scholarly journals Religious Belief and Diaspora in Coetzee’s Youth and Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 1457-1466
Author(s):  
Ala’ Aldojan ◽  
Yousef Awad
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
South African ◽  
Host Country ◽  
Identity Crisis ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Health It ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
The Road ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
Diaspora Politics

This study focuses on the role that faith plays in immigrants’ lives in the South African novelist John Maxwell Coetzee’s Youth (2002) and the Arab British author Robin Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus (2008). Specifically, the study analyzes and scrutinizes the faith (lessness)-informed attitudes of the two protagonists toward the various challenges they encounter as diasporic subjects in a society that instills alienation and displacement. Each protagonist goes through an identity crisis triggered by his inability to reach his objectives and goals as Coetzee’s John fails to be the poet he has aspired to be and Sami finds it hard to finish a PhD on Arabic poetry that his late father has encouraged him to pursue. While faith helps Yassin-Kassab’s protagonist to eventually overcome the challenges he faces, faithlessness in Coetzee’s novel deepens the protagonist’s sense of alienation and dislocation as the novel ends on a gloomy note. The study adopts an approach of textual analysis and comparison between the two novels. It also touches upon other fields including religion, history, identity, culture, diaspora, politics, and mental health. It examines the protagonists’ cultural, national, and religious identities based on settling in diasporic communities in relation to the historical backgrounds and the socio-cultural conditions in the homeland and the host country.

Teaching Jack Kerouac in a Decolonizing South African University

2021 ◽  
pp. 269-278
Author(s):  
Eric Strand
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
White Male ◽  
Jack Kerouac ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Student Newspaper ◽  
Reader Responses ◽  
The Road ◽  
On The Road ◽  
University Of Cape Town ◽  
The University

Eric Strand addresses his experiences as a white, male American professor teaching Jack Kerouac’s On the Road at the University of Cape Town in South Africa during the Rhodes Must Fall student movement, c 2015. Integrating excerpts from student essays in his classes and from the univeristy’s student newspaper, the essay reveals complex racial, gender, and class-based interpretations of the novel, all advising against narrow and stereotypic predications of reader responses to the novel.

scholarly journals PERPETUAL STRIFE TO REARTICULATE DISCOURSE, MEANING, AND IDENTITY IN GORDIMER’S JULY’S PEOPLE: A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

2018 ◽  
pp. 125-148
Author(s):  
HHanieh MehrMotlagh ◽  
Maryam Soltan Beyad
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
South African ◽  
Identity Crisis ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Discursive Practices ◽  
African Society ◽  
The South ◽  
Family Structures ◽  
South African Society

Specific utilizations of language have the capacity to fabricate power positions for individuals or to locate them in peripheral positions. It is through on-going discursive practices that different discourses strive to foreground themselves and marginalize antagonistic discourses. As the process perpetuates, each discourse configures a particular identity and objectivity the sustainability of which depends on constant rearticulations of major concepts and preserving the previously settled meanings in a corresponding discourse. Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People (1981) recounts the story of characters who are obliged to cope with identity crisis and uncertainty induced out of an envisioned end of apartheid. Pertaining to Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theories, the present study reveals that the characters’ identities are shaped with regard to the sub-discourses of white, black, consumerism, materialism, patriarchy, and subjugated women. Discovering the orders of discourses in the novel renders that the discursive practices of the characters, the dichotomies in their identities, and the clashes in family structures are rooted in the struggles between major discourses of white and black, traditional and modern, as well as indigenous and foreign which have created divisions in the South African society. Finally, this study sheds light on understanding how the relations among discursive practices in a fictional text are associated with the conflicts among major discourses in the society.

The Road to Reading for South African Learners

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maike Malda ◽  
Carisma Nel ◽  
Fons van de Vijver
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
The Road

scholarly journals Addressing the mental health needs of adolescents in South African communities: a protocol for a feasibility randomized controlled trial

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Sorsdahl ◽  
C. van der Westhuizen ◽  
M. Neuman ◽  
H. A. Weiss ◽  
B. Myers
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
At Risk ◽  
South African ◽  
Mental Health Problems ◽  
Age Of Onset ◽  
Common Mental Disorders ◽  
Controlled Trial ◽  
Feasibility Trial ◽  
Counselling Intervention ◽  
Health Counselling

Abstract Background Like many low- and middle-income countries, almost half of the proportion of the South African population is under the age of 25. Given the peak age of onset for most mental health problems is in adolescence, it is vital that adolescents have access to mental health counselling. There are several initiatives to increase access to mental health counselling in South Africa, primarily through the integration of counselling for common mental disorders (CMD) into primary health care services, but adolescents (15–18 years of age) generally do not utilize these services. To address this gap, we will undertake a study to explore the feasibility of conducting a trial of the effectiveness of a community-based mental health counselling intervention for adolescents at-risk for a CMD. Methods The study is a feasibility trial of the ASPIRE intervention, a four-session blended multi-component counselling intervention adapted for South African adolescents at risk for depression and alcohol use disorders. We will enrol 100 adolescents from community settings and randomly assign them to the ASPIRE intervention or a comparison condition. Feasibility measures, such as rates of recruitment, consent to participate in the trial and retention, will be calculated. Qualitative interviews with participants and counsellors will explore the acceptability of the intervention. The primary outcomes for a subsequent trial would be reductions in symptoms of depression and days of heavy drinking which will be measured at baseline, 6 weeks, and 3 months post-randomization. Discussion This feasibility trial using a mixed-methods design will allow us to determine whether we can move forward to a larger effectiveness trial of the ASPIRE intervention. Trial registration The trial is registered with the Pan African Clinical Trials Registry (PACTR20200352214510). Registered 28 February 2020—retrospectively registered, https://pactr.samrc.ac.za/TrialDisplay.aspx?TrialID=9795

‘Whatever form you spoke of you were right’: Multivalence and ambiguous address in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

2011 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 333-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Warde
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Second Person ◽  
The Road ◽  
Person Pronoun ◽  
Ontological Uncertainty

This article explores the workings of second-person pronoun forms in Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 post-apocalyptic novel The Road. More particularly, the analysis focuses on examples of ‘doubly deictic you’ (Herman, 2002), and demonstrates how the novel exploits the uncertain deictic, referential and address functions of this particular pronoun form to develop what I term a ‘post-apocalyptic poetics’, through which it attempts to explore – and enact – the spatial and temporal dislocations that ensue from the fictional apocalypse. The article also demonstrates how the novel’s indeterminate use of narrative you creates profound hermeneutical (and often ontological) uncertainty for readers, who must often suspend any attempt to fix the positions from and to which the story is addressed. McCarthy’s opaque use of the terms you and your throughout the novel creates profound polyphony and multivalence by preventing readers from clearly distinguishing the discourse and perspectives of protagonists from those of the narration, and by thus impelling readers to develop several interpretations of key passages, all of which must be sustained simultaneously. Finally, the analysis explores how the (potential) apostrophic effects associated with doubly deictic you serve to immerse readers in the horrors of the post-apocalyptic world, thus increasing the novel’s ecocritical import.

scholarly journals A preliminary survey on the religious profile of Brazilian psychiatrists and their approach to patients' religiosity in clinical practice

BJPsych Open ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (6) ◽  
pp. 346-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Cecilia Menegatti-Chequini ◽  
Juliane P.B. Gonçalves ◽  
Frederico C. Leão ◽  
Mario F. P. Peres ◽  
Homero Vallada
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Clinical Practice ◽  
Religious Affiliation ◽  
Preliminary Survey ◽  
Health It ◽  
Cross Sectional Survey ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Spirituality Training

BackgroundAlthough there is evidence of a relationship between religion/ spirituality and mental health, it remains unclear how Brazilian psychiatrists deal with the religion/spirituality of their patients.AimsTo explore whether Brazilian psychiatrists enquire about religion/spirituality in their practice and whether their own beliefs influence their work.MethodFour hundred and eighty-four Brazilian psychiatrists completed a cross-sectional survey on religion/spirituality and clinical practice.ResultsMost psychiatrists had a religious affiliation (67.4%) but more than half of the 484 participants (55.5%) did not usually enquire about patients' religion/spirituality. The most common reasons for not assessing patients' religion/spirituality were ‘being afraid of exceeding the role of a doctor’ (30.2%) and ‘lack of training’ (22.3%).ConclusionsVery religious/spiritual psychiatrists were the most likely to ask about their patients' religion/spirituality. Training in how to deal with a patient's religiosity might help psychiatrists to develop better patient rapport and may contribute to the patient's quicker recovery.

Violence by any other name: constructing immigration crises, the threat of the sick refugee and rationalising immigration detention through moral panic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah A. Adjekum ◽  
Ameil J. Joseph
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Health It ◽  
Immigration Detention ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Health Aid ◽  
Political Conditions

This article is concerned with the employment of pathologising discourses of mental health and trauma by the mainstream media as they pertain to the treatment of migrants in detention in Canada. Using critical discourse analysis, this research contrasts mainstream media coverage of four major publications on immigration detention. It explores the media’s role in the (re)creation of refugee discourse, and as a purveyor of racial ideology, which problematises people of colour and demands state intervention in the form of mental health aid. The resulting discourse pathologises the refugee identity and simultaneously obscures the socio-political conditions and violence that necessitates their departure from their home countries. As refugee discourse is infused with biomedical understandings of mental health, it also legitimises the nation state’s practice of coercive social control for these populations through detention.

Environmental Surveillance for Noroviruses in Selected South African Wastewaters 2015–2016: Emergence of the Novel GII.17

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. V. Mabasa ◽  
K. D. Meno ◽  
M. B. Taylor ◽  
Janet Mans
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Environmental Surveillance
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