scholarly journals A Feminist Critique of “Voice” and the “Other” in J.M. Coetzee’s Post-colonial Novel “Foe”

Author(s):  
Nushrat Azam

This paper seeks to analyze the techniques and effects of voice and silence in the life of a female character in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe. The analysis shows how the character of Susan Barton in Foe gives readers a feminine perspective on the famous tale of Robinson Crusoe. The method of investigation is a critical examination of the characterization of the female character; the research analyzes the events, actions and the interactions of Susan Barton, with a sight to identify how the character of Susan is portrayed in the novel. The analysis shows that while Susan is able to find a “voice” in some parts of this post-colonial text, her constant submission to strong male characters in the novel ends up showing a picture of a frail woman who defines her existence and individuality relative to men in her life. It strengthens the fact that women were still struggling to free themselves from the patriarchal domination of the post-colonial era.

Author(s):  
Nushrat Azam

This paper seeks to analyze the mediums and effects of voice and silence in the life of a female character of the re-written post-colonial text Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. The analysis shows how a re-written text can give a new meaning to a character and story of a novel, where the character of Antoinette tells the untold story of Bertha in Jane Eyre. The method of investigation for this research is analytical and descriptive; the research was completed by analyzing the events, actions and the interactions of the female character, Antoinette with the other major characters in the novel in order to identify how the character of Antoinette was portrayed throughout the novel. It is understood through the study of the text, that the post-colonial novel gave the female voice much more importance than its previous counterpart. This represents the early post-colonial times during which women were starting to gain liberation but had still not completely moved on from the notions of patriarchal societies that they had grown up in.


2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 35
Author(s):  
Ferry Fauzi Hermawan

Artikel ini bertujuan untuk menggambarkan transgresi seksual yang terdapat dalam novel Para Penebus Dosa karya Motinggo Busye. Metode yang digunakan dalam artikel ini adalah metode deskriptif analitis. Data dari novel dideskripsikan untuk memperoleh gambaran transgresi seksual. Dalam novel tersebut pelanggaran terhadap kebiasaan seksual, norma, dan kelas digambarkan melalui peristiwa seksual yang dialami oleh para tokoh, terutama tokoh perempuan. Hasil analisis menunjukkan bahwa tokoh perempuan digambarkan banyak melakukan tindak transgresi dibandingkan dengan tokoh laki-laki. Analisis juga menunjukkan bahwa narator dalam novel memiliki sikap bias gender dan mendukung nilai-nilai patriarki dengan lebih banyak memberikan hukuman terhadap tokoh perempuan yang melakukan tindak transgresi seksual dibandingkan kepada tokoh laki-laki.Abstract:The paper aims at describing sexual transgression in Motinggo Busye’s “Para Penebus Dosa”.  The research applies descriptive method. The sexual transgressions elaborated in the novel are presented through the deviance of sexual affairs, social norms, and class experienced by the characters, especially female character. The result of the research shows that  female characters described in the story committed a lot of sexual transgressions compared to male characters. The study also reveals that the narrator in the novel  has a gender bias act. Moreover, he supports values of patriarchy by giving more punishment to the female committing sexual transgression act than to the male.


Human Affairs ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-159
Author(s):  
Moslem Fatollahi

Abstract Post-colonialism and orientalism have inspired literary scholars to study various aspects of literature and literary translation in the post-colonial era. One of the implications of post-colonialism for literature as a discipline is the idea of cannibalism and cultural manipulation. This corpus-based study aims to analyze the notions of “cultural manipulation” or “cannibalism” in the Persian translation of Haji Baba by Mirza Habib Isfahani, to explore the translator’s strategy, as an intercultural mediator, in modulating the source novel’s colonial stance and adapting it to the religious, literary and cultural tastes of the Iranians. Our findings reveal that two main techniques—of omission and euphemism—have been applied in rendering the novel into Persian. Using these techniques, the translator has attempted to challenge the imperial stance of the main writer and come up with a version of the source novel which is much less insulting to Iranians’ cultural values. That is why this translation has been widely received as a literary masterpiece in Persian literature. One implication is that it might be claimed that cannibalism and cultural manipulation can be used to explain the trend of manipulating western literature in countries which have never been colonized, but that have suffered from the colonial stance of colonial writers.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-93
Author(s):  
Badiuzzaman Shaikh

Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower, published in 2011, is a trenchant critique on the effects of globalization, urbanization, privatization and capitalism in the post-colonial era in India. All these changes in the contemporary society have effectively bifurcated the entire country into two groups—the rich and the poor, the centre and the margin, the privileged upper class and the underprivileged lower class. In the novel Dharmen Shah, a real estate mogul represents the first group of people who are socio-politically and economically highly influential, whereas Yogesh A. Murthy, aka Masterji, is the embodiment of the marginalized class that are constantly dominated and exploited by the former group. My present paper aims to analyse in detail how far Masterji is able to resist the scabrous sufferings unleashed by the rich realtor Dharmen Shah, and how far Masterji’s resistance becomes an incarnation of the resilience of marginalized people in the contemporary society.


Author(s):  
Saman A. Dizayi

This paper presents an analysis of the novel "The God of the Small Things" written by Arundhati Roy. The primary purpose of this paper is to evaluate the idea of resistance and identity that have been described in the novel by the novelist. It will be demonstrated in this novel that how the resistance against the traditions and norms of post-colonial era is related to the self-realisation. There are different kinds of resistance that have been depicted in the novel at various circumstances. In Postcolonial context identity is a complex concept to be located in just a simple definition or to be investigated throughout a single theoretical approach.  Resistance as a concept linked to the identity question. The Novel handles this notion and throughout its plot, besides the burden that is left from the colonial legacy, gender identity comes to the surface. Though women resistance appears as a reaction with identity suppression; yet it is a reflection of self-identification of gender inequality under patriarchal traditions inherited from long dominant masculine power. This paper elaborates on each type of resistance and activism that arises against the feudal and patriarchal forces structured by the economic and politically influential people in the new community as a sample in India after postcolonialism. Consequently, one of the points that the research ends with is that the act of resistance validates the pursuit for self-identity, which is an attempt to renown, reclaim and rename the world.


Author(s):  
Febin Vijay ◽  
Priyanka Tripathi

The present article begins with a brief historical account of the exclusionary politics of Western crime fiction, with most of the works representing the East as ‘exotic other’ while assuming the subject position themselves. A post-colonial analysis of Abir Mukherjee’s A Rising Man (2016) is conducted to study how the novel deals with questions of justice and racial politics, and further encompasses a brief inquiry into it can be positioned as an anti-colonial text which advocates a move towards decolonization. The text can be seen as representing the body of work by writers who give voice to the oppressed within colonial contexts and vehemently refuse the idea of being inferior.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ирина Попова-Бондаренко

Morpho Eugenia is the first part of the postmodernist novel Angels and Insects by A.S. Byatt. The male world is represented here in abundance by numerous names of famous naturalists, philosophers and poets of the XVII-XVIII centuries and of Victorian England, as well as by the male characters of the novel. It is pointed out that the concepts of “masculine” and “non-masculine” in the novel presuppose double reading, namely, the traditional (Victorian) and posttraditional one (neo-Victorian). In the neo-Victorian interpretation, most of the male characters in the novel are devoid of traditional masculine qualities (honor and dignity, commitment to the cause, inner strength), they bear a stigma of vice (incest), while the “male organization” features of the central female character, non-typical for a Victorian woman (talent, efficiency, perseverance, energy, self-reliance), contribute to the formation of an integral harmonious world of men and women as friends, lovers, like-minded people.


Author(s):  
Vicent Cucarella-Ramon

Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) stands in the tradition of African American use of the biblical musings that aims to relativize and yet uphold a new version of the sacred story under the gaze of a black woman that manipulates and admonishes the characters of the gospel to offer a feminist side of the Bible. The novel discloses Hurston’s mastering of the aesthetics that black folklore infused to the African American cultural experience and her accommodation to bring to the fore the needed voice of black women. Rejecting the role of religion as a reductive mode of social protest, the novel extends its jeremiadic ethos and evolves into a black feminist manifesto in which a world without women equates disruption and instability. Hurston showcases the importance of an inclusive and ethic sacred femininity to reclaim a new type of womanhood both socially and aesthetically. Three decades before the post-colonial era, Hurston’s bold representation of the sacred femininity recasts the jeremiad tradition to pin down notions of humanitarianism, social justice and the recognition of politics of art. All in all, in an era of a manly social protest literature Hurston opts for portraying the folkloric aesthetics of spirituality as creative agency simply to acknowledge the leadership of the sacred femininity that black women could remodel into art.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 17-27
Author(s):  
Samal Marf Mohammed

This research paper attempts to investigate the representation of women, their character and their rights in Dave Eggers’ novel A Hologram for the King (2012), according to the feministic approach to literary works. Gender bias has been reflected in many literary works from classical canonical works to contemporary literary ones and has been dealt with in many critical pieces. The theme of self-objectification, which is closely tied to gender bias to some extent, has not been analyzed, independently and fully, especially in the literature of the post-colonial era. The current study scrutinizes the writer’s portrayal of women characters in order to uncover the replication of the same stereotypes and gender bias categories against women, dominant in the literary works before the post-colonial era. Based on the feminist approach, A Hologram for the King is identified as a misogynist work although it is written in postmodern era. The author of the novel, is inspired by men’s superiority, creates a completely distorted image of women by introducing them as people who turn themselves into objects of pleasure for men. The novelist further deprives women of their rights and misrepresents them as unprincipled humans, disparaging them as naïve and sexually licentious creatures. After all, this study becomes a means of writing back against marginalization of women, in their picturization and their subordination to men.


Author(s):  
Aisha Mustapha Muhammad

In the novel Adichie uncovers the characters’ struggles based on the loss of Identity and Human values which is basically the result of the Nigerian civil war. The characters strive to bring back what they lost due to the war. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born much later after the Nigerian civil war of 1966-1969. Chimamanda Adichie had the interest to revive history of the war; she used her imaginative talent in bringing what she hadn’t experienced. The novel Half of a Yellow Sun is a literary work which uses the theory of post-colonialism or post-colonial studies, it is a term that is used to analyze and explain the legacy of colonialism through the study of a particular book. Colonialism did not happen during the colonial era only but extended to after independence of the countries that were colonized. The novel Half of a Yellow Sun shows the effect of colonialism after independence of Nigeria. Adichie believes that by bringing back the issue of the war, the growing generation would understand more about the war. According to her in Nigeria the history taught in the primary and secondary schools is not complete, some parts were removed and nobody is allowed to talk about it. So through the novel, she tries to go through history to see what has happened, so that she can make the young generation understand history better. The book opens with a poem by Chinua Achebe about the Nigerian civil war.


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