces that are dominant in either of the two hegemonic domains to which they belong. Also discussed is Shakespeare’s writing which, in this sense, qualifies as minor literature in that it depicts such a series of transformations and becomings against the long-held belief of stable identity, and lets the readers become one with the process of reading and hence challenge the identities that are forced upon them. © 2017, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary.
3L: Language, Linguistics, Literature (01285157) 22(2)pp. 17-29
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) is an eminent American philosopher, lecturer, social critic, and known for her feminist utopian novel, Herland (1998). The novel is analysed based on Greta Gaard's theory of ecofeminism that cites patriarchal religion, Darwin's human evolutionary development, and the metaphorical or ideological explanations as the sources of the separation of culture from nature that lead to the self/other dualism. This study is an attempt to reject the self/other, man/woman and culture/nature dualisms of patriarchal thought, and show how women and nature are liberated from oppression. Gaard has shown that the claim for the superiority, separation, and domination of the self is based on the difference between self and other, where all things associated with self are privileged, and all things described as other are devalued. Gaard uses this self/other dualism to explain the patriarchal domination pertaining the supposed relationship between women and nature, since both are configured as 'other' and are separated from self associated with men and culture. She explains that patriarchal thought emphasises the differentiation of 'self' from 'other' and the connection of women and nature to justify the domination of both women and nature. This study will explore how Gilman declines the root cause of dualisms of culture/nature and man/woman as lying in the social construction of patriarchal religion and Darwin's human evolutionary development through depicting a utopian maternal world. She undermines the paternal attitudes that are based on competition to possess and dominate both women and nature, and she makes the connections among men, women, and nature through education of the children in open fields to create the interconnections between nature and culture and denounce the oppression of these categories.
3L: Language, Linguistics, Literature (01285157) 22(1)pp. 165-177
The present article focuses on Judith Butler's theory of 'gender performativity' and its application to Joanna Russ's science fiction, The Female Man (1975). Butler applies Foucault's genealogical methodology in Gender Trouble (1999) to trace the processes by which identity is constructed within language and discourse. She sees the subject as the effect of institutions and discourses rather than the other way round, which implies that the subject cannot simply be but is always already instituted. She believes that since the subject is always involved in the endless process of becoming, it is possible to reassume or repeat subject hood in different ways. Butler's genealogical critique of the category of the subject coincides with her notion that gendered and sexed identities are performative. She extends Beauvoir's (1908-1986) famous statement that "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" and suggests that Beauvoir's claim can be read as a formulation that shows gender as a process which has neither origin nor end, so that it is something that we 'do' rather than we 'are'. Gendered identities are therefore performative i. e., based on repetition and since the repetitions which form the subject's identity never finish, gender identity is never fixed. Russ (1937-2011) depicts four women from different worlds with different attributes which affirms Butler's belief in performativity of gender that challenges the presumed fixed gender identities.
Research in Contemporary World Literature/ Pazhuhesh-e Zabanha-ye Khareji (25884131) 20(2)pp. 317-338
Shahriyar Mandanipour is one of the talented and distinguished writers of the twentieth century in Iran. With his magnificent ability in handling the language, he has marked a new era in Iran’s short story writing. By challenging and breaking the common norms and conventions of storytelling as well as using novel narrative technics, Mandanipour has made a new language which distinguishes him from his contemporary writers. This study is an attempt to find and analyze these technics and manifest their role and significance in one of his short stories, “Senoubar va Zan-e-Khofteh.” This study rests on the four narrative technics of “Imagery”, “Polyphony”, “Dramatic Irony” and “Flash back” that are discussed based on a Barthesian structuralist framework in “Senoubar va Zan-e-Khofteh” from Mandanipour’s short story collection Abi-e-Mavara-ye-Behar (2003) written after the September-eleventh event that influenced, in many aspects, the personal and social lives of different groups of people. © 2015, Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Tehran. All rights reserved.
Journal of Language Teaching and Research (17984769) 6(5)pp. 1145-1156
The Renaissance clearly witnessed a revitalization of human’s worldview towards education, the arts, and critical thinking. In the midst of this social, cultural and political transformation, a renewed perspective was held on the subjects of euthanasia and suicide. Philosophy began to struggle free from the fetters of Christianity and to redefine its targets as the production of free and intellectual citizens. Many wellknown figures of Renaissance philosophy put forward theses that were reckoned at the time to be harshly iconoclastic, such as the permissibility of suicide. Shakespeare, the chief figure of the English renaissance, in line with anti-religious discourses of his time, employs characters who radically pertain to suicidal ideologies of the ancients. The dominant theme of suicide pervading his works demonstrates how the Renaissance man mirrored the Greek and Roman ideologies and how the process of secularization exposed him with a sort of absurdity as a result of which suicide could be tolerated or even more admired. The present paper, aims, on the one hand, to defy many contemporary arguments which ill-foundedly endeavor to introduce Shakespeare as an anti-suicide figure. On the other hand, the authors show how Shakespeare was heavily influenced by the religious, humanistic, artistic and scientific discourses of his time in his exposure to the theme of suicide. The paper's main discussion is preceded by an overview so as to introduce the fluctuation of attitudes towards suicide through history until the Renaissance. The study may be reckoned as a great stride towards a newhistoricist study of Shakespeare and the idea of suicide. © 2015 ACADEMY PUBLICATION.
3L: Language, Linguistics, Literature (01285157) 20(1)pp. 49-60
The Roman tragedy of Titus Andronicus (1588-1593), the first and perhaps the least popular play of Shakespeare, depicts a non-Aristotelian tragic hero who is gradually decentred from his role and loses sympathy. Despite the fact that the play has been harshly criticised by many critics, Titus has regained its Elizabethan popularity in recent decades, and under the influence of postmodernist readings that focus on the play's fragmentary manner is well-matched with the fragmented contemporary time. This study is an attempt to present a detailed analysis of the language of Titus and the play in general. Using Derridean ideas, it will be argued that Shakespeare, through decentring the dualities of proper/improper language and speech/writing, decentres his protagonist and fills the play with chaos. It will be shown that the presence attributed to speech in Western thought is undermined by Shakespeare, for Titus' ineffective speech makes him resort to writing which leads to even more chaos in the play. In other words, the Derridean logo centric presence is undermined both in Titus' spoken and written languages and he can, either through neither speech nor writing, express his intentions. By and large, by decentring his protagonist, Shakespeare has endeavoured to distract the audience's attention from Titus and foreground Elizabeth's lack of a successor reflected in the play.
3L: Language, Linguistics, Literature (01285157) 19(1)pp. 119-127
The Bostonians (1886) is known as Henry James's lesbian novel in which the writer's ambivalent look towards the New Woman can be explored. James was a subject/product of the complex discursive web of his time when such ideologies of the superiority of men over women were strictly observed. In that time the idea of same-sex bond was regarded as a threat to the traditional concept of heterosexual bonding. This study is an attempt to conclude James as the contributor to the notion of the New Woman since locating the issue in his novel is enough to make readers put many long-held conventions in question. In this study three important misspeaks are referred to: firstly, James shows the uniqueness of the relation between the two women of the novel; secondly, the writer shows Verena (Basil's wife) changed into property; and finally James shows America's potential for such big changes in attitude regarding women. Although James cannot remain untouched by certain ideologies of his time, he makes his readers think about a different possibility and future for both America and her modern woman.
