جلال سخنور

Through the lens of spatial studies expounded in human geography, this paper aims to investigate the dynamics of space and place in the metropolitan context of two twentieth-century novels set in contemporary Sydney titled Indelible Ink (2010) by Fiona McGregor and Five Bells (2011) by Gail Jones. The characters' interactions with city spaces and places will be studied to examine the effects of spatial experience on their lives. Inter-related notions of sense of place, place identity, and topophilia are analyzed in the light of theories expounded by thinkers including Yi-Fu Tuan and John Agnew. This is complemented by an examination of the impacts of landmarks as iconic public spaces on the characters employing ideas put forth by Christophe Den Tandt. One of the conclusions the paper reaches is that characters of both novels fail to establish or maintain stable bonds with places of their dwelling and cityspaces, as a result of which, their sense of place as well as their inner peace and security are disturbed. When place identity is undermined, they suffer from a sense of dislocatedness and placelessness.

William Shakespeare, the English bard of Avon, inaugurates a Feminist approach in Love’s labour’s Lost which is comparable with the Holy Quran’s mandate and Hadith. He reminisces Muslim association through deeply-seated words of the Elizabethan era including Ethiop, black, moors, Africans and so on in order to signify in his work the Islamic concern for the Muslim women in terms of respect, love, and revival of rights. Riffat Hassan’s theology of honor killing and progressive Islam could be argued to be in thematic affinity with Gayatri Spivak’s concepts of ethical responsibility of the agents and subalterns. The area of concern in Shakespeare’s encompasses men’s sanction in shunning women, intellectual men vs. slave, black and inferior women, and love, marriage and infatuation with women. This is in line with Quranic principles namely poor Muslim lifestyle vs. the affluent pagan hegemony, Muslim’s faith, migration to from Ommat, reception by the hegemonic pagans, Muslims’ conquests and Islamic enhancement. The area of concern in Shakespeare’s play includes men’s sanction in shunning women, intellectual men versus the black and inferior women, love, marriage, and infatuation with women. This approach is in line with the life style of the poor Muslims as opposed to the affluent pagan hegemony, and includes faith, migration, and toleration for the sake of Muslims’ conquests.

This is a comparative study of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea and Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net . The main focus is on the role of trauma in the creation of unreliable narrators. Both Sartre and Murdoch have witnessed the horrors of World War II and it seems that their narratives are affected by such a terrible event. The characters look traumatized and suffer from the burden of the past which has never left them alone. In other words, past events have formed their identity and have rewritten their personality under the situation of World War II. Here, with the help of Wayne C. Booth’s theory of unreliable narrator, the narrators of the selected novels are scrutinized at the social and political contexts of the novels. Accordingly, considering this context and its consequent trauma, the research tries to reveal the presence and function of the unreliable narrators in the selected literary works.

This article aims at studying ecofeminism in Vladimir Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark . Nabokov’s works have been the matter of different perspectives since they have been created but this article claims that what has so far been neglected about his works is that Nabokov’s novels pay respectful attention to nature and its problems. Ecofeminism, a branch of ecocriticism, has been created and widened recently by some prominent thinkers like Susan Griffin and Elizabeth Bishop. In the context of ecofeminism, the similarities between nature and women in having two opposite sides is the site of authorship for some contemporary writers. Nature and women, according to them, are both healer and killer simultaneously. The article shows how these two sides are presented in Nabokov’s novel, and, by means of which it, tacitly, claims that Nabokov, as in his other works, worships nature and its elements.

The present paper aims address the Lacanian concepts of the tyche (tuche) and the automaton in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion (1987), and to explore the way the whole novel is based on moments of chance, peril, and jeopardy which are traceable in the transformation of automaton into tyche. Illuminating the track of automaton into tyche, the study endeavors to compare reading women’s writing style to experiencing tyche while going through other styles could be comparable to an automaton. A historiographic metafiction, The Passion is divided into four seemingly unrelated sections connected by the elements of chance and calamity. Via experiencing traumatic happenings, the characters face the incursion of the Real into the Symbolic Order (Tyche), considered beyond the determinations of the Symbolic. Observing the mass slaughter and deplorable death of his comrades, Henri is unable to return to the Symbolic and is obliged to remain in the asylum as a mentally disordered person. On the contrary, Villanelle manages to free herself from the post-traumatic stress and commences a new life.