درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The present study focuses on the strategic process of enlisting the readers’ empathetic responsiveness in Thomas Hardy’s major Wessex novels. The analytical perspective draws on Suzanna Keen’s theories in affective narratology; it intends to uncover the stylistic strategies of affective impressionism in the Wessex narratives. The methodological procedure is grounded in the qualitative appraisal of the emotive aspects of Hardy’s realistic representations through critical discourse analysis. The research approach is influenced by the recent mind theories in cognitive science, emphasizing emotional perception as the most significant determinant of the gestalt of interpretations. The semi-fictional world of Wessex capitalizes on an insight into the primacy of emotive sensibility over cognitive rationality. The authorial intentionality in the Wessex narratives aspires to propagate human compassion by resorting to the literary application of the empathy-altruism hypothesis. The melioristic agenda for edification via investment in the readers’ emotive capacities saturates the narratives’ impressionistic composition. The manipulation of the narrative consciousness foci in the major Wessex novels enables Hardy to maintain his readers’ empathetic identification with his characters’ predicaments in a philosophical context. Moreover, the tagged characterization of the protagonists establishes the intended impressions of their temperament and demands the corresponding empathetic responses from the readers.

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.

This article investigates Deirdre Madden’s Time Present and Time Past through the lens of Marianne Hirsch’s theory of postmemory, focusing on the role of photographs in bridging gaps between generations and constructing narratives about traumatic events. Despite a societal inclination towards anti-nostalgia and a desire to forget past concerns in favor of newfound prosperity, the main characters deal with a past that intrudes into the present in a quasi-traumatic form. To assay such fractured identity formation in characters, characteristic of post Celtic Tiger Ireland, this article explores memories as one’s inseparable source of identity. As such, Marianne Hirsch’s notion of Postmemory will be used to understand the connection between traumatic memory-formation and identity formation shared among the survivors of catastrophic events. Such an abstract connection invites an examination of photography as a means to transfer meaning, memory, and identity from one generation to another, meditating the relationship between the past and the present. This article concludes by paying special attention to how postmemory works as a healthy means of grappling with unresolved traumas, leading the characters towards an ethical form of remembering the past.

This study queries into the ethical functions of diasporic fiction through carrying out a textual as well as a contextual study of The Famished Road. As an account of the politically marginal and the socially displaced, the diasporic novel is imbued with a singularity of form and content. Formally speaking, diasporic fiction is non-canonical, since it belongs to the space between nations and cultures. Furthermore, it partakes of a dialogic form which novelizes minor discourses and genres. In terms of content, the diasporic fiction opens up and narrates a liminal space and consists of the search for a utopian alternative to the dystopian status quo. The concurrence of these four qualities turns the diasporic novel into an account of experience at its extremes. However, the diasporic fiction is ethically radical not because it shows how different human experience is at the moment of exception, but because it points toward what Badiou calls an ethics of truths in singular situations. The diasporic experience results in a radical ethical system of truths that, far from succumbing to an overarching ethics of difference and a logic of us versus them, highlights the human truth at the heart of the experience of diaspora.

The present paper explores Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy in an attempt to highlight the importance of the establishment of a well-defined identity as the crucial step in the life of Tashi, a victim of genital mutilation. She becomes whole and healthy once she finds a voice and remakes her severed ties with the black community. Her individual acts of rebellion are complemented with collective political action against genital mutilation. Butler’s view, agency is a restorative energy which works against fragmentation and opens a new possibility for psychic healing as the essential path to the formation of an individual identity. The paper explores the path taken by the novel’s female protagonist to validate her right as an active agent and defy the objectifying assumptions which deprive women of the right to be treated as human subjects. The long-held womanist aspirations shared by Tashi and her fellow sufferers matched by the desire to restore the lost agency is the only hope given to black women to establish their own voice. The protagonist’s final healing is thus achieved through the healthy interaction between individual as well as collective acts of rebellion: individual agency accompanied by political and social transformation.

The debates concerning Orlando’s magical sex transformation and its main concern with gender trouble are ever growing. Yet it seems a very significant fact is neglected in this debate, the extent the male Orlando is different from the female. Till Orlando is a man, he holds a very rigid and sedentary view of gender roles and reproduces the old cliché about men and women. As soon as he becomes a woman, she starts to view the world in a nomadic distribution. The present paper uses Deleuze’s theory of time and his notions of sedentary and nomadic to represent how time and sex transformation are connected to a split subjectivity and the birth of a new female subject/artist. The sex transformation is a tremendous event that splits Orlando into a before and an after. The male Orlando is not equal to "the act" which is to go beyond the spirit of his age and become an artist who is able to affirm androgynous and nomadic worldview. Through "becoming woman" Orlando abandons his sedentary view of the world and becomes nomadic and at last, completes her poem "The Oak Tree". Through metamorphosis and a split subjectivity, Orlando becomes equal to "the act".

This paper deals with Wallace Stevens’s first collection of poetry, Harmonium, in light of Heidegger’s philosophy, with a particular emphasis on Da-sein as the place of negativity. The focus is particularly on Heidegger’s later philosophy, where he defines Man as the juncture where the four constitutive elements (earth, sky, divinities, and mortals) converge to let Da-sein appear as the futural authentic animal whose Being matters to him as his distinctive mark. Stevens’s poetry in Harmonium displays an experimental development along the same lines. The collection consists of poems dealing with the effect that the prospects of death and finitude have on its protagonists. Stevens achieves authentic protagonists who accept the nihilating power of death in order to save themselves from any form of social, poetic, and philosophical closure. This is significant because Stevens conceives a creative potential that not only runs counter to the romantic nostalgia for a return to an innocent past, but also openly embraces the idea of finitude as the only way out of any logocentric and metaphysical forms of thinking. This study, therefore, aims to show how in Harmonium Stevens poetizes an endless creative power that sets upon reproducing the non-closure associated with nihilation and nothingness.