مطالب

This article investigates Eimear McBride's novel A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing in the light of Bernard Stiegler's concept of disorientation. As a technical development, disorientation manifests itself in the girl's non-syntactic language and the gradual evolving linguistic repertoire as she matures. The article argues that McBride's usage of the idiomatic language and stream of consciousness is part of the narrator's tertiary memory or epiphylogenetic memory. The young protagonist-narrator cannot reach a state of equilibrium between her developing consciousness as an Irish girl and her "technic" of writing herself as the epiphylogenetic memory, hence her disorientation. The technics in the Irish context can include not only the Irish English, but also the theological and political technics which engulf the subject to form her or him to their image. Technics is a technical term used by Bernard Stiegler as the horizon of human existence. Technics, often used as a singular noun, is juxtaposed with episteme in order to highlight the ignorance of Western philosophy about the significant role it plays in the human evolution and consciousness.    

Based on David Gauntlett’s Web 2.0 approach of media audiences, this article argues that while Islamophobic discourses may be hegemonic in the British media in general, and the online media in particular, counter-Islamophobic ones have real potentials to subvert the anti-Muslims hegemony in contemporary Britain. Online media users, both as producers and consumers of mass-mediated representations, are empowered to blur the boundaries between the real and the virtual spaces in the construction of different conceptions of their own identities as well as of those of the others. To this end, comparatively, the comments of the users of two YouTube videos are analyzed and critically appraised to identify how they prosumed the different representations of Muslim communities of/in Britain. It is suggested that YouTube users contribute, from their respective subject positions, to the construction of diverse conceptualizations of their own identities and those of others as well. Their prosumed representations both entrench and defy a hierarchy of Islamophobic and Islamophallic images of Islam and Muslims in contemporary multicultural Britain.

The present quasi-experimental study attempts to investigate the effectiveness of a context-sensitive framework of writing on the improvement of Iranian EFL students' writing performance. To this aim, sixty sophomores majoring in English language translation from two intact classes at Islamic Azad University of Tonekabon, Iran participated in this study. An Oxford Quick Placement Test was administered to assess the participants' degree of homogeneity and classify them in intermediate (receiving 28-36 out of 60) and upper-intermediate (receiving 37-44 out of 60) groups. Then, each group was randomly assigned into experimental and control groups. A pretest of writing was administered to all participants. The experimental groups practiced essay writing according to the context-sensitive framework. After 12 sessions, all participants took part in the post test. Paired sample t-tests and independent sample t-tests were run to examine whether there were statistically significant differences between the means of the groups. The results revealed that both the intermediate and upper- intermediate experimental groups significantly outperformed the control groups stating that the context-sensitive framework was effective to improve the students' writing performance. However, there was no significant difference between the posttest scores of intermediate and upper-intermediate experimental groups. It means that implementation of context-sensitive framework was equally effective in both experimental groups. The findings supported the use of a context-sensitive framework for promoting writing ability of Iranian EFL learners. The study has implications for writing teachers, practitioners, and learners.