Subverting Patriarchy through Écriture Feminine in Fawzia Afzal-Khan’s Lahore with Love: Growing Up with Girlfriends, Pakistani Style

Author(s):  
Shirin Zubair ◽  
Rija Ahsan

This research paper explores linguistic techniques employed by Fawzia Afzal-Khan in her memoir Lahore with Love: Growing up with Girlfriends, Pakistani Style (LWL) to challenge patriarchal norms and structures. The theoretical frameworks used for this research are drawn from structural linguistics including the works of Mills (1995), Spender (1980), as well as French Poststructuralists: Cixous (1975) and Irigaray (1985). Through analysis of the linguistic features of her narrative such as tropes, metaphors, imagery, wordplay, polyphony, genre-mixing, and code-mixing, the paper strives to illustrate the alternative writing style of the memoirist.  The objective is to reveal that her linguistic and stylistic methods differ from the dominant structural and patriarchal writing styles, and mark her feminine individuality expressed thematically and stylistically in her memoir. The significance of our approach is that our analysis of her narrative is informed by a combination of the literary insights of the French feminists along with the ideas gained from the discipline of feminist linguistics and feminist stylistics. We hope that this paper goes some way in filling the research gap in the domain of Pakistani women’s memoir-writing: an emerging arena of literary studies which is ignored and dismissed both in its literary merit and political significance. 

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Mimi Li ◽  
Meixiu Zhang

Abstract Research on second language (L2) collaborative writing (CW) has proliferated over the recent decade and will continue to bloom due to the changing landscape of writing and learning in the digital age. This article provides a research agenda on CW in L2 classrooms. We illustrate six research themes for future research inquiry by pointing out the research gap, following a brief review of theoretical frameworks and existing empirical efforts on CW. We then expound on six specific research tasks that we deem to be pressing for this domain to progress, including more attention to multimodal CW, expanded frameworks for analyzing peer interaction and writing products, deployment of underused research techniques and improved research practice, development of CW assessment practice, as well as the inquiry of practitioners’ input on CW. We hope to provide guidance for future research endeavors by identifying avenues of investigations on CW and meanwhile contribute to the trajectory of vibrant research on L2 writing and language learning.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 50
Author(s):  
Gholam-Reza Parvizi

The question of image in literary studies and in recent years in Translation Studies is one of the most problematic innature. In the present study an attempt was made to define the nature of translating linguistic constructions – evokingimages in the mind of reader – in English novels and their rendered versions in Persian translations. In this studyseven types of images (visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, kinesthetic and organic) in two English novelsand their rendered versions in Persian were analyzed based on two theoretical frameworks, the first one is Jiang’sImage-Based Model to Literary Translation (2008) by which the nature of translation of images were examined andthe other is Chesterman’s translation strategies (1997) which help to systematize translation strategies adopted bytranslators in rewriting the images in English novels. The results have shown that in most of the cases the images thatare intended by original author have been changed in the translations, and the aesthetic experience of the ST reader isdifferent from that of the TT reader.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 136
Author(s):  
Gladys Agyeiwaa Denkyi –Manieson

This essay examines the portrayal of women in John Dramani Mahama’s My First Coup D’etat: Memories from the Lost Decades of Africa (2012). The essay contends that subtly My First Coup D’etat expresses ideas of patriarchy, misogyny and masculinity. A feminist reading of work pays attention to images, themes, expressions, motifs and many other factors that are embedded in the text. An examination of the portrayal of women in male narratives is a worthwhile exercise as it helps establish gender ideologies for female empowerment. A paper like this stretches the dimension of psycho-critical literary studies which pays attention to the interplay between consciousness and unconsciousness in life narratives. Life narratives is an accumulation of layered propositions, interpretation of which are discernible by critical literary studies, like this research paper.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 206-222
Author(s):  
Midhuna M Suresh ◽  
Sreejitha P S

The discourse on feminism and ecology is familiar in literary studies as well as in socio-cultural scenario. But it seldom merged with each other-it has probably only been five decades since Indian literature has started discussing Eco feminism. Eco feminism, in short, blends the theories of feminism and ecology. This research paper critically analyses poems of the prolific Indian writers Sugathakumari and Kamala Das who always fought for upholding the women’s issues and conserving the nature. The paper aims to study their writings through the lenses of Ecofeminism, to treat them as their unabashed political commentaries on women and nature.


Author(s):  
Michael Lundell ◽  
Vincent P. Pecora

Structuralism, generally described, is a twentieth-century intellectual movement associated with linguistic studies in Europe, despite its vast applicability and many adherents. An initial aim of structural linguistics was to investigate – in greater detail than previously – the way language functions as a network of signification. Structuralism’s goal also typically derives from the question of whether universal truth can be revealed in this network in ways that define the constitution of thought. Structuralism focused on the whole of language, the ‘structure’ of the totality, over its individual parts or their historical development. The principles of Structuralism and its later transformations found widespread application outside of linguistics, particularly in anthropology, sociology, literary studies, semiotics, film, musicology, psychology, and philosophy.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Daniel T. Yokossi

Using the Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this article seeks to carry out a theoretically founded analysis of two extracts from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun to decode both her world view and ideology behind her writing for a better understanding of the whole novel with a view to making her message accessible to the laymen. The quantitative research method employed by the study has helped to recap the linguistic features of the analyzed excerpts in a statistical table paving the way to their interpretation via the qualitative method. The study has interestingly arrived at impressive results. Among others, it is to be highlighted that Adichie has written Half of a Yellow Sun to get important messages across. To descend to particulars, the analysis has unveiled that unkindness, wickedness, violence, heartlessness and mistrustfulness are some of the evils that the Nigeria-Biafra war has resulted into. As a result, by writing this award winning novel, Adichie aims at giving advice to her contemporaries and, more precisely, to the Nigerian current and future political leaders for the country brighter future. Adichie’s selections of modality in the studied excerpts reveal the possibility of new developments of the bygone civil war. The high rate of circumstantial adjuncts has contributed to improve the texts experiential density, and complements other strategies used by Adichie to make her novel very well written in mode. Indeed, these are just some of the results the present research work has arrived at; more remain to be discovered in the section devoted to the interpretation of findings in this paper. The study has interestingly opened up to such further research horizons as experiential meaning, textual meaning, pragmatic transfer, code switching, code mixing to name but just a few of them.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (8) ◽  
pp. e0255661
Author(s):  
Ahmed Taha ◽  
Heba M. Khalil ◽  
Tarek El-shishtawy

Nowadays, forensic authorship authentication plays a vital role in identifying the number of unknown authors as a result of the world’s rapidly rising internet use. This paper presents two-level learning techniques for authorship authentication. The learning technique is supplied with linguistic knowledge, statistical features, and vocabulary features to enhance its efficiency instead of learning only. The linguistic knowledge is represented through lexical analysis features such as part of speech. In this study, a two-level classifier has been presented to capture the best predictive performance for identifying authorship. The first classifier is based on vocabulary features that detect the frequency with which each author uses certain words. This classifier’s results are fed to the second one which is based on a learning technique. It depends on lexical, statistical and linguistic features. All of the three sets of features describe the author’s writing styles in numerical forms. Through this work, many new features are proposed for identifying the author’s writing style. Although, the proposed new methodology is tested for Arabic writings, it is general and can be applied to any language. According to the used machine learning models, the experiment carried out shows that the trained two-level classifier achieves an accuracy ranging from 94% to 96.16%.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 26
Author(s):  
Layo Olaluwoye

Existing studies on code-switching have mainly been carried out among English/Chinese bilinguals. Studies on English/Yoruba/Pidgin English bilinguals with emphasis on code-mixing and code-switching on the Internet have been grossly insufficient. Therefore, this study reveals the surface features of code-switching among Yoruba/English/Pidgin English bilinguals in the Nigerian Online Community on Facebook. For theoretical framework, we relied on insights from Halliday’s (1994) functional theory of language.  Five types of surface features were identified: simplified lexicon and sentences, non-adherence to the use of tones/diacritics, inconsistencies of spellings and words, unnecessary lengthening of letters, and tolerance of surface errors. The study has revealed the distinctive features of code-switching in the Nigerian Online Community page on Facebook. These linguistic features have thrown more light on the characteristics of the language use on the Facebook forum and how the posters use the codes in their speech repertoire to achieve this


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 21
Author(s):  
Luluk Iswati ◽  
Pratomo Widodo

Slogan is one of the powerful tools to advertise e-commerce products and services. The power of slogan to promote commodities lies primarily on the language style that it employs. This study is aimed at analyzing the linguistic feautures in 38 e-commerce slogans that are popular in Indonesia. The data were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Quantitatively, the data were calculated regarding the frequency of each identified linguistic features: semantic devices, syntactic devices, phonetic devices, orthographic devices, syntactic errors, code-mixing, and moods. Qualitatively, the data were verbally analyzed, described, and discussed. The findings show that regarding linguistic devices, the most prevalent case is semantic device (self-reference). Concerning syntactic errors, the most apparent errors relate to word order typology and ommission of articles & prepositions. Speaking of code-mixing, the most frequently used term is the word ‘online’. In relation to moods, the most dominant mood is declarative. This study suggests further study with a wider context of data


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-84
Author(s):  
Sarah Anna Juen

Abstract In this day and age a continuous flow of ideas and culture takes place, which is part of the globalisation process. These exchanges influence the development of a transcultural literature. Murakami Haruki is not only a transcultural writer, but one of the most popular and internationally acclaimed authors of contemporary Japanese literature who has changed the literary scene in Japan since the publication of his debut novel Kaze no uta o kike (Hear the Wind Sing). Murakami has experimented with postmodern expressions and eventually developed his own writing style, which integrates elements of Western cultures into his works. This paper focuses on the author’s transcultural strategy, which is often reflected in his choice of the setting and time frame, the frequent mentioning of cultural consumer goods and linguistic features such as the utilisation of loanwords. In particular, references to music and literature play a major role in Murakami’s publications. This paper analyses how and to what extent transculturality influences the characters, their actions, and the storyline on the basis of the short story “Nemuri” (Sleep) published in 1989. In the process it is concluded that, above all, these references underpin aspects such as the search for identity, the escape into ‘another world’, and the rejection of societal norms and values.


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