scholarly journals Death and Woman: Comparing the Meaning of the Deaths of the Female Main Characters in the Works of Toni Morrison and Alice Munro

Lexicon ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Achmad Munjid

This paper seeks to explore the meaning of death in two important works by two female Noble Prize winning authors, Toni Morrison and Alice Munro. Hagin’s (2010) theory of role of death in storyline is used to analyze the works. The three deaths found in the story: initial death, intermediary death and story-terminating death all have significant meaningful relation to the past and the future. They have epistemological value of revealing and/or exposing the truth from the past. Death is used as technical instrument to reveal the truth, to transform ignorance into knowledge, dishonesty into accountability, to purify the past from falsehood and lies. Death also inserts its demand in the story by removing obstacle or giving opportunity for the living to set up new goal. The demand of the dead is possible since the deceased is “remembered” by the “cult” who may follow or manipulate their legacy. The two authors articulate “feminist voice” through the struggle of the main female characters. Toni Morrison articulates the dehumanizing consequence of racism, whereas Alice Munro voices her concern on the contradictory nature of orderly neat appearance of the modern people versus scandalous dark secret beneath the surface.Keywords: dehumanization, feminist voice, initial death, intermediary death, story-terminating death, racism.

2020 ◽  
pp. 109-132
Author(s):  
David Henig

This chapter examines the role of prayer (dova) in Muslim life. The act of prayer belongs to the villagers’ repertoires of vital exchange whereby blessing, prosperity, and vitality are accessed, and relations between life and the afterlife, and between the living, the dead, and the divine are maintained and cultivated. Prayer is thus crucial in villagers’ temporal orientations toward the past, present, and the future. The chapter focuses on two major forms of prayer. First, it explores how prayer is deployed to address matters here and now, and/or prospectively by introducing examples of Islamic healing, and dream visions and divination. Second, it analyzes how acts of prayer intersect with and shape the ethics of memory. It shows how the idiom of dova provides village Muslims with a vocabulary with which to engage with the critical events of the past and becomes a mode of historical experience. Specifically, it focuses on how prayer is performed by the living for the souls of the dead, including war martyrs from the 1992-95 war, as well as from the Ottoman era.


2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 17-39
Author(s):  
Trond Lundemo

The archive is not a place for the undifferentiated storage of the past: the political role of the archive is to select what to include as the past and what to discard, in order to regulate the future. These selections are prescribed by laws and regulations, but they are also determined by the archival techniques available for inscription, storage, indexing and access. The author analyses the technological selections of two ages of the archive. The first age is that of the intermedial archive emerging after the end of the text archive monopoly, with the gramophone, photograph and, in particular, film. The gaps and contradictions resulting from this configuration of media are investigated through a discussion of the media set-up of Albert Kahn’s Les archives de la planète (1908-1931). The second age is that of the digital archives, and the digitization of analogue material, again with Les archives de la planète as an example. Instead of understanding these ages of archival technologies as autonomous and separate, the author argues that they should be approached as “superimposed” archival regimes in order to tease out the current interrelations between analogue and digital archives.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pham Van Loi

Vietnam - Laos has more than 2,000 km of common national borders. The coherent relationship between the two nations and the inhabitants of the two countries has been formed and fostered in history and especially developed over the past 7 decades. The Thai ethnic group in Vietnam has over one million people, residing permanently, concentrated in the Northwest region, the region consists of 8 provinces, of which 4 provinces have the Vietnam-Laos border crossing. This paper focuses on clarifying the practical basis for the Thai people to play a role in the traditional Vietnam-Laos friendship and propose some solutions to promote the role of Thai in maintaining, developing the traditional friendship between Vietnam and Laos, now and in the future.


2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-71
Author(s):  
Lorna Hill

Abstract This study will explore the role of female authors in contemporary Scottish crime fiction. Over the past thirty years, women writers have overhauled the traditionally male dominated genre of crime fiction by writing about strong female characters who drive the plot and solve the crimes. Authors including Val McDermid, Denise Mina and Lin Anderson are just a few of the women who have challenged the expectation of gender and genre. By setting their novels in contemporary society they reflect a range of social and political issues through the lens of a female protagonist. By closely examining the female characters, both journalists, in Val McDermid’s Lindsay Gordon series and Denise Mina’s Paddy Meehan series, I wish to explore the issue of gender through these writers’ perspectives. This essay documents the influence of these writers on my own practice-based research which involves writing a crime novel set in a post referendum Scotland. I examine a progressive and contemporary Scottish society, where women hold many senior positions in public life, and investigate whether this has an effect on the outcome of crimes. Through this narrative, my main character will focus on the current and largely hidden crimes of human trafficking and domestic abuse. By doing this I examine the ways in which the modern crime novel has evolved to cross genre boundaries. In addition to focusing on a crime, the victims and witnesses, today’s crime novels are tackling social issues to reflect society’s changing attitudes and values.


2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-57
Author(s):  
Jamie McKeown

This article reports the findings from a study of discursive representations of the future role of technology in the work of the US National Intelligence Council (NIC). Specifically, it investigates the interplay of ‘techno-optimism’ (a form of ideological bias) and propositional certainty in the NIC’s ‘Future Global Trends Reports’. In doing so, it answers the following questions: To what extent was techno-optimism present in the discourse? What level of propositional certainty was expressed in the discourse? How did the discourse deal with the inherent uncertainty of the future? Overall, the discourse was pronouncedly techno-optimist in its stance towards the future role of technology: high-technological solutions were portrayed as solving a host of problems, despite the readily available presence of low-technology or no-technology solutions. In all, 75.1% of the representations were presented as future categorical certainties, meaning the future was predominantly presented as a known and closed inevitability. The discourse dealt with the inherent uncertainty of the subject matter, that is, the future, by projecting the past and present into the future. This was particularly the case in relation to the idea of technological military dominance as a guarantee of global peace, and the role of technology as an inevitable force free from societal censorship.


2011 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 671-685 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Drayton

The contemporary historian, as she or he speaks to the public about the origins and meanings of the present, has important ethical responsibilities. ‘Imperial’ historians, in particular, shape how politicians and the public imagine the future of the world. This article examines how British imperial history, as it emerged as an academic subject since about 1900, often lent ideological support to imperialism, while more generally it suppressed or avoided the role of violence and terror in the making and keeping of the Empire. It suggests that after 2001, and during the Iraq War, in particular, a new Whig historiography sought to retail a flattering narrative of the British Empire’s past, and concludes with a call for a post-patriotic imperial history which is sceptical of power and speaks for those on the underside of global processes.


2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
George Kouvaros

In his final unfinished book on the writing of history, Siegfried Kracauer wonders about his increasing susceptibility to ‘the speechless plea of the dead’. ‘[T]he older one grows, the more he is bound to realize that his future is the future of the past—history.’ For the children of migrants, the question of how to speak well of the dead is distinguished by complex feelings of attachment and rejection, identification and denial that are expressed in a range of everyday interactions. ‘The Old Greeks’ examines the part played by photographic media in this process of memorialisation. It elaborates a series of propositions about the value of photographic media that are tested through a consideration of the events that surrounded the author’s first years in Australia.


2011 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 3-8
Author(s):  
Cong Zhao ◽  
Wei Guo

To achieve the goal that anybody could communicate with anyone at anytime in anyplace and in anyway, many technologies, such as GSM、CDMA、WCDMA、CDMA2000、TD-SCDMA、802.11a/b/g and so on, come true in the past years. And now, many B3G or 4G technologies are being studied. It is well-known that the future network would be heterogeneous networks. It is studied in this paper the mobility management of wireless heterogeneous network and a reversing paging process of callee is proposed which integrates paging and handoff. In the process when the caller pages the callee choosing its best suited network on one end, the callee chooses its own best network to begin a reversing paging process to set up the communication. The simulation tells that the proposed process has better performances in the call delay, the call succeeding rate and the wireless signal cost than that of the existing process in which it sets up the call first and then does vertical handoff independently.


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