Female Writings in Times of Crisis

2021 ◽  
pp. 235-255
Author(s):  
Nancy Al-Doghmi ◽  
Reema Salah
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Theoretical Approach ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Personal Essays ◽  
Writing Practices ◽  
Self Discovery

This chapter presents a critical study of female writing practices in response to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic in contrasting cultures, ethnicities, social classes, and educational levels. It studies 10 personal narratives by Arab and American women responding to the global coronavirus crisis in writing. The authors' responses vary and their narratives of crisis, whether short stories, personal essays, or testimonies, represent the heterogeneity of each woman's life experience. The study examines women's gendered reactions in these narratives as presenting a new kind of subjectivity that women adopt to respond to life crises, to overcome pain, to express emotions, to create meaning, and to build communications and coalitions. Writing becomes an instrumental voice for these women to self-discovery, healing, and empowerment. By adopting a transnational literary feminist theoretical approach as well as a sociolinguistic one, the study explores a complex relationship between crisis, gender, and writing that reveals how female subjects use the narrative form in times of crisis.

Muriel Spark's Early Fiction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Stage Play ◽  
Insight Into

This book presents a detailed critical analysis of a period of significant formal and thematic innovation in Muriel Spark’s literary career. Spanning the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, it identifies formative instances of literary experimentation in texts including The Comforters, The Driver’s Seat and The Public Image, with an emphasis on metafiction and the influence of the nouveau roman. As the first critical study to draw extensively on Spark’s vast archives of correspondence, manuscripts and research, it provides a unique insight into the social contexts and personal concerns that dictated her fiction. Offering a distinctive reappraisal of Spark’s fiction, the book challenges the rigid critical framework that has long been applied to her writing. In doing so, it interrogates how Spark’s literary innovations work to facilitate moments of subversive satire and gendered social critique. As well as presenting nuanced re-readings major works like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, it draws unprecedented attention to lesser-discussed texts such as her only stage play, Doctors of Philosophy, and early short stories.

Interviews

2019 ◽  
pp. 250-267
Author(s):  
Craig M. Klugman
Keyword(s):  
Life Experience ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Healthcare Providers ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Question Type ◽  
Institutional Review Board ◽  
Health Humanities ◽  
Institutional Review ◽  
Interview Studies

Interviewing is a means of engaging an individual in dialogue to reflect upon and share his or her life experience. For health humanities, this method accesses the lived reality of patients and healthcare providers. Asking people to share their personal narratives can allow for emic—from the subject’s perspective—and etic—from the researcher’s point of view—interpretation. Health humanities interviews consist of six steps: define the research question, design the interview, apply for Institutional Review Board approval, conduct the interviews, analyze the data, and distribute the findings. This chapter examines best practices for conducting interview studies including format (structured, unstructured, semi-structured), question type (closed- or open-ended), sampling (convenience, snowball), and notetaking. The author uses a study on collecting death histories to demonstrate this process and how to apply narrative, thematic, and frequency analyses.

scholarly journals We are now omnidextrous to sustain! Story of CERA India

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 173-179
Author(s):  
Dipak Kumar Bhattacharyya
Keyword(s):  
Life Experience ◽  
Organizational Transformation ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Product Lines ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Important Message ◽  
Inclusive Approach ◽  
Brand Dilution ◽  
Socially Relevant

Purpose This study aims to help students to relate their theoretical knowledge in managing change in a crisis. It is more relevant in today’s pandemic situation and could be a morale booster for many entrepreneurs who are struggling to sustain. Design/methodology/approach It is based on managing real-life change situation in organization, and it is presented in narrative form. Findings CERA India could successfully transform and sustain in Covid-19 pandemic situation with an inclusive approach, without losing their identity. Research limitations/implications This study is based on consulting experience and success story of one organization in pandemic situation. Important message is in a crisis, organizations can sustain partnering with people. But, this depends on the prevalent culture of the organization. Also, other organizations before replication need to ascertain the problem of their brand dilution, for shifting their focus to other product lines. Practical implications This story can be used in organizational change management classes, and students may be assigned to document their lessons. At the end of the story, some possible areas of investigation for students are listed for getting appropriate direction. Social implications In this pandemic situation, this study is socially relevant, as it shows how organizations can sustain with a human face. Originality/value This study is original and based on real-life experience in managing organizational transformation in a crisis situation. The name of the organization is imaginary, as organization did not like their name in public. This is one reason of not using their data for tabular presentation.

scholarly journals The The Image of a Woman of Colour and Native American Woman in Two Kerouac Novels: A Double Otherness

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-133
Author(s):  
Nejc Rožman Ivančič
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
American Woman ◽  
Racial Prejudice ◽  
Jack Kerouac ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Self Discovery

The article examines the portrayal of a woman of colour in the novel The Subterraneans (1958), and the portrayal of a Native American woman in the novel Tristessa (1960). The two works are representative examples within the opus of the American writer Jack Kerouac (1922–1969), and offer suitable starting points for the reinterpretation of his attitude towards women and non-white ethnicities. The novels reveal the ethnocentric, even colonizing attitude of the dominating male narrator in relation to the dominated and subjugated social groups. Although the treated works are considered Kerouac’s “female-centred novels” (Phelan Lyke 1991, v), this syntagm is problematized here by showing that the male narrator remains the true protagonist, focused essentially on his own perceptions of the non-white romantic subject, whereas the two female characters are (mere) objects for the protagonists’ self-discovery, life experience and psychological projection. In this sense, Kerouac’s consistent presentation of women as representatives of an identity of the exotic/Other reveals his nested gender and racial prejudice.

Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth von Arnim

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
The Other ◽  
Poor Health ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
John Middleton Murry ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Final Letter

Recent scholarship on the complex relationship between Katherine Mansfield and her best-selling author cousin, Elizabeth von Arnim, has done much to shed light on the familial, personal and literary connections between these unlikely friends. Although their lives appeared to be very different (Mansfield’s largely one of penurious poor health, von Arnim’s chiefly one of robust privilege), we know that each of these women experienced the other as an influential presence. Moreover, Mansfield’s narrator in her early collection of short stories, In a German Pension (1911), bears marked resemblances with the protagonist of Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898), and von Arnim’s most radical novel, Vera (1921), was written at the height of her friendship with Mansfield. The final letter Mansfield ever wrote was to von Arnim and, following Mansfield's death in 1923, John Middleton Murry dedicated his posthumous collection of Mansfield’s poems as follows: ‘To Elizabeth of the German Garden who loved certain of these poems and their author’. This volume brings together contributions from leading scholars including Bonnie Kime Scott, Angela Smith and Andrew Thacker, including the prize-winning essay by Juliane Römhild and creative contributions from New Zealand writers Sarah Laing and Nina Powles.

Autoethnographic Expression and Cultural Translation in Tian Yage's Short Stories

2012 ◽  
Vol 211 ◽  
pp. 806-826
Author(s):  
Liang-ya Liou
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Cultural Translation ◽  
Narrative Voice ◽  
Cultural Revival ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Modern Subject ◽  
Dominant Society ◽  
Modern Fiction ◽  
Writing Chinese

AbstractThis article explores how three short stories set in 1980s Taiwan by the Taiwanese aboriginal writer Tian Yage (Tuobasi Tamapima) can be read as autoethnographic fiction as well as modern fiction, portraying contemporary Taiwanese aboriginal society caught between indigenous folkways and colonial modernity, and how the narrators of the stories tackle cultural translation. I begin with a discussion of Sun Ta-chuan's caution in 1991 as the Taiwan Aboriginal Movement was evolving into the Taiwan Aboriginal Cultural Revivalist Movement. After analysing anthropology's relationship with aborigines and imperialism, I apply Mary Louise Pratt's concept of autoethnography to the aboriginal activists' ethnographic studies and personal narratives. I argue that, prior to the Taiwan Aboriginal Cultural Revivalist Movement, Tian sought to construct an aboriginal cultural identity vis-à-vis the metropolis and to envision a cultural revival within the indigenous community, while he also explored the dilemmas and difficulties that arose from these. In the last section, I apply Homi K. Bhabha's theory of the untranslatable in cultural translation to further examine the language, the narrative voice and the form of both autoethnographic fiction and modern fiction in Tian's stories. I argue that writing Chinese-language modern fiction is a tacit recognition on Tian's part of the legacy of colonial modernity, but the purpose is to manoeuvre for a rethinking of the Taiwanese modern subject. As the narrative voice of his stories is one of an aboriginal speaking as a subject rather than an object, speaking with the backdrop of the aboriginal village as the locus of indigenous traditions vis-à-vis the dominant society, Tian is implicitly demanding aboriginal rights and a reconsideration of the Taiwanese modern subject as well as a shift in the paradigm of historiography on Taiwan.

scholarly journals Unraveling Electra Complex in Kanza Javed’s Ashes, Wine and Dust

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-84
Author(s):  
Maryam Raza ◽  
Athar Tahir
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Electronic Media ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Secondary Source ◽  
Father Figure ◽  
Biological Father ◽  
Self Discovery ◽  
Unconscious Desire

The aim of this study is to explore the Jungian Electra complex in Kanza Javed’s Ashes, Wine and Dust. This is a qualitative research. Electronic media including reviews and interviews form the secondary source of this study. The researcher substantiates that Javed’s young protagonist Mariam Ameen is father-fixated for her beloved grandfather, who is simply known as Dadda. The concealed unconscious desire for her grandfather is unveiled by dint of establishing the fact that Dadda is the true father figure for Mariam. He overshadows the role of the biological father, taking up the position of an immediate father for Mariam. This accentuates the underlying Electra complex in Mariam’s heart. Moreover, the use of double roles is also deciphered as a leitmotif in Javed’s novel. Mariam serves as the doppelganger of Parakneeti which further aids the prevalence of the Electra complex. Dadda’s incessant influence in Mariam’s life even after his death and her self-imposed spinsterhood is discerned in terms of her infatuation for her grandfather. This study also analyses Mariam’s journey to the land of her grandfather as a metaphorical voyage of regression to the phallic stage which renders in a metaphysical union of the lover and the beloved. As a result, it is a journey of self-discovery in terms of love. The significance of this critical study is that it broadens the research horizons on Javed’s work as a psychoanalytic novel. It also enables the researchers to explore theories by other psychoanalysts, since only Freud and Jung share the limelight in the field of psychoanalytic research.

scholarly journals The Fictional Avatars of Mrs W: The Influence of the Adoptive Mother and the Birth of Jeanette Winterson as a Writer

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-139
Author(s):  
Emilie Walezak
Keyword(s):  
Life Experience ◽  
Jeanette Winterson ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Mother Daughter Relationship

Abstract Throughout her writing career, Jeanette Winterson has experimented with her life experience, revisiting in particular the complex relationship with her adoptive mother, Mrs W, in such works as Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), Sexing the Cherry (1989), and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal (2011). This article examines the complex mother-daughter relationship between Jeanette and Mrs W to illustrate the birth of a feminist writer. In answer to her mother’s confiscation of her birth narrative, Jeanette Winterson has fictionalized Mrs W to alter traditional narrative paradigms she deemed repressive. The process has allowed the daughter to open up an enunciative space for herself through performative utterances: “I’m telling you stories. Trust me.” Finally, the parallel drawn between Mrs Winterson and Mrs Thatcher in the former’s fictional avatars highlights specifically the personal political itinerary of the feminist writer.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document