scholarly journals Pro-Life and Pro-Choice Contentions in Joyce Carol Oates’s: A Book of American Martyrs

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 30-34
Author(s):  
Weini Wang

This thesis probes into the issue on pro-life and pro-choice contentions in Joyce Carol Oates’s: A Book of American Martyrs. Karl Marx explains how capitalists maneuver the deferred redemption intrinsic of religion per se to exploit and oppress workers and re-enforce capitalism proper. In the novel, the transformation of Luther and Gus provides a convincible account for Luther’s frenzy and Gus’s irreligion. This thesis discusses argues that the workers are unconsciously subjected to the governance of the dominant group via the conceptualization of religious ideology and religious culture industry. It should be condemned to impose one’s belief on the others, or even to commit murder ruthlessly in the name of God.

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josh D. Wondra ◽  
Glenn D. Reeder
Keyword(s):  
Pro Life ◽  

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 1031-1047
Author(s):  
Neil A. O’Brian

What explains the alignment of antiabortion positions within the Republican party? I explore this development among voters, activists, and elites before 1980. By 1970, antiabortion attitudes among ordinary voters correlated with conservative views on a range of noneconomic issues including civil rights, Vietnam, feminism and, by 1972, with Republican presidential vote choice. These attitudes predated the parties taking divergent abortion positions. I argue that because racial conservatives and military hawks entered the Republican coalition before abortion became politically activated, issue overlap among ordinary voters incentivized Republicans to oppose abortion rights once the issue gained salience. Likewise, because proabortion voters generally supported civil rights, once the GOP adopted a Southern strategy, this predisposed pro-choice groups to align with the Democratic party. A core argument is that preexisting public opinion enabled activist leaders to embed the anti (pro) abortion movement in a web of conservative (liberal) causes. A key finding is that the white evangelical laity’s support for conservative abortion policies preceded the political mobilization of evangelical leaders into the pro-life movement. I contend the pro-life movement’s alignment with conservatism and the Republican party was less contingent on elite bargaining, and more rooted in the mass public, than existing scholarship suggests.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-80
Author(s):  
Grace Cheng-Ying Lin

In Taiwan, abortion was legalized in 1984. This paper examines the voices surrounding abortion expressed by monasteries in Humanistic Buddhism, a prominent Buddhist philosophy practiced in modern Taiwan. Humanistic Buddhism emphasizes that it is a “religion of the people.” However, in addition to the law of karma and causality, the value of all life forms is prioritized based on the ethics of “non-harming (ahimsā).” When some monasteries insist that abortion is killing, resulting in karmic retribution, some express sympathy with a woman’s decision to abort. When some monasteries promote a newly popularized ritual to appease aborted fetuses, some are keenly critical of the exploitation of women and manipulation of scriptures. Through a discursive analysis, this paper demonstrates the wide spectrum of Buddhist narratives in response to reproductive politics embedded in the conflicts between modernity and tradition, as well as locality and globality.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dwi Mayang Sagita ◽  
Delvi Wahyuni

This thesis is an analysis of a novel written by Celeste Ng entitled Little Fires Everywhere (2017). This analysis looks at the commodification and alienation that is experienced by women who involved in surrogacy and adoption. This analysis employes Marxist literary theory to explain the phenomena in the novel. The analysis focuses on two issues of commodification and alienation that are proposed by Karl Marx as seen through two female protagonists which are Mia Warren and Bebe Chow. This analysis also depends a lot on the narrator to determine which parts of the novel are used as the data. The result of the study shows that Mia Warren experienced commodification of the human body and four kinds of alienation such as alienation from the product of labor, alienation from the act of production, alienation from the species being, and alienation from other people bacause she becomes a surrogate mother. The other protagonist, Bebe Chow, also experienced four kinds of alienation because her child is adopted.


2021 ◽  
pp. 107-135
Author(s):  
Emily Kopley

In several essays concurrent with her major experimental works of the 1920s, Woolf proclaims that the novel will usurp the tools and the place of poetry. Most important among these essays is the book-length A Room of One’s Own (1929). Here Woolf identifies the lack of poet foremothers available as models to women writers. She urges young women to fill this gap by writing not poetry per se, but rather prose whose greatness qualifies it as “poetry.” Woolf wants to gain for prose, and by extension women writers, the prestige historically accorded to verse. This chapter sketches the historic link among English Studies, poetry, and patriarchy. This link contributed to Woolf’s vision of the novel as the democratic, feminist alternative to poetry. It also spurred her subtle challenge in A Room of One’s Own to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who had doubted women’s ability to write poetry. This chapter concludes by considering the real women poets who inspired Woolf’s fiction of Judith Shakespeare.


Author(s):  
Karin Kukkonen

The conclusion shows that several of the embodied aspects of writing fiction discussed for the eighteenth-century novel can be traced into the nineteenth century through an example from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. It is shown that, like the earlier authors in the case studies in this book, Dickens features shifting embodied stances and involves elements of the media ecology of his day rather than deploying the concrete particulars that “formal realism” considers central to the novel. Links to larger arguments about the role of the novel in literary history are then drawn in contrast with accounts, based on Adorno/Habermas and Benjamin, that argue that eighteenth-century fiction becomes rationalised and disembodied with the novel and its culture industry. Rather than impoverishing experience, it is argued that the novel as a lifeworld technology depends profoundly on readers’ embodied engagements and that 4E cognition is a critical perspective that affords such an alternative take.


2003 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Jo Muratore

For many readers, Camus’ L’Etranger traces the protagonist’s evolution from a state of self-indulgent unawareness to one of metaphysical lucidity. This article exposes the shortcomings of such readings by focusing rather on Meursault’s fundamentally static nature. In fact, this infamous character’s intellectual perspective and situational reality remain virtually unchanged from beginning to end. The sole evolution in evidence is in the “vision” of others, who fall prey to the prevailing prejudices of a dominant group. In consequence, an unremarkable but well-liked man is transformed into a social pariah via a tidal wave of condemnation – while the man himself is unchanged, victimized by conceptual deformations that are imposed upon him. The anti-hero’s status as an outsider signals, then, not merely the force of public opinion, but the flawed nature of the existentialist endeavor (a movement from which Camus wished ostensibly to be disassociated). The novel comes to represent, not the phenomenon of auto-determined or self-altered identity, but the unstable contingencies imposed from without and from which there is no exit.


Author(s):  
Fran Amery

This chapter gives a brief overview of the current terrain of abortion debate in the UK, covering calls for decriminalisation as well as debates on sex-selection, disability and pre-abortion counselling. It argues that the classic image of abortion politics as a war between ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-choice’ actors cannot adequately accommodate these recent developments – nor does it fit with how abortion debates have actually unfolded in Britain historically. Instead, it offers an interpretation of abortion law as resting on a coalition between government and medical actors formed to govern women’s reproductive decisions. The chapter closes with an overview of the book.


2013 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 490-519 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilana M. Blumberg

Silas Marner (1861) depicts a stolen hoard of glittering gold at a historical moment that saw an increasing displacement of coinage by paper money in one of the major developments of industrial capitalist modernity. Reading the novel as George Eliot’s aesthetic and ethical response to the modern processes of abstraction that absorbed nineteenth-century thinkers from Auguste Comte to Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, I suggest that Silas Marner consoles for a potentially impoverishing process of abstraction by refiguring it as an opportunity for a new form of value, one that transcends material limitations and depends upon human networks for its realization. Associating the “abstraction” of gold with the creation of a post-Malthusian modern economy in which giving has little personal cost and, on the contrary, produces collective, practical benefit, Silas Marner reflects the possibilities for abundance, surplus, and shared wealth that could be glimpsed in England at the outset of the 1860s. As the novel shifts from describing money as an unchanging, inanimate object to describing it instead as an exchange-value whose meaning is expressed in relation to the natural growth and repeating cycles of human experience, George Eliot offers a historically relevant fable of moral progress dependent on the abstractions common to material exchange, social sympathy, and narrative itself.


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