The fall of national identity in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

This article examines Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart within a postcolonial discourse. While the majority of postcolonial critiques argue over indigenous identity, this study explores the deterioration of national identity in Things Fall Apart. Such deterioration is brought about by the spiritual and tentative defeat inherent in the failure of the protagonist, Okonkwo, to face the colonial whites. Ultimately, the protagonist's failure leads to a tragic death. In the novel's context, Achebe exhorts the fall of national identity and its pathetic aftermath. The deterioration in national identity symbolically correlates to the protagonist's personal irresolute experience which is at first physically powerful but in the end spiritually weak. The focus of this article is a textual analysis of Achebe's Things Fall Apart, applying postcolonial theoretical concepts, especially aboriginality, hegemony, subaltern and identity. These concepts facilitate a smouldering conceptualisation of national identity as it is exterminated in the novel. Thus, the these terms will be cited mainly with reference to Bill Ashcroft, Gayatri Spivak, and Laura Chrisman's postcolonial critiques

The paradox of the narrative event in John Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse"

This article explores, via a postmodern approach, how Barth dealt with the intricate relationship between postmodern fiction and its modern counterpart by constructing a subjective narrative event in his novella, "Lost in the Funhouse". It examines the transparent and correspondent representation of the narrative event as a category of Barthian critique of modern literary exhaustion, and how Barth appropriates remedial recycling for fictional conventions. This apocalyptic homogeneous narrative device involves a constant reciprocal examination of contemporary fiction and its possible future. It is carried out through mutual subversion and, ultimately, challenges the notion of inherited literary forms and their utilisation over time. As such, the whole narrative event is achieved via a self-reflexive trajectory and multifarious textual solipsism

Postmodern narrative in Kurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse-Five

This article explores Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) as a postmodern critique of modern literary modes. As a novel recapitulating within itself a postmodern relative perspective of reality, it elucidates one aspect of postmodernism, that of literary experimentation. Vonnegut experiments with the narrator,setting and characters of the novel to provide a fictional critique of the literary exhaustion prevailing in modern literary modes. Experimentation is thus remedial replenishment for such exhaustion through authorial metafictional intrusion into the text. Accordingly, the article uses Patricia Waugh, Gérard Genette and Mikhail Bakhtin’s narrative theory to examine the experimental technique in the novel. What makes the majority of metafictional style unique is not only its presence in the novel, but also its conflated depiction of the American individual’s suffering after the Second World War.For this later style, the self-justifying manner in the novel extrapolates textual dialogic relations to accentuate the author’s critical voice. Such voice originates in the main narrative point of view in the text and is known as focalization

Pre-colonial residuals in Toni Morrison's Recitatif and Alice Walker's Everyday Use

This article examines Toni Morrison's Recitatif and Alice Walker's Everyday Use as post-colonial texts. Morrison's short story moves beyond the postcolonial aftermath to maintain pre-colonial cultural conventions. The discussion begins with how Recitatif is considered within the field of postcolonial studies, demonstrating such postcolonial concepts as diaspora, nativism and chromatism. The study also focuses on Alice Walker's short story Everyday Use, and discusses how various forms of Filiation/Affiliation and Synergy contribute to the conventions of precolonial culture. Everyday Use aims precisely at ethical propensity within colonial circumference. Thus, Walkerself-consciously illustrates the level of its pre-colonial features, which expose the colonisation dispersal of identity

Women Individuality: A Critique of Patriarchal Society in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

This paper examines the sense of women individuality as a critique of patriarch society in in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. As a matter of fact, Woolf is considered one of the most influential writers in English literature in the twentieth century and even before. Her writings reflect the modern literary realism in all its features. She writes in fictional modes that suggests departure from the previous literary fashion. In so doing, she provides experimental literary strategies which could be imitated by writers who follow her. Woolf tried her hands to write in new experimental forms to offer new insights into the literary modernism. At this point, she represents an outstanding figure in modernism. The aim if this study, therefore is to explore the realistic depiction of Woolf’s appropriation of women’s ordeals as an indictment of the contemporary patriarchal social attitudes awards women.

Caribbean Displacement and the Question of Oppression and Cultural Changes of Post-colonialism in Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River

This article examines the conditions of the displaced individuals in Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River (1993). In essence, the displaced individuals undergo oppressive experience. They are forced to leave their homeland for other lands. The study is going to demonstrate how these displaced minorities cope with their conditional presence in the displacement lands. In the main, displacement involves the diasporic movement of the colonized people and their settlement in other lands which are not their own. The analysis will concentrate on the imperial practices exerted over the displaced individuals. As such, the study will apply a postcolonial methodological approach to explore the colonial relationship between the colonized individuals and their colonizers. The displaced individuals become prone to transformation in their new lands since they are negatively suppressed by the colonizers. In the course of the analysis, the focus will be on Phillips’s portrayal of the displaced individuals and their interactions with other characters whether the colonizer or other displaced individualities

Anthropomorphism as an Embodiment of Natural Gothic and Man in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

This essay examines anthropomorphism and gothic elements in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003). Atwood offers several textual clues regarding animals and birds that represent ideal environment. Moreover, she reinforces the narrative descriptions of such animals by polarizing other natural elements, like trees and bird. She constructs the decisive improvement of the literary characters’ lives. These character resort to natural places to elevate their peace of mind by spending time in tranquility among environmental circumferences since countryside helps them to live peacefully. Here, Atwood’s narrative appropriation of animals and birds essentially relates to the environmental capacity to make the characters relived and contended with nature desired by the characters. The study will apply the concept of anthropomorphism which encompasses the sense of gothic elements. Animals are one of the basic environmental components of the story’s natural milieus. Atwood appropriates the view of the Animals through inextricable natural elements, birds, water, forests, and woods. As for birds, they function as the equilibrium of the ecological integrity tackled in literary works. Thus, the study tries to reveal the vital significance of natural biodiversity; and its literary function lies in offering implied textual insights on biodiversity depicted in the novel.

Naguib Mahfouz’s Arabian Nights and Days: The Allegorical Sequel of The Arabian Nights

This article examines the influence of The Arabian Nights on Najib Mahfouz’s Arabian Nights and Days. The Arabian Nights provides an archetypal narrative structure which Mahfouz utilizes in his Arabian Nights and Days. The purpose of this study scrutinizes the reformulation of four narrative elements pertinent to The Arabian Nights, namely, plot, narrator, characters, and setting. These elements exemplify the allegorical depiction of political corruption in the Egyptian society. The study’s narrative scrutiny follows a textual analysis of the cyclical plot as used in The Arabian Nights. The narrator’s name and identity is similar to The Arabian Nights’ traditional narrator, but he will be studied in the light of modern Egyptian citizenship. A close reading of the characters’ dialogic voice will extricate the author’s implicit voice in the novel’s magical real context. This voice critiques the dominating political corruption transpiring in an allegorical setting which resembles the contemporary Egyptian society. The conceptual framework used in this study draws up Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogic novel; whereby the author expresses his/her monologic, or abstract ideology, through the novel’s dialogic voices

Selected Reviews on the Implementation of Multilingualism as a Social Practice Politeness’s Non-Verbal Strategies

This paper attempts to review some selected studies on multilingualism and politeness. It will be mainly a review of how multilingualism and politeness work together in revealing implicative nuances in various linguistic discourses. For this reason, the review will be divided into two inextricable parts. First, the use of multilingualism and an incarnation of social practice. That it serves as a way of facilitating the social interactions among people who speak different languages. Therefore, multilingualism will be reviewed and a social interactive communicative link among speakers of these languages. Second, it will highlight linguistic politeness as a non-verbal strategy. In this regard, the primary focus will be on the way by which politeness is used to ameliorate the abstract relationships among speakers. In this sense, politeness, as a non-verbal strategy, will be unraveled as a pragmatic practice pursued by interlocutors who use polite gestures to make their communicative interactive more meaningful and effective. Ultimately, these reviews will be supported by my synthesis of their arguments through accentuating my evaluation of their linguistic significance

The Thematic Complexity of Poverty, Relationships, Political Turmoil in Thailand, and Students’ Aspiration in Minfong Ho’s Rice Without Rain

The purpose of this essay is to explain the themes of poverty, relationships, political turmoil in Thailand, and students’ aspiration in Ho’s Rice Without Rain (1986). The essay focuses on the thematic aspects of the novel in order to demonstrate how it thematically reflects the contemporary national affairs, epically political upheavals and students’ aspiration. The discussion of poverty, relationships, political turmoil in Thailand, and students’ aspiration will be closely related to the way by which Ho perceives the economic deterioration of poor people; and how she offers viable alternatives throughout the narrative structure of the novel. These alternatives are the optimistic narrative events that convey the core of national prosperity by getting rid of political turmoil, and reinforcing students’ aspiration. In doing so, the essay attempts to prove how the themes of poverty, relationships, political turmoil in Thailand, and students’ aspiration could really contribute to the reconciliation of the past and current political unrest in Thailand. Thus. The study’s methodology is descriptive i.e., it sheds light on the narrative description of poverty, relationships, and politics approached in the course of the novel.