Romantic Love, Gender Imbalance and Feminist Readings in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea

Even though Iris Murdoch’s novels depict a profoundly patriarchal society, most scholars have generally failed to identify any feminist aspirations in her work. This article aims to reassess her legacy as a writer by analysing from a feminist perspective one of her most acclaimed novels, The Sea, The Sea (1978). The tension between the androcentric approach of a self-deluded male narrator and a female author whose worldview is strongly influenced by her gender results in a feminist critique which is not based on the recovery of a female voice, but on the exploration of patriarchy within the novel and the production of a feminist epistemology derived from a dialogue between Murdoch’s fiction and philosophy.

La traduction au prisme du genre et de la pensée islamique

The main objective of this article is to make the female voice heard in an area of the world where women are discriminated against and prejudiced, despite the progress made regarding their status in status in society. The aim is to demonstrate that the translation of the male discourse produced undergoes fundamental transformations that are the result of choices studied by the translator. She intervenes She intervenes and rewrites the text in her own way, even in the way that allows her to represent herself as a full human being in her own right, not relegated to the background. Through the analysis of samples taken from the work of the Algerian thinker Malek Bennabi “Les conditions de la renaissance” as well as the questioning of the first translation by the Egyptian thinker Abdel Sabbour Chahine, considered reductive and ‘religiously oriented’, we are in line with the feminist approach to translation feminist approach to translation, which advocates taking a stand on the dominant discourse. By invoking some of the methodological tools of Giles' IDRC Model and by referring to the notion of subjectivity developed in the framework of feminism of colour, we proceeded to the analysis of the source and target texts. We found that the doubly masculine discourse (the author and her (the author and his translator) was reproduced differently in the target language by taking into consideration elements that are absent from the source text. The invisibility of the woman in the process since she is considered an object, she passes to the status of visibility through the translational choices, the positions taken, and thus the decisions made.

A Female Voice for Action in the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea

Although most critical attention on laments for the dead in the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea has focused on Pleberio’s long lament for Melibea in Auto XXI, Elicia’s lament for the loss of her lover, Sempronio, his companion, Pármeno, and her protector, Celestina, is highly significant for plot development. Her lament is a decisive event that sets in motion a plan for revenge that will ultimately lead to the deaths of Calisto and Melibea. This article demonstrates how Elicia’s personal experience of loss brings about significant changes in her characterization. With the help of Areúsa, Elicia hatches a plan for vengeance on the aristocratic lovers that she despises. Building on Louise Haywood’s studies of female laments for the dead, it examines Elicia’s curse on Calisto and Melibea and shows how her words have real and tragic consequences. In Rojas’s world, a prostitute’s expression of grief is a force strong enough to topple the elites of society and fundamentally contribute to the tragedia embedded in his work’s hybrid title.

Arias for an Untold Want: The Queer Desire of the Diva Film

This chapter defines the diva as a specific cultural type that has been shaped by long-held ideas about the female voice, but has moved beyond the narrow category of the female singer, and grown to encompass many non-singing women and characters who are understood as a “public success” but a “private failure.” Using the operatic history of the term “diva,” the chapter defines the type not by its reception in queer circles, but by its foundation in a “doubly feminine” relation of desire. Via close readings of the films Rapsodia Satanica (1917), Funny Girl (1968), and Queen Christina (1933), it explores the queer valences of female “narcissism,” and argues that a transhistorical “diva genre” of film is defined by a queer feminine “doubling,” which manifests in scenes featuring the spectacularized longing of the female lead.

I Dream of Siri: Magic and Female Voice Assistants

Recent advances in science and engineering have facilitated the development of artificial intelligence voice assistants. While this is true from a technical aspect, smart speakers and voice assistants did not develop in isolation from the rest of human society. The devices may be new, but the practices and patterns in their development and use are not. Using Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, I map homologous practices of smart speaker interaction onto historical conceptions of supernatural magic use. This structural comparison suggests that practices and patterns that were essential to magic use have re-emerged in smart speaker utilization in similar forms. Some of these practices are noteworthy for their homology alone. However, other homologous behaviors revive patterns of inequity that, in Western magical traditions, had privileged the traditionally educated man. The goal of this paper is to elucidate the ghost in the machine: the prejudiced social practices of supernatural magic that were asserted to be eradicated yet which are now, nevertheless, newly instantiated within our most cutting-edge devices.

Female Voice in Urdu Poetry

This essay aims at understanding the development and struggles of a ‘female voice’ within Urdu poetic tradition through the writings of women poets of the Nineteenth century in contrast to the women poets of the twentieth-century feminist movement. The women in traditional Urdu poetry have remained a silent cruel beloved, the image offered is that of a ‘feckless beloved, endowed with heavenly beauty, reigned: fair to face, doe-eyed, dark hair, tall and willowy, a woman who vacillated from indifference, shyness and modesty to wanton cruelty. The essay is an attempt to understand the level of autonomy of the female voice in the poems of women poets through the years. To portray the development of a feminine expression in Urdu poetry the paper will be ranging from the poems of tawaifs (courtesan) of the eighteenth century like Mah Laqa Chanda, their attempts to acquire a place within the patrilineal Urdu literary tradition; the rekhti tradition where men wrote poems in a female voice, to the twentieth century feminist poets like Kishwar Naheed and Fehmida Riaz. The paper is based on Hakim Fasihuddin Ranj’s anthology ‘Baharistan-i-Naz’ which provides a brief yet important introduction on the status of various tawaif poets within the Urdu literary circle; Rahat Azmi’s Halat-i-Mah Laqa, a biographical work on the life and works of Mah Laqa Bai Chanda; and Rukhsana Ahmad’s ‘We Sinful Women’, a compilation of the original and translated works of feminist women poets of twentieth-century Pakistan. Various secondary sources have been used to understand the dynamics behind the writing style of these poets and how similar terms came to be used for portraying completely distinct themes.

Destructive and Constructive Violence in Yvonne Vera’s Nehanda

This article addresses the issue of violence seen through the lens of colonialism and its impacts on the literary discourses African writers in general, and women writers in particular, use forward as a responsive “weapon” to fight back destructive violence. Given the scope of repressive colonial violence and its destructive side effects on the African continent, especially on the woman subject, the paper focuses on one of the pioneers of Zimbabwean literature, Yvonne Vera’s Nehanda. On the one hand, the study brings to light the extent to which the female voice is instrumental in the retrieval and reconstruction of women’s worth. On the other hand, it evidences the way in which the female body is essential in the construction of national identity, freedom, and unity.