scholarly journals Conciliatory Amalgamation

Prism ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 409-430
Author(s):  
E. K. Tan

Abstract Published in 2015, Padi Guli's A Hundred Years of Bloodline tells the story of Fatima, a Uyghur woman's journey to unpack her family history while struggling to understand the status of ethnic minorities in the larger fabric of multiethnic China. The novel concludes with a positive message calling for ethnic integration. This adoption of a state-sanctioned concept of ethnic integration is what this article calls conciliatory amalgamation; it privileges a rhetoric of multiethnicism that centers on national unity and economic progress. This article reads the novel against the PRC's ethnic minority policy to examine the implications of the protagonist's cultural, linguistic, and geopolitical border-crossing as she comes to terms with ethnic amalgamation as a necessary mode of survival. This allows the novel to be read as a symptom of Padi Guli's status as a Sinophone Uyghur writer who establishes herself within the dominant tradition of Chinese literature. As one of the few prominent Sinophone Uyghur writers, she inevitably becomes a token that sustains the rhetoric of Chinese literature as inclusive and diverse. Along this line of thought, the article argues that Padi Guli's status as a writer mirrors that of her protagonist as they both adopt a conciliatory attitude toward amalgamation.

2016 ◽  
Vol 55 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Teri Szűcs

The mother is a central figure in the works of Szilárd Borbély, and she usually appears as Mater Dolorosa, the sorrowful mother. The novel Nincstelenek is exceptional in this respect, because it also presents her as the resisting mother. The novel focuses on the aggressive attribution of identities, the exclusion of those who are considered Jewish – and thus: as the Other – from the community. This process stretches over several generations. The only character in the novel whose attitude towards this violent attribution of inferior identity consciously changes is the mother. While her husband and her children are stigmatized by blood lineage, in the case of the mother Jewishness is a choice. Thus she becomes able to understand the events that befall her family, their exclusion, their poverty. She offers this insight to her husband at the end of the novel, and he finally accepts the status of the Jew, and participates in the Shabbat ritual. The peculiar practice of the mother is an attempt to grasp agency.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 142-149
Author(s):  
Murugesan M ◽  
Dr. A. K. Muthusamy

The concept ‘the Other’is a literary theory, which defines one’s identity among others. It explains the state of a person who is neglected or subordinated and displays how one feels as an alien by gender, caste, religion, culture, appearance, geography, ideology and so on. Doris Lessing’s novels are mostly concerned with human race and criticize the patriarchal society, where female does not get the recognition she is due. Instead of taking care of women, appreciating their talents and providing them freedom of expression and movement, the society makes them feel ‘the Other’. Lessing has crafted the novel, The Summer Before the Dark as to expose the fate of women, who are always submissive and unassertive to their husbands and children, thereby becoming insignificant to the society. This paper examines the status of Kate Brown in her family and in the society, where she is neglected and deprecated by her ungrateful husband and children by the frame of ‘The Other’/ ‘Otherness’.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Yunyi Xia ◽  
Yuemin Wang

This paper adopts a cognitive perspective in the analysis of various image schemas in the novel A Dream of Red Mansions, one of the most influential classical masterpieces in Chinese literature. Two poems from the novel are interpreted from the perspective of link schema, container schema, up-down schema, part-whole schema, and source-path-goal schema, to reveal the personalities, values and life philosophies of the two female protagonists. The contrast between the pessimism and melancholy of Daiyu and the optimism and aspiration of Baochai demonstrates the author’s understanding of that time and society, especially the status and fate of females. The analysis illustrates that image schemas, which involves bodily experience and metaphorical projection from concrete to abstract domains, can surpass language boundaries, reveal emotions and themes, and shed light on cross-cultural studies of literature.


Jurnal KATA ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 336
Author(s):  
Yulia Pebriani

<em>Local culture is very diverse Indonesia became an honor and challenge to maintain and inherited to the next generation. Local Indonesian culture is very proud because it has a very varied diversity and unique. As time, lead to changes in lifestyle a more modern society. As a result, people will prefer the new culture that may be considered more practical than the local culture. Views on kinship, treasures, and wander in the novel Tenggelamnya Kapal Van Der Wijck Hamka works and novels Bulan Susut works Ismet Fanany changes and cultural shifts. Kinship, treasures, and wander in the novel Sinking Ship Van Der Wijck Hamka's work is described explicitly, whereas kinship, treasures, and wander in the novel Month Losses Ismet work Fanany described implicitly. Changes in people's lives has implications for social Minangkabau culture in Minangkabau society. A leadership that is both functional mamak transformed into symbolic leadership. Mamak originally as straps tribesmen, has changed the status and intrinsic meaning.</em>


Author(s):  
Charles Brockden Brown

One of the earliest American novels, Wieland (1798) is a thrilling tale of suspense and intrigue set in rural Pennyslvania in the 1760s. Based on an actual case of a New York farmer who murdered his family, the novel employs Gothic devices and sensational elements such as spontaneous combustion, ventriloquism, and religious fanaticism. The plot turns on the charming but diabolical intruder Carwin, who exercises his power over the narrator, Clara Wieland, and her family, destroying the order and authority of the small community in which they live. Underlying the mystery and horror, however, is a profound examination of the human mind's capacity for rational judgement. The text also explores some of the most important issues vital to the survival of democracy in the new American republic. Brown further considers power and manipulation in his unfinished sequel, Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, which traces Carwin's career as a disciple of the utopist Ludloe.


PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (3) ◽  
pp. 718-722 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Fitzpatrick

I was invited by the MLA committee on the status of graduate students in the profession to speak at a convention workshop entitled “Keywords for a Digital Profession.” My keyword was obsolescence, a catchall term for a multiplicity of conditions; there are material obsolescences, institutional obsolescences, and purely theoretical obsolescences, each type demanding a different response. I spent years pondering theoretical obsolescence while writing The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television. The book argues, in part, that claims about the obsolescence of cultural forms often say more about those doing the claiming than they do about the objects of the claims. Neither the novel in particular nor the book more broadly nor print in general is dead, and agonized announcements of the death of such technologies and genres often serve to re-create an elite cadre of cultural producers and consumers, ostensibly operating on the margins of contemporary culture and profiting from their claims of marginality by creating a sense that their own values, once mainstream and now decaying, must be protected. Two oft-cited reports of the National Endowment for the Arts, Reading at Risk (2004) and To Read or Not to Read (2007), come to mind; like numerous other expressions of anxiety about the supposed decline of reading, each rhetorically creates a cultural wildlife preserve in which the apparently obsolete can flourish (United States). These texts suggest that obsolescence is, in this case at least, less a material state than a political project.


2021 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-32
Author(s):  
Rahaf Aldoughli

This article analyzes the role of Sunni Islam in speeches given to religious scholars by Syrian president Bashar al-Asad in 2014 and 2017. I discuss how religion was used in these speeches as a security tool to consolidate authority, legitimize the Ba'thist regime, and marginalize political dissidents. I specifically highlight the emphasis Asad placed on convincing government-recognized 'ulama to support state security measures and to the novel links he constructed between Islam and national unity.


2003 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 591-632 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Mackey

Working with young readers, aged 10 to 14, as they responded to narrative texts in a variety of media (Mackey, 2002), I observed a recurring phenomenon: In a variety of ways they repeatedly stepped in and out of the fictional universe of their different stories. Some examples will perhaps give the flavor of this experience: Two 14-year-old girls playing Starship Titanic alternate between lively engagement in the narrative world of the story and stepping outside the fiction to console themselves, “Oh well, if we die, we can just start again.” A 10-year-old girl speaks of alternating between the novel and the computer game of My Teacher is an Alien, using the novel as a source of game-playing repertoire. Two 10-year-old boys look at the DVD of the film Contact, learning how the special effects of an explosion scene were composed, and commenting on how their new awareness of scene construction would affect how they view the film in the future. As I recorded and analyzed numerous examples of such behaviors, I was struck by a common element of interpretive activity on the boundaries of the fictional universe. Sensitized to the topic, I began to notice, and then to collect, examples of contemporary texts that foster various forms of such border crossing, in and out of the diegesis, the framework of events as narrated in the text. This article explores how an awareness of this aspect of contemporary texts may enhance our understanding of interpretive processes and expand what happens in literature classes.


2021 ◽  
Vol 85 ◽  
pp. 227-244
Author(s):  
María Sandra Peña-Cervel ◽  
Andreea Rosca

This paper provides evidence of the fruitfulness of combining analytical categories from Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis for the analysis of complex literary characterizations. It does so through a detailed study of the “tributes”, i.e. the randomly selected children who have to fight to death in a nationally televised show, in The Hunger Games. The study proves the effectiveness of such categories to provide an analytically accurate picture of the dystopian world depicted in the novel, which is revealed to include a paradoxical element of hope. The type of dehumanization that characterizes the dystopian society of Panem is portrayed through an internally consistent set of ontological metaphors which project negative aspects of lower forms of existence onto people. This selection of metaphors promotes a biased perspective on the poor inhabitants of Panem, while legitimizing the social inequalities the wealthy Capitol works hard to immortalize. However, Katniss undergoes a metamorphosis through her discovery of her own identity, which hints at an emerging female empowerment. This transformation, together with her identification with the Mockingjay, a supernatural being that voices her beliefs and emotions, contributes to disrupting the status quo imposed by the almighty Gamemakers and to purveying a message of optimism.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 1197-1202
Author(s):  
Mohammed Abdullah Abduldaim Hizabr Alhusami

The aim of this paper is to investigate the issue of intertextuality in the novel Alfirdaws Alyabab (The Waste Paradise) by the female Saudi novelist and short story writer Laila al-Juhani. Intertextuality is a rhetoric and literary technique defined as a textual reference deliberate or subtle to some other texts with a view of drawing more significance to the core text; and hence it is employed by an author to communicate and discuss ideas in a critical style. The narrative structure of Alfirdaws Alyabab (The Waste Paradise) showcases references of religious, literary, historical, and folkloric intertextuality. In analyzing these references, the study follows the intertextual approach. In her novel The Waste Paradise, Laila al-Juhani portrays the suffering of Saudi women who are less tormented by social marginalization than by an inner conflict between openness to Western culture and conformity to cultural heritage. Intertextuality relates to words, texts, or discourses among each other. Moreover, the intertextual relations are subject to reader’s response to the text. The relation of one text with other texts or contexts never reduces the prestige of writing. Therefore, this study, does not diminish the status of the writer or the text; rather, it is in itself a kind of literary creativity. Finally, this paper aims to introduce Saudi writers in general and the female writers in particular to the world literature.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document