سید مجید علوی شوشتری

The theoretical discussion of the present paper is particularly based on the insights of Giorgio Agamben contextualized in Iris Murdoch’s novel, A Word Child (1975), written in the transitional period of the seventies England. It will inspect Agamben’s biopolitical insights to examine how they may contribute to understanding of the dark side of sovereignty considering the figure of a banished individual. Taking the precariousness of the emotional, political and ontological faculties of ‘love’, ‘homo sacer’ and ‘bare life’ allocated to the human being in Murdoch’s novel, A Word Child , this paper offers a different view of Murdoch’s inspirational emphatic love, socio-political abstruse problems in her novel arguing that Agamben’s account of these issues supplies an underlying structure of the form-of-life. It resounds through Agamben’s view as a never-ending struggle of human beings to underpin the messiness and cruelty of life in which characters are emotionally engaged and entrapped in order to examine some potentialities as the escape routes from the prevailing deadlocks of the era and eventually to trace, according to Agamben, a form-of-life that is called a happy life.

This article sketches the application of Wendy B. Faris’s primary features of narrative techniques in magical realist fiction in the selected novels The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts (1990) by the British novelist Louis de Bernières and I Stared at the Night of the City (2008) by Kurdish novelist Bakhtiyar Ali, while keeping an eye on Chanady’s and Hegerfeldt’s perspectives where relevant. The focus is on the authors' use of Faris's features; namely the phenomenal world, unsettling doubts, merging-realms, irreducible elements and disruptions of time, space and identity, to depict their war-torn communities. These novelists have manipulated these characteristics from their diverse viewpoints. Despite their different cultural backgrounds and intellectual perspectives, both novelists attempt to convey a sense of reality by exploring the enigmatic nature of human behaviour and psychology, politics, and life in general. In this study, the researchers aim to elucidate the significance of these features in the selected novels to demonstrate the dilemma of war-stricken communities. Essentially, the researchers seek to unravel how these literary elements help in representing the complex and multifaceted nature of societies grappling with the impacts of conflict. The authors' manipulation of Faris's features becomes a lens through which they examine and articulate the intricate realities of war-stricken communities in their respective works.

This paper aims to analyze the impact of the traumatic experiences on the identity formation of Shaila Abdulla’s main character in Saffron Dreams and elaborates on how she manages to overcome her diverse emotional burdens. The author, who is concerned with Muslim women’s multiple identities and struggles in the American Diaspora, discusses the challenges of living in the increasing Islamophobic climate in the aftermath of 9/11 through the life of her heroine, Arissa Illahi, a Pakistani writer and artist, who loses her husband in the collapse of the World Trade Centre. Judith Herman’s conceptions of trauma and recovery are applied to discuss the impact of trauma on the identity formation of the character and how she succeeds to go through the process of healing. The paper also analyzes the literary strategies and narrative techniques in this feminist trauma narrative to indicate how the author has tried to represent what is originally marked by voicelessness. The results of the study demonstrates that although the traumatic event of 9/11 and its consequences has devastating effects on Arissa, she as an artist is able to utilize her psychological resources and to take advantage of familial ties to cope successfully with the traumatic experiences in her life, tolerate adversities, and even develop an optimistic view point about new possibilities for her future life. This paper supports the aim of contemporary feminist traumatology which is to make women’s trauma visible, give meaning to it, and ultimately create frameworks that promote the healing of trauma. Cathy Caruth, Judith Herman, and Laurie Vickroy are among the main theoreticians of the research.