مطالب

Call of Duty is a popular first-person shooter (FPS) game. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2007) was the first game in the franchise which did not focus on the World Wars’ history. It was also the first Call of Duty which had a continuous interactive digital narrative (IDN). This article attempts to take a comparative approach to the game. As a cultural product, the game is susceptible to postcolonial and orientalist discourses. This article attempts to apply Edward Said’s theories to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare in order to prove that the game’s IDN was shaped by postcolonialism and orientalism. The game functioned as a cultural medium which disseminated orientalist discourses amongst its player base. As such, this article tries to not only shed light upon a lesser-known aspect of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare but also to demonstrate that computer games are not exempt from external cultural forces.

J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello is about animal rights and animal Ethics. In this novel, an aging novelist gives a series of lectures about animals and their moral status. Elizabeth Costello takes issue with the tradition of Western philosophical thought which is based on the binary opposition between reason and emotion. In Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk’s Janina Duszejko is also an elderly woman haunted by the horror of what human beings do to animals. The present interdisciplinary study -a library-based qualitative research- reviews the similarities between these two characters and aims to show that Duszejko could be seen as Costello’s alter ego. It surveys the writers’ choice of sentience over reason, the way the texts have undermined the arguments of their major characters, and the similarities between animals and prisoners of concentration camps. Findings show that Coetzee and Tokarczuk do not uphold the Western tradition that divides experience into reason/emotion, masculine/ feminine, justice/ love, and public/ private. In both novels, the writers avoid binary oppositions and through Costello and Duszejko ask the readers/audiences to open their hearts and become one with their victims.

The discovery of the motives behind human actions turned into a controversial issue among philosophers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While supporters of libertarianism maintained that human actions stemmed from an inner will, the Necessitarians, on the other hand, believed human actions were an effect of previous external causes. David Hume, however, came up with a middle-way solution for this dispute which he named his Reconciling Project. This comparative study aims to discover the concept of the Reconciling Project in the works of Alexander Pope. To achieve this the article would elaborate upon Hume’s thoughts on the theme mentioned above expressed in the eighth chapter of his book An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding entitled Of Liberty and Necessity. It would trace it to the works of Pope by analysing Pope’s views in Essay on Man and his notion of The Ruling Passion. It would be argued and concluded through a comparative method that Hume’s thoughts had found their way into the works of Pope, and both thinkers found human instincts as the real motive behind human actions. Through an intertextual analysis, it would also be concluded that this was either the direct effect of Hume's thoughts on Pope or that both figures were influenced by the same intellectual currents of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment, and secularisation.

There have been major changes in African contemporary literature. It depicts the decentralized realities that Africans experience in the increasingly interconnected world going beyond singular narratives. The devolution of ethnic cultures and the rise of a generation struggling with fragmented identities are reflected in the emergence of new African voices both within and outside of the continent. One of the best examples of this trend is the novel Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Adichie crafts a story that skillfully combines disparate cultural elements—Nigerian and American—while providing a nuanced examination of self-identity and the feeling of being other through the journey of Ifemelu and Obinze. This article centers on Adichie’s use of the idea of decentralized realities to illustrate the challenges faced by African migrants who have to reassess who they are in the face of societies that frequently marginalize their cultures. Americanah draws attention to the intricacy of cross-cultural encounters as well as the ongoing discussions and conflicts surrounding identity and belonging. In a world where borders—both physical and cultural—are always changing, the characters grapple with the idea of where they truly belong. The article explores how Adichie illustrates the psychological and emotional costs of navigating a world that does not always acknowledge their multiple identities by looking at their individual journeys. In the end, Adichie’s Americanah explores the complex realities of the diaspora in a profound way as a representative work of contemporary African literature. The book promotes empathy and a greater comprehension of the complexity of individuals torn between cultures by making the reader confront preconceived ideas about identity and belonging.