The Functions of Deictic Words in the Representation of Migrants’ Experiences in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013)

Imbizo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Okwudiri Anasiudu
Keyword(s):  
Collective Identity ◽  
Qualitative Methodology ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Transnational Migration ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
Social Events ◽  
Singular Form ◽  
African Migrant

Literature is one of the arenas of discourse where the meaning potential of language can be explored. Interestingly, literary language is more figurative than denotative. One of the functions of language in literary discourse is to represent reality. The reality literature represents varies, depending on the historical time and social events a writer focuses on. Some aspects of global reality captured in current literature include transnational migration, border crossing and how migrants negotiate their identities in new cultures and spaces. For the African writer, the foregoing is a source of inspiration for what has become known as the African migrant novel. Against this background, this paper explores the representation of migrant experiences with particular attention paid to the use of language. An aspect of language explored in this paper is the use of deictic words in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names and the deployment of deictic forms, such as pronouns, verbs, and adverbs in order to specify personal and collective identity, physical and psychological displacement and spatiotemporal referencing in the novel. M. A. K. Halliday’s and Roger Fowler’s functional linguistic models are adopted as a theoretical framework within a descriptive and qualitative methodology. This paper notes that the recurrent use of the first-person pronoun in singular form (I) foregrounds the text as a Bildungsroman. It also underscores the process of self-evolution of Darling, the protagonist, from an a priori subject to a self-conscious a posteriori subject. The paper shows that deictic words as deployed in the novel enabled Bulawayo, the author, to create distinct narrative voices, from a personal voice to a collective voice. A guiding assumption of this paper is that it is not enough to say that a narrative has a first, second, or third person narrative speaking voice without pointing to the text to show how it is realised with data drawn from the text. It is on that basis that this research contributes significantly to the multidisciplinary interconnection between the field of linguistics and literature (stylistics) to demonstrate how a writer can engage nouns and pronouns as linguistic resources for the construction of migrant experiences, whether encompassing personal or group identity, nostalgia and memory, dislocation, or hybridity.

scholarly journals Chasing After Life: Migrating Childhoods in Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 76-91
Author(s):  
Aparna Mishra Tarc
Keyword(s):  
Transnational Migration ◽  
Migrant Children ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Autobiographical Memories ◽  
Displaced Children ◽  
Adult World ◽  
New Challenges

This essay engages the border-crossing poetics of transnational migration through an engagement with Valeria Luiselli’s fictional depictions of migrant children in her novel Lost Children Archive. Engaging the migrating and intertextual forum of children’s witness and memory in the novel, I follow Luiselli’s moving depiction of child migrants as wholly undocumented and lost people outside the adult world of articulation. I argue that Luiselli’s novel documentation conjures up historical, contemporary, and autobiographical memories of migrant and displaced children comprising the colonial story of modernism. I consider children’s articulations, construction and witness of migration through my readings of the stories of migrating childhood delivered by Luiselli’s fictional depiction. I find, Luiselli’s moving rendition of children’s migration presents new challenges to educational and popular discourses of childhood, migration, and the responsibilities of the adult communities.

scholarly journals Hyperbolic Wavelet Analysis of Classical Isotropic and Anisotropic Besov–Sobolev Spaces

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Schäfer ◽  
Tino Ullrich ◽  
Béatrice Vedel
Keyword(s):  
Haar System ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Natural Setting ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Major Question ◽  
Vanishing Moments ◽  
Classical Setting ◽  
Hyperbolic Wavelets ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Mixed Smoothness

AbstractIn this paper we introduce new function spaces which we call anisotropic hyperbolic Besov and Triebel-Lizorkin spaces. Their definition is based on a hyperbolic Littlewood-Paley analysis involving an anisotropy vector only occurring in the smoothness weights. Such spaces provide a general and natural setting in order to understand what kind of anisotropic smoothness can be described using hyperbolic wavelets (in the literature also sometimes called tensor-product wavelets), a wavelet class which hitherto has been mainly used to characterize spaces of dominating mixed smoothness. A centerpiece of our present work are characterizations of these new spaces based on the hyperbolic wavelet transform. Hereby we treat both, the standard approach using wavelet systems equipped with sufficient smoothness, decay, and vanishing moments, but also the very simple and basic hyperbolic Haar system. The second major question we pursue is the relationship between the novel hyperbolic spaces and the classical anisotropic Besov–Lizorkin-Triebel scales. As our results show, in general, both approaches to resolve an anisotropy do not coincide. However, in the Sobolev range this is the case, providing a link to apply the newly obtained hyperbolic wavelet characterizations to the classical setting. In particular, this allows for detecting classical anisotropies via the coefficients of a universal hyperbolic wavelet basis, without the need of adaption of the basis or a-priori knowledge on the anisotropy.

scholarly journals At Play on the Borders of the Diegetic: Story Boundaries and Narrative Interpretation

2003 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 591-632 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Mackey
Keyword(s):  
Computer Game ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Common Element ◽  
Game Playing ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Texts ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
Scene Construction ◽  
Narrative Interpretation

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.

Little Dorrit

2018 ◽  
pp. 244-259
Author(s):  
Francesca Orestano
Keyword(s):  
Collective Identity ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Visual Studies ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Critical Enquiry ◽  
Narrative Function

By dwelling first on the ‘faults’, then on the ‘excellencies’ remarked by reviewers and critics of Little Dorrit, this chapter also traces the history of that novel’s critical reception as it evolved from a close focus on contemporary politics and economics toward a study of the writer’s Hogarthian skill at building a visual satire. Subsequently the characters’ psychology as well as Dickens’s became the object of critical enquiry. When visual studies brought to the fore the import of perception and its narrative function, another area of investigation opened, in this chapter specifically connected with, and culturally encoded in, the technique of the stereoscope and the scientific notion of the binocularity of vision. Implemented by Dickens in the construction of Little Dorrit, this notion allows for a further critical reading of the novel as lieu de mémoire where real and imagined imprisonments, inscribed in history, also conjure the scene where cultural memory rewrites individual and collective identity in the present.

scholarly journals Ičvič's Travels: Representations of Identity in Petar Milošević's Novel London, Pomaz

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mladena Prelić
Keyword(s):  
Collective Identity ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Small Community ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Love Story ◽  
Power And Control ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Ethnic War ◽  
And Control

The paper offers a reading of the novel London, Pomaz by Petar Milošević (b. 1952 in Kalaz, Hungary) in the key of individual and collective identity positionings, from the aspect of sociocultural anthropology. The novel, published in 1993, is framed as a love story spanning the East and West, until recently divided by the Cold War, and the protagonists are Serbs from the area around Budapest, a community to which both the author and his main character Ičvič belong. The character's surname, which is actually non-existent, has been formed from the suffixes -ić and -vić characteristic of patronymic Serbian surnames, in the Hungarianized version of -ič and -vič. Through a series of sequences, the novel describes the protagonist's life cycle from Pomaz, a small town between Budapest and Szentendre, where Ičvič was born, and Budapest, to Slovakia, the former Yugoslavia, Venice and London, and finally back to Pomaz, from the 1950s to the 1990s. Ičvič encounters different people and situations, others' stereotypes and prejudices as well as his own, unfulfilled expectations and the illusion of freedom in a world that has supposedly risen above ideological divisions, while next door, his (former) country is riven by ethnic war, the small community to which he belongs by birth is gradually disappearing, and in the supposed democratization processes following the fall of the Berlin wall, power and control merely take new forms. The situations in which the protagonist finds himself provide the possibility of reading/reading into them the relationship we:others or I:others, in other words, of different identity formations and positionings, not only of Ičvič himself but also of other characters and the collectivities to which they actually or supposedly belong. The assumption is that, despite the significant differences between a literary text and ethnography, a literary work can be used, with due methodological caution, as a source in anthropological research.

Tragic Pathos and Border Syndrome: Constantine Giannaris’s Hostage

2020 ◽  
pp. 103-124
Author(s):  
Philip E. Phillis ◽  
Philip E. Phillis
Keyword(s):  
Transnational Migration ◽  
Border Crossing ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Accented Cinema

Giannaris’s film provides an original evocation of border crossing through its reimagining of the 1999 hijacking of an intercity bus in Greece by a clandestine Albanian migrant who endured police brutality in Greece. This chapter affords an in-depth analysis of the film’s form and thematic preoccupations so as to comprehend issues of mobility that are essential to (cinematic) migrant journeys. The author argues that the film’s layered use of on-screen and off-screen mobility reveal the politics of transnational migration and their impact on the migrant’s body. These conventions and their ideological are conveyed to the reader through close readings of select scenes. To further achieve this, the author resorts to the notion of ‘border syndrome’, coined by Gazmend Kapllani in his Short Border Handbook and to Hamid Naficy’s meditations on border subjects in his Accented Cinema, and argues that Hostage reimagines the migrant as a tragic outsider, prone to victimhood.

scholarly journals RESIDENTS’ AND RECENT GRADUATES’ PERSPECTIVES ON SIMULATION TRAINING IN NEONATAL RESUSCITATION COMPETENCY ACQUISITION

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (suppl_1) ◽  
pp. e50-e51
Author(s):  
Mary Woodward
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Methodology ◽  
Simulation Training ◽  
Cognitive Theory ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Neonatal Resuscitation ◽  
Clinical Exposure ◽  
Training Models ◽  
Institutional Ethics ◽  
Preparedness For Practice ◽  
Recent Graduates

Abstract BACKGROUND Simulation training has been incorporated into Canadian residency programs in order to teach both the technical and behavioral skills of resuscitation. Current literature speaks to ‘improvement’ in skills following a simulation encounter. Residents’ perspectives on competency acquisition through simulation training have not been previously reported. OBJECTIVES To explore the perspectives of residents and recent graduates on simulation as an educational modality for competency acquisition in neonatal resuscitation DESIGN/METHODS This project employed an interpretive design qualitative methodology, using an a priori educational theory incorporating the principles of social cognitive theory, deliberate practice, distributive practice, and ‘choke phenomenon’. Semi structured focus groups of residents and paediatricians were used for data collection. Interpretive analysis in the style of Crabtree and Miller was employed. Data validity was optimized through member checking and triangulation of themes across investigators. Validity criteria as described by Lincoln and Guba were applied. Institutional ethics board approval was obtained. RESULTS Participants recognized the important role of simulation which allowed for a safe space to practice in order to become familiar with the algorithm and the equipment of resuscitation. Strengths associated with simulation training included: teaching geared toward the junior learner on the team, the opportunity to build and consolidate learning, and ideal preparation for examinations. In particular, given the current limited neonatal clinical exposure (constraints of reduced workload and hours), simulation was often seen as the trainee’s only opportunity for leading resuscitation. However, both groups of participants highlighted that for neonatal resuscitation the technology was less important than the scenario itself, i.e. ‘high fidelity is not the doll, it’s the stress of the situation’. They identified a lack of the ‘fear’ element in simulated scenarios, with a controlled comfortable environment, artificial ‘time component’, and ‘hypothetical resolution’ of every scenario. Finally, participants identified another potential pitfall of simulation which led to overconfidence and a false sense of expertise that cannot be translated to the ‘real baby’. CONCLUSION Participants perceived simulation to be a useful training modality for aspects of competency acquisition in neonatal resuscitation but highlighted a number of challenges and gaps toward preparedness for practice. In the development of future curricula in competency based training models, educators should consider in the design, graduated levels of simulation aimed toward transition to practice.

Mathematical contributions to the theory of evolution. VIII. On the correlation of characters not quantitatively measurable

1900 ◽  
Vol 66 (424-433) ◽  
pp. 241-244 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Coat Colour ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
Theoretical Part ◽  
Thoroughbred Horses ◽  
Eye Colour

1. In August last I presented to the Society a memoir on the inheritance of coat-colour in thoroughbred horses, and of eye-colour in man. This memoir, which was read in November of last year, presented the novel feature of determining correlation between characters which were not capable à priori of being quantitatively measured. The theoretical part of that memoir was somewhat brief, but I showed by illustrations that the method could be extended to deal with problems like the effectiveness of vaccination and of the antitoxin treatment in diphtheria.

James's Idea of Structure

PMLA ◽  
1965 ◽  
Vol 80 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 419-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Ward
Keyword(s):  
General Principle ◽  
A Priori ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
The Right

James's youthful ideas about the form of fiction are the germs of the principles expressed in the late prefaces. But his earliest dicta, in comparison to the late, are arid and formalist—dogmatically proclaimed, not experimentally discovered. They hint of an American Gallophile, infatuated with the rigid lines and harsh economy of the well-made play and the well-made novel. In 1874 James announced: “We confess to a conservative taste in literary matters—to a relish for brevity, for conciseness, for elegance, for perfection of form” (LRE, p. 139). He never renounced such a taste; “brevity” and “perfection of form”—more frequently “economy” and “composition”—are as prominent, indeed as hieratic, in the prefaces as in the earliest reviews. But if James seems to have acquired his literary standards artificially and to have begun his career with a set of a priori principles to guide him, it was not long before he was to make these ideas his own by fully understanding their relevance to the craft of fiction. The early assumptions are not repudiated, but tested, clarified, and deepened. There is a remarkable balance in James's mature criticism between the general principle and the pragmatically discovered insight. Though the insistence on economy and order is never relaxed, the concepts become increasingly more flexible; with ease they accommodate notions of fiction that seem contradictory. James repeatedly exults in the freedom of the novelist: “the Novel remains still, under the right persuasion, the most independent, most elastic, most prodigious of literary forms” (AN, p. 326). Indeed to James it is plastic enough and prodigious enough to allow for the reconciliation of the art of Scribe with that of Balzac, and of the principles of Coleridge with those of Flaubert.

Transnational Migration Contesting Borders of Responsibility for Justice

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 799-814
Author(s):  
Zuzana Uhde
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
Transnational Migration ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Structural Group ◽  
International Human Rights ◽  
Human Rights Regime ◽  
Transnational Migrants

The article focuses on structural causes of migration, putting forward an argument that such analysis sheds light on key shortcomings of today’s global geopolitical regime. First the author analyzes structural causes of transnational migration in global capitalism. She argues that transnational migrants represent a structural group of people who find themselves in a similar position in relation to social structures of current global economic architecture even though they do not necessarily have a collective identity. Second, the author discusses the methodological and practical limits of the current nation-state defined framework of responsibility for global justice which does not respond to structural causes of transnational migration and reproduces the internal contradictions of the international human rights regime. Following this critical analysis, the author focuses on the possibilities of extraterritorial obligations for justice, which are partly embedded in the current international law. Then she outlines an argument for a differentiated responsibility for global justice.

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