سمیرا ساسانی

Disability has an omnipresence in our daily lives, from our encounters with people with disabilities in real-life experiences to encountering them in novels, movies, and video games. After the Vietnam War was pursued by movements like Civil Rights and social discourses revolving around race, gender, and sexuality gained momentum in the 1970s, there was an urge for a civil rights-based model for disability. Previously, disability was considered a physical or mental deviance in the individual, an affliction to be cured or eliminated. This medical model gave its place to a social model, in which the social, political, and cultural environment rendered people with impairments disabled. Recently, some theorists have denounced drawing lines between the social and medical models and instead propose a liminal cultural model, believing that this mixed paradigm is the only model that does justice to the lived experiences of people with disabilities. The present study aims at analyzing John Steinbeck’s novella, Of Mice and Men. It investigates how Lennie, a person with a cognitive disability, is treated and the challenges he faces, grounded on Garland-Thomson’s cultural theorization of disability through three concepts of feminism, otherness, and disability.

World literature investigates literary works that circulate beyond their cultures and demonstrates what like-but-unlike is. It considers a certain motif and sees how it represents its cultural aspects. . The Jungian archetype of the bird is the common thread that has been analyzed in this comparative study. Bird’s flight sheds light on metaphysical ascendance and transcendence. Moreover, the bird archetype conveys meanings associated with death, rebirth, awareness, consciousness, enlightenment, and wisdom. This article compares the archetype of birds in the poetry of Attar’s The Conference of the Birds (1177), Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1992), and Agbemabiese’s “ Sankofa” (2008). The reason for such a choice is that, although they belong to different ages and literary heritages, all three portray a journey toward an individual’s Self-perfection.  These poets utilize the bird archetype to manifest how Simurgh , Albatross, and Sankofa, reveal their archetypal meanings in Persian, English, and African cultures. By a comparative method based on Jung’s archetypal “process of individuation”, the bird is a uniting archetype, that represents the “Self” in Jung’s terminology. Binding the poetry of these nations demonstrates that through a self-realization journey, the individual can achieve perfection or become one with the whole.