Headley’s The Mere Wife: Diffused Satire in a troubling piece of Beowulfiana

Focus on Grendel's Mother leads us to expect a feminist attack on male heroic narrative, but Maria Dahvana Headley offers us a complex and nuanced look at parent-child, upper-lower class, and male-female patterns of interaction in this novel symbiotic upon the Anglo-Saxon BEOWULF. Since the attacks sometimes seem contradictory, I use diffused satire theory to separate the various kinds of satire, show where contradictions and ambiguities occur, and show how they can be resolved. Headley makes the point that you need to hear from all the voices in an event, not just from the last one who writes the history. What she does is give us those various voices and goad us to work out our personal positions on the issues for which she offers no easy satiric answer. <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face{font-family:"Cambria Math";panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;mso-font-charset:0;mso-generic-font-family:roman;mso-font-pitch:variable;mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;}@font-face{font-family:Calibri;panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4;mso-font-charset:0;mso-generic-font-family:swiss;mso-font-pitch:variable;mso-font-signature:-536859905 -1073732485 9 0 511 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal{mso-style-unhide:no;mso-style-qformat:yes;mso-style-parent:"";margin:0in;mso-pagination:widow-orphan;font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}.MsoChpDefault{mso-style-type:export-only;mso-default-props:yes;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}size:8.5in 11.0in;margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in;mso-header-margin:.5in;mso-footer-margin:.5in;mso-paper-source:0;}div.WordSection1{page:WordSection1;}

The Politics of the Hero's Journey: A Narratology of American Special Education Textbooks

This paper explores introduction to special education textbooks in order to illuminate how they portray the social and political work of special educators, especially in relation to disabled students and adults. This study analyzed five leading special education textbooks used in university teacher education programs using traditional methods of discourse analysis, including line-by-line coding and language-in-use with valuation. The analysis and coding tracked story plot components and characters associated with five phases evident in the narrative structure of a hero's journey: (1) the call to adventure, (2) supernatural aid, (3) threshold guardians, (4) trials and tribulations, and (5) the return. Discussions of the findings illustrate the problematic ways in which the textbooks create a heroic narrative of past and current elements tied to the field of special education.

From Muse to Material: The Defiance of Homeric Identity Through Creative Adaptation

The hero crossing the wine-dark sea, a king kneeling at the foot of his son’s killer, a boy defending his homeland in his father’s absence. The world of epic Greek myth is an alluring and vast web of heroic narrative and moral dilemma. These iconic moments transcend history and cultural decay. They live in the literature, art, and philosophical framework of the contemporary human experience. Homeric myth is intrinsically embedded in our cultural landscape; it is the thread that runs through the most mundane storytelling and the most epic fantasy narrative. The narratives of the Iliad and The Odyssey have been institutionalized in the Western canon and prescribed as the essential foundation of academic discourse. Yet these same myths also include a daughter sacrificed by the hand of her father, a woman raped and held hostage by the greatest of the Greeks, and a girl whose beauty launched a thousand ships and killed even more men. There is room, though, in the oeuvre of Homeric myth, for an elevation of otherwise silenced voices. Through reimagining epic narratives such as the Iliad and The Odyssey, women authors transform exclusionary texts into stories that encompass the identities reflected in contemporary society.

Death, genre, and gender in the graphic novel 'I kill giants'

This paper analyzes the heroic narrative in the graphic novel for children and youth I Kill Giants. Since the central theme of the novel is the heroine's dealing with the loss of a parent, the analysis relies on recent research on the topic of death in children's and adolescent literature that emphasizes a close connection between this topic and gender representation/construction. Dealing with the death of loved ones and the awareness of the inevitability of one's own death in children's literature is often presented as part of the growing-up process in which heroines acquire knowledge about their position within social power structures. The paper focuses on the main structural elements of the heroic narrative, such as overcoming obstacles through action, triumphing over the enemy, perseverance, and commitment to the goal as the main features of the hero's character. From the point of view of feminist literary criticism, the paper aims to show that progressiveness in terms of gender construction, apart from the inclusion of a female character in the position of a hero, requires redefining most of the main structural elements of this predominantly male genre. These changes in the graphic novel I Kill Giants have undermined clear boundaries within the binary oppositions: male-female, private-public, civilized-wild, realistic-fantastic, rational-emotional, adult-child, showing significant possibilities for these types of interventions within the genre framework of the heroic narrative.

Воинские коллизии в Багацохуровском цикле эпоса «Джангар»

Introduction.The epic narrative of the early Baga-Tsokhor cycle (1853-1862), being heroic in nature, is based on archaic motifs which can also be traced through the topic of military conflicts. Goals. The study aims to consider the main sections of military conflicts, and the following tasks be solved thereto: typological identification of a hero (‘forefather hero’ or ‘warrior hero’); designation of functions attributed to the war horse and weapons; delineation of combat forms and symbolic epic backgrounds. Materials and Methods. The paper analyzes texts of the early Baga-Tsokhor cycle of the Kalmyk Jangar epic. The work employs comparative, textual, and analytical research methods. Results. In fact, plots and motifs of this topic are a symbiosis of archaic and heroic lines. Prologues to the songs of the Cycle are formed as part of a mythological interpretation of events, and the plots of the songs — although devoted to exploits of the heroes, which determines a military, heroic nature of the cycle — are still dependent on magical mythological motifs. The warrior hero still possesses rudiments of the image typical for the first-born (‘forefather’) hero, which explains the absence of important links of the heroic epic, e.g. motifs of miraculous birth and heroic childhood. The war horse and weapons are still destined, and the latter also serve as an accommodation for the external soul of the hero. The epic background is also twofold: while the prologue describes the primordial era, the plot deals with the time of consolidation of various ethnic groups. Conclusions. It can be presumed that the Baga-Tsokhor cycle of the epic reflects a transition from a ‘small’ epic form to a ‘large’ one, an evolution from the original core of the archaic epic to the final ‘concentric’ cyclization of the heroic narrative.

‘Beyond the limit of human endurance’: The stolen Manx history of Dunkirk

This article reappraises the experience of the civilian crews aboard Manx personnel vessels engaged in Operation Dynamo, and the contested aftermath. More than 20,000 troops were retrieved by nine ships of the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company, three of which were sunk in and off Dunkirk. There is more than enough material for a heroic narrative to emerge, yet a sense of scandal seems to cling to these particular civilian crews. Various political, social and cultural forces foster distinctly separate narratives between the United Kingdom and Isle of Man. However, empirical research in Manx and UK archives, including access to a hitherto closed file, reveals a different story: that the official Admiralty narrative of Operation Dynamo was intentionally weaponized against the Manx civilian crews for political reasons. This was achieved through the creation of reports that were false, misleading or unsupported by evidence, the provocation of the Isle of Man’s Lieutenant Governor into acts of reprisal, and through the work of an unseen editorial hand in Admiralty archives. The influence of this hostile narrative, which continues to be reinforced, has obscured the contributions of the true civilians of Dunkirk.