Mahshid Namjoo; Leila Baradaran Jamili
Abstract
Introduction: This research aims to investigate the effects of geography in the reconstruction of subjectivity and also shows that there is a mutual relationship between spatiality and subjectivity. The theoretical framework is mainly based on Henri Lefebvre’s theories of space which represent ...
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Introduction: This research aims to investigate the effects of geography in the reconstruction of subjectivity and also shows that there is a mutual relationship between spatiality and subjectivity. The theoretical framework is mainly based on Henri Lefebvre’s theories of space which represent a reconciliation between mental space and real physical space. On this account, the study relies primarily on Inaam Kachachi’s novel-The American Granddaughter- and Lefebvre’s spatial triad. In investigating the geo-effects on subjectivity-formation, the characters’ inner struggle, their spatial reproduction, and the creation of the third mental space will be explored. The colonial role of homeland in the creation of mental geography, and the characters’ various postcolonial responses will be discussed further. The article finally indicates that geographical expectations and norms can act as colonial forces which control the characters’ will and determination and eventually lead them to the production of mental geography.Background of the study: This article focuses on The American Granddaughter and it is designed to study the novel by demonstrating the geographical effects on subjectivity formation. It, also, shows that spatiality can be viewed as a colonial power that manipulates the minds of people and controls everyday life practices. Inaam Kachachi, an Iraqi journalist and author, officially presented herself to the literary society in 2005 with the publication of her first novel, Heart Springs. Her second novel, The American Granddaughter, was a depiction of the American occupations of Iraq through the eyes of a young Iraqi-American woman who returns to her birth country as an interpreter for the US Army and witnesses emotional outbursts, familial conflicts, and the fall of the country of origin.Methodology: The present study applies an interdisciplinary approach that integrates perspectives from different fields of knowledge; i.e., spatiality, immigration, and subjectivity. Lefebvre’s space is a social product and is reproduced through human interactions, relations, and intentions. His spatial triad, i.e., private, public, and mental spaces can affect positively and negatively the reproduction of both space and subjectivity. According to Lefebvre, a social space contains a diversity of networks and interactions which can help spatial growth. Not only can people bring a set of concepts and change spatial representations, but also they can neither be separated from spatiality nor interpreted separately. Through this interdisciplinary study, the readers are given a chance to understand the effects of spatial mechanisms on both an immigrant’s mentality and her/his self-reformation. Because of spatial confirmation, an immigrant adjusts her/his subjectivity/self-representation to new forms of challenges and norms in a receiving country. When the new self-images cannot be matched with the homeland’s doctrines, an immigrant starts creating a mental geography. Furthermore, this study indicates how Kachachi merges the spatial images of an immigrant and her/his rooted-images into mental images by which she/he can be attached to her/his homeland and can forget the pain of being known as the Other.Conclusion: The American Granddaughter offers a site to study the dynamic relations between spatiality and subjectivity. The use of mental space gives a chance to the characters to survive and attach to the remnant of past memories. In addition, the readers can understand the characters’ decisions and suffering better. Kachachi employs a multitude of variations on the characters’ voices as a postcolonial reaction to indicate the social aspects of spatiality and subjectivity; both are social products and have a transient nature
Fatemeh Pourjafari; leila Baradaran Jamili
Abstract
The present study is based on the interaction between aesthetics and ethics and by focusing on the rhetorical narrative theory and the ethical philosophy it aims to investigate the aesthetic representation of ethics in On Beauty by Zadie Smith. On this account, this study relies primarily on James Phelan's ...
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The present study is based on the interaction between aesthetics and ethics and by focusing on the rhetorical narrative theory and the ethical philosophy it aims to investigate the aesthetic representation of ethics in On Beauty by Zadie Smith. On this account, this study relies primarily on James Phelan's rhetorical approach to narratology and Charles Taylor's philosophy of ethics. According to Phelan, the study of narrative aesthetics deals with the analysis of the narrative techniques, employed by the author and the narrator. Free indirect discourse and narrative voice are two techniques that contribute to the aesthetic dimension of the narrative. Through free indirect discourse, the readers are given a chance to enter inside the characters' unconscious mind which is integrated within the narrative flow, while narrative voice is defined by Phelan as the synthesis of style, tone, and ethics. Furthermore, the ethical world of the story is analyzed concerning the characters' various attitudes towards the concept of beauty, and their tendency towards human connection and altruism as ethical goods. Smith’s characters search for their authentic selfhood within the pluralistic context of the globalized world while practicing concern for others. This article aims at exploring the ethical values embedded in the choice of using certain narrative frameworks in Smith’s novel, and their relation to the contemporary tendency in literature towards rejecting postmodern fragmented narrative world.
Farideh Shahriari; Leila Baradaran Jamili
Abstract
Introduction This research employs a comparative study design to analyze the political, sociological, and physiological impacts that Iraq-Iran and Iraq-America war had in shaping the literary approach that the Arab/Iraqi female war memoirists use. The Arab/Iraqi war memoirists including Haifa Zangana ...
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Introduction This research employs a comparative study design to analyze the political, sociological, and physiological impacts that Iraq-Iran and Iraq-America war had in shaping the literary approach that the Arab/Iraqi female war memoirists use. The Arab/Iraqi war memoirists including Haifa Zangana and Dunya Mikhail try to bring out the violent effects of the oppressive space as considered the concept of subjectivity, which they live. The Arab/Irqi war memoirists portray themselves as authoritative spears in the war whether they were acting as civilians or soldiers to overcome the aggression, where they take a transgressive move by attacking gender roles and taking up masculine roles such as leading activists’ groups. The current research is based on the premises that from a geopolitical point of views, Zangana and Mikhail are found to rewrite the scripts of war as a reflection of the gendered experiences, while they open up new approaches to the themes of war in literature and narrative. Background of the studies Kelly Robin Adams in her doctoral dissertation “Literature Practices in Women’s Memoirs of the Civil Rights Movement “(2012) carried out a research on the literate practice in women’s memoirs of the Civil Rights Movement, where the researcher highlights the participatory roles that women played in the movement including their ability to act publicly in a movement remembered mostly for its male leaders. On the other hand, Johnson M. Alison in his book, Histories of War: Representations of Silence in Woman’s Vietnam/American War Narratives (2016) draws on the feminist rhetorical theories of silence, listening, and praxis to interrogate traditional psychoanalytic through thought by investing how America, Vietnamese, and Vietnamese-American women who experienced the war provide a different model for narrating the war and coping with trauma. On her part, Amy Kathleen Sininger with The Truth in Comedy: Representations of Postfeminist Success and American Culture in Women’s Comedic Memoirs (2015) researched on the representations of postfeminist success and American culture in women’s comedic memoirs. The researcher carried out an in-depth analysis of how the increasing prominence of comedic is memoir is indicative of American cultural changes, particularly in relation to women and feminist, as women prove to dominate the genre. Consequently, Jenny Young Kijowski in Gender and Trauma from World War I to the War in Iraq: Narrative in the Aftermath of Loss (2015) analyzes the theme of gender ad trauma from World War I to the war in Iraq. The studies portrayed are correlated in some way because they provide the avenues with which the authors could express their experiences with the war while taking a transgressive move to portray themselves as agent of destruction of the symbolic order that privilege the masculine in literature. Materials and Discussions The variations in the geopolitical orientations of the Arab/Irqi female war memoirists provides readers with the information about how the space they occupied influenced their selection of language and style of approaching about the war events in the Iraq-Iran and America-Iraq war. These geopolitical orientations form the foundation for the selection of the theoretical perspectives that can be used to read the Arab/Irqi female war memoirs. This research employs “Geocriticism” approaches by theorists like Bertrand Westphal, and Robert Tally, and philosophers like, Henri Lefebvre with his Production of Space to analyze the relation existing between the subjects and space in literary terms with critics such as Hélèn Cixous the concept of écriture feminine. Conclusion From a geocriticism approach, the Arab female war memoirists are found out to rewrite the scripts of the Iraq-Iran and the Iraq-American war as a reflection of the gendered experience, where they open up new approaches to the theme of war in the literary world. The audience of the studies can therefore track the foundation for creating knowledge in terms of how space, land, and spatiality within the jurisdiction of Arab female war memoirists influences their style of approach in portraying the events of the war.
Sussan Rahimi Bagha; Leila Baradaran Jamili
Abstract
Introduction: This article attempts to analyze the concepts of transculturation, ideology and double consciousness in Amiri Baraka’s ideological plays; The Great Goodness of Life: A Coon Show (1969) and The Slave Ship (1967). In order to get this objective, Frantz Fanon’s concepts of transculturation ...
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Introduction: This article attempts to analyze the concepts of transculturation, ideology and double consciousness in Amiri Baraka’s ideological plays; The Great Goodness of Life: A Coon Show (1969) and The Slave Ship (1967). In order to get this objective, Frantz Fanon’s concepts of transculturation and the identity in regards to the symptom of double consciousness, as well as the ideas of Slavoj Zizek in analyzing the psycho-ideological impacts have been utilized. The blacks were defined as the ‘Others’, and the dreams of ‘Becoming’ have never been easily applicable for them. They become separated from their homeland, and labored in the new world of Western multinational capitalism among the forms of colonization. The plays of Amiri Baraka focus on the revolutionary work of art. This study concentrates on Baraka's attempts toward his black plays as the notion of critical response to the dominated ideology which stands against the black community.Background of the Studies: This study is an attempt to consider ethno-psycho-ideological key concepts while reading Baraka’s plays. Amiri Baraka formerly known as LeRoi Jones (1934 – 2014) is a black American poet, activist, scholar and playwright. Throughout most of his career, he supported and assisted in re-establishing of the influential Black Arts movement which sought to move black writers away from western aesthetic sensibilities toward a more complete embrace of the black world. Baraka is known for his aggressive style and his controversial writing. He has penned more than 50 books, including fiction, music criticism, essays, short stories, poetry and plays in order to explore and examine Black life, love, and social order.Materials and Discussions: This research will be an interdisciplinary discourse, fascinated with the spectacle of the racism, as the images of the colonial and black ‘Others’ which become a trope of desire for the hybrid identities. The discussions will take place in the realm of transculturalism and hybridity, as well as the identities which evoke the challengeable racial and ideological experiences in Fanon’s thought. Being the ‘Other’ and having double consciousness are under the invitation of the black subject to mimic white culture in order to obtain political and social comformity. Zizek’s opening discussion in his The Sublime Object of Ideology is to claim that today ideology has delved in the political landscape. He insists, Althusser’s understanding of ideological identification suggests that an individual is wholly interpellated into a place within a political system by the system’s dominant ideology and ideological state apparatuses. His ideas are formed by drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, around the ideological dis-identification and jouissance as political factors.Result and Discussion: The third play of Four Black Revolutionary Plays is Great Goodness of Life: A Coon Show (1969) which employed the combinatory techniques and styles of expression, and subtitled as A Coon Show to demonstrate that the play parodies the nineteenth-century American black minstrel show which was created by whites to satirize, exaggerate, and to ridicule black life-styles through the use of myth. The black protagonist, Court Royal is accused by an electronic voice, of shielding a wanted criminal. It is black man’s gullibility that Baraka seems to resent the most. Slave Ship (1967) is a historical pageant consists of projected images, different styles of black dance and chant, plus pause and silence. The setting of the play is a slave ship, the cries of enslaved women and men, and white sailors laughing while calculating the number of slaves. Inscribed in the play is the nationalist revolution Baraka envisions, in order to transform realities of bondage, cultural defamation, and racial prejudice. Conclusion: Both plays of Amiri Baraka, in this study, are the revolutionary work of art. His plays indicate the centrality of a black massive movement toward the achievement of complete self-rule and self-realization. His experimental works in the 1960s are considered as the most significant African-American ones. Baraka’s powerful revolutionary art and political actions were directed entirely to the black and white audiences.
Ensiyeh Darzinejad; Leila Baradaran Jamili
Volume 14, Issue 19 , October 2018, , Pages 169-186
Abstract
The concept of home is pivotal in diaspora studies. Mohja Kahf (1967- ), the Syrian Muslim novelist residing in the United States, challenges the fixity of home in her diasporic novel, The Girl in Tangerine Scarf (2006). The efforts of her heroine, Khadra, to find home in the fixed geographical territories, ...
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The concept of home is pivotal in diaspora studies. Mohja Kahf (1967- ), the Syrian Muslim novelist residing in the United States, challenges the fixity of home in her diasporic novel, The Girl in Tangerine Scarf (2006). The efforts of her heroine, Khadra, to find home in the fixed geographical territories, such as Syria, United States, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, are futile. She finds out that as a diasporic subject, instead of trying to satisfy her desire for home, she has to please her homing desire. Taking part in the community of Muslim religious rituals such as Haj pilgrimage and congregational prayer enables her to create a translocal space for herself. This space is engendered round the pivotal point of religious belief and the plurality and multiplicity of transnational Islamic community. The present study regards translocality as a solution to the challenge of home in diaspora. James Clifford, Avtar Brah, Katherine Brickell and Ayona Datta, and Tim Oakes and Louisa Schein are among the main theoretician of this research.
Volume 11, Issue 15 , October 2015, , Pages 21-40
Abstract
Abstract
Edward Said challenges western orientalism in an analytical way in his book, Orientalism (1978). His view of orientalism is based on finding a new relationship between the Orient and the Occident. Western orientalism refers to English, French and American ones based on the dominant power and ...
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Abstract
Edward Said challenges western orientalism in an analytical way in his book, Orientalism (1978). His view of orientalism is based on finding a new relationship between the Orient and the Occident. Western orientalism refers to English, French and American ones based on the dominant power and hegemony of the West over the East which is a kind of Nietzschean will to power. From Friedrich Nietzsche’s perspective, every idea is a will to power; meanwhile, the evolution of man’s wisdom is the result of his will to power; in this way, knowledge will be the instrument of power. This paper, through Said’s analytical criticism, challenges orientalism to show that, the formal expression of will to truth is will to power that leads to a kind of cultural imperialism. Moreover, it represents a form of cultural imperialism in Said’s Orientalism, which is one of the most powerful factors of the hegemony of imperial powers especially in the colonized countries. Through amateurism, Said indicates how creating such a culture in literary works can be one of the most resisting factors in the postcolonial societies. Thus, he suffers from an intellectual personal imperialism, which is in contradiction with the world of critical theories and criticism .
Volume 10, Issue 14 , October 2015, , Pages 157-180
Abstract
Abstract Through studying classical literature and cultures of various counties, especially Persia, James Joyce has created his everlasting novel, Finnegans Wake, whose narratives can never come to an end. He creates a kind of fascinating intertextuality between these two works by using quotations without ...
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Abstract Through studying classical literature and cultures of various counties, especially Persia, James Joyce has created his everlasting novel, Finnegans Wake, whose narratives can never come to an end. He creates a kind of fascinating intertextuality between these two works by using quotations without any quotation marks and by interconnecting the Persian stories of The Thousand and One Nights with English stories and culture which involve the readers into a new verbal play of signifiers. This paper, by using the theories of Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva and applying their theory of intertextuality, searches for the footsteps of The Thousand and One Nights in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Meanwhile, the paper shows that how the occurrence of events in Joyce’s novel follows the patterns of Shahrzad’s sleep and wake to lead Joyce’s characters away from their sleep or ignorance and moving toward wake or knowledge. Joyce designs a labyrinth for his readers, in his narration, which lasts many nights, even more than thousand and one nights, to enjoy and evaluate the patterns of sleep and wake. As a result of gaining the horizon of this new knowledge, his readers learn to interact and communicate with other cultures.