“Things” and Recovery From Trauma in Joukhader’s A Map of Salt and Stars

The present article explores the impact of “Things” on the healing journeys of the characters in Syrian American author Jennifer Zeynab Joukhader’s novel A Map of Salt and Stars (2018). It highlights the role of certain “Things” in Nour’s family’s healing process from the traumatic experiences of the Syrian war. The article also sheds light on the war’s reshaping of the objects and the individuals’ relationship with them. The objects that this article investigates are as varied as mundane utensils (a shattered plate), cherished souvenirs (Zahra’s bracelet), and even magical objects (Nour’s stone). Particularly, the article examines the establishment of the close association between the characters and these objects and the impact of this association on the family’s journey towards safety and recovery. For this reason, the present study is situated within the theoretical frameworks of the “Thing” theory and psychological trauma. This article argues that the close association that the characters establish with certain “Things” accompanies them during their grief and traumatic experiences, and subsequently initiates and facilitates their recovery.

STYLISTIC DEVICES IN REVEALING CHARACTERS’ EMOTIONS AND WAYS OF THEIR TRANSLATION

The present research focuses on the analysis of the most common stylistic devices that are used to depict characters’ emotions in two novels “Flowers for Algernon” (2006) and “The Minds of Billy Milligan” (1995) written by the American author Daniel Keyes. The patterns of translation of emotionally coloured extracts of the text where these stylistic devices have been used are analysed in this research. As stylistic devices are considered to be an integral part of the composition of works of fiction and they add emotional colouring and exert pragmatic influence on the readers, translators Viktor Shovkun and Olena Stusenko faced onerous work as their task was to find accurate equivalents and use translation transformations in order to avoid literal translation, achieve adequacy on all levels and preserve the stylistic colouring. Furthermore, it is worth mentioning that the translation should fully replace the original text and recipients should perceive the translated text as identical to the original even though stylistic devices and the emotional component of linguistic semantics are arduous to convey in translation. This research also concludes that translators most often resorted to lexical (concretization, generalization and modulation), lexico-grammatical (omission and addition) and grammatical (verbalization and nominalization) translation transformations to avoid literal translation. It has also been established and verified by a comparative method that more stylistic devices are used in the Ukrainian translation than in the original text. The most widely used stylistic devices are metaphors, epithets, comparisons and idioms. Key words: stylistic device, translation transformation, source text, target text, pragmatics, communicative intention, emotions.

Winnifred Eaton

Winnifred Eaton Babcock Reeve (b. 1875–d. 1954) was a Chinese North American author best known for fiction published under the faux-Japanese penname “Onoto Watanna.” In her forty-year career, Eaton published nineteen novels, many of which were critically acclaimed and translated into many languages. Eaton also published hundreds of stories, poems, and articles in US, Canadian, Jamaican, and English magazines and newspapers. She was born in Montreal to a white British father and a Chinese mother who married in China and, after brief stays in England and the United States, emigrated to Canada. Whereas Winnifred pretended to be Japanese, Eaton’s older sister Edith wrote sympathetically about diasporic Chinese using the pen name “Sui Sin Far”; with her sister Sara, Winnifred co-wrote Chinese-Japanese Cook Book (1914), one of the first Asian American cookbooks. Sara’s experiences also inspired Winnifred Eaton’s novel Marion (1916). In 1895, Eaton began her writing career working as a reporter in Jamaica. Soon afterward, she moved to Cincinnati, where she first assumed the identity of a half-Japanese, and then to Chicago. Writing as “Onoto Watanna,” Eaton published prolifically about Japanese life, exploring romantic encounters between Americans and Japanese and the experiences of mixed-race children and interracial kinship. Her Miss Numè of Japan (1898) is the first novel in English by a writer of Asian descent published in North America. In 1901, when she was living in New York, Eaton married journalist Bertrand Babcock and published her novel A Japanese Nightingale, which skyrocketed her to fame, inspiring a play, a film, and an opera. After reviewers expressed doubts about her Japanese identity, however, Eaton tried to leave Japanese subjects behind her. She submitted Diary of Delia (1907) to publishers under another pseudonym, published Me (1915) and Marion (1916) anonymously, and published one final Japanese-themed text, Sunny-San, in 1922. In 1917, after divorcing Babcock, Eaton married American businessman Francis Reeve, moved to Alberta, and rebranded herself as “Winnifred Reeve,” rancher’s wife and Canadian literary nationalist. There, Eaton wrote Cattle, a powerful naturalist novel about a girl raped by her employer, and His Royal Nibs, a romance between an English aristocrat and a young Alberta woman, and tried her hand at writing screenplays. Eaton received her first film credit in 1921 on Universal’s “False Kisses.” When the Reeves’ ranch failed, Eaton joined the East Coast scenario department of Universal, a then-minor film producer, and soon afterward was made its Hollywood editor-in-chief and literary advisor. Eaton collaborated on dozens of screenplays and adaptations, translating her experience writing Japanese romances into scripts featuring exotic locales and peoples, as well as commissioned scripts during Universal’s transition from “silents” to “talkies”. She also ghostwrote scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Eaton left Hollywood and returned to Alberta in 1931 after a brief estrangement from Reeve. At her death, most of Eaton’s works were out of print. Yet she remains significant to North American literary history as the first Asian American novelist and screenwriter and as an early Canadian author and woman journalist.

Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Human Jobs (Review of the Monograph George Gilder “Gaming AI”. Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2020).

A review of the book “Gaming AI” by the famous American author, economist and co-founder of the Discovery Institute, George Gilder, in which he argues that Artificial Intelligence (AI) cannot think like a man, but can change conditions of a human jobs. Therefore, he expects that in the future AI will be controlled by a man in those types of jobs that are routine and mechanical, as well as help him/her in creativeness.

Hunter S. Thompson, Transmetropolitan, and the Evolution from Author to Character

<p>This thesis examines American author Hunter S. Thompson, in the context of his own works – primarily Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Rum Diary– as well as the representation of him as a character in the graphic text Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis. The evolution of Thompson from author to character and the development of that character in his own works is examined, as well as how this development allowed for his character to be fully realised in a completely fictional world. In turn, the fully developed use of Thompson’s character is the starting point for my analysis of Transmetropolitan could potentially be read as a work of New Journalism, albeit a fictional one. The first chapter examines how Thompson began writing himself as a character in his early fictional work The Rum Diary. Though largely overlooked by critics because of its long delayed publication and the focus on the more flashy and better known Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Rum Diary is critical to Thompson’s development of himself as a character in his works in particular, and to his development as an author in general. Though The Rum Diary is ostensibly a purely fictional novel, this chapter examines how the character Paul Kemp is actually largely autobiographical, and how Kemp is an early version of the same character Thompson uses in his later nonfiction. I then analyse the development of that nonfiction version, Raoul Duke, in Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. As The Rum Diary is not actually purely fictional, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is not actually completely nonfictional. Thompson, as this chapter shows, did not believe in the divide between fact and fiction, and he uses the character he develops in Raoul Duke to write about himself while creatively embellishing the truth. I then look at how Thompson wrote himself so strongly into his character that he became inextricably viewed as actually being Raoul Duke, and how that character was in turn viewed and written about. The second chapter examines the legacy of Thompson’s fully formed self-characterisation, as it is picked up by another author and written in the fully fictional context of the graphic novel series Transmetropolitan. I consider how Transmetropolitan’s main character Spider Jerusalem continues Thompson’s self-as-character through his characterisation, behaviour, and language. Furthermore I analyse how, within the world of the series, Spider as a journalist continues Thompson’s legacy as a writer. The third and final chapter examines how Spider’s characterisation as a continuation of Thompson is an important contextual factor for considering Transmetropolitan as a work of New Journalism. I consider the connection to Thompson, the content of Spider’s articles, and the format in which the articles are depicted in the graphic novel</p>

Revising Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Closer Look at Two Color Line Stories “The Wife of His Youth” and “Cecily’s Dream” by Charles W. Chesnutt

This article explores an African American writer’s revision of a famous English poet Tennyson whose versified medieval portrait of the Arthurian legend appears in Idylls of the King as well as other poems. The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899), a story collection by African American author Charles Chesnutt (1858–1932), addresses parameters contextualized in the aftermath of slavery such as esthetic notions of beauty tied to whiteness and intra-racial inequality. The final failure of two protagonists, a man and a woman, to fulfill their romantic aspirations of whiteness connects the collection’s titular story to “Cecily’s Dream.” In addition to the color-line theme, however, Chesnutt is motivated to refer to the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), including moments in which chivalric codes of honor, whiteness and flawed courtly love are idealized. Tennyson’s parabolic poems provide Chesnutt’s intertextual scheme to engage the implied reader by renewing, transforming and also subverting the motif of courtly love in these Arthurian idylls.

The Arabs and Gabriel García Márquez

In 2014, newspapers across the Spanish-speaking world covered how the international press paid tribute to García Márquez. Particular attention was given to the extensive eulogies in the Arab press. A special homage was paid to the author’s memory in Saudi Arabia, where the Third South American-Arab Countries Summit was being held at the time. This was not Naguib Mahfuz; this was García Márquez. How was it possible for a Latin American author to become that popular across the Arab world? How was it possible for his novels to be referenced naturally in popular Arab films such as The Embassy in the Building (2005)? Was all this simply due to the fact that in postindependence Latin America, particularly since the 1940s, there has been a growing de-orientalist discourse? Or did García Márquez craft a particular dialogue with the internal and external Arabs? With all this in mind, and by drawing on Latin American (de)orientalism in the works of Kushigian, Nagy-Zekmi, and Tyutina, among others, this article analyzes the dimensions and implications of García Márquez’s depiction of the internal Arab (immigrant in Latin America) in some of his novels as well as his dialogue with the external Arab (the Arab world) in some of his press articles.

The Oxford Handbook of Gabriel García Márquez

García Márquez’s writing is a literary order that will continue to be read, studied, and learned so long as there are practitioners, students, and lovers of literature. One Hundred Years of Solitude, of course, is admired by millions across the world, from high school students to major novelists such as Salman Rushdie and the late Toni Morrison. The Oxford Handbook of Gabriel García Márquez takes a broad overview of the life and oeuvre of “Gabo” (as he is affectionately known throughout Latin America) and examines them thoroughly. The volume incorporates ongoing critical approaches such as feminism, ecocriticism, Marxism, and ethnic studies, as well as signaling such key aspects of García Márquez’s work as his Caribbean-Colombian background; his use of magical realism, myth, and folklore; and his left-wing political positions. Thirty-two wide-ranging chapters by a diverse and international group of experts deal with the bulk of the author’s writings—both major and minor, early and late, long and short—as well as his involvement with film. They also give due attention to the central roles played by romantic love, by his prose style, and by the various kinds of music in his literary art. Particularly worthy of mention are the contributors’ extensive discussions of the worldwide artistic impact of García Márquez—on established canons, on the Global South, on imaginative writing in South Asia, China, Japan, and throughout Africa and the Arab world. More than a Latin American author, he truly qualifies as a global phenomenon. This is the first book on García Márquez that places the Colombian within that wider context.

“A Book One Can with Complete Confidence Call Important”: Albert Erskine, Ralph Ellison, and the Publishing of Invisible Man

In this article I examine the editing and publishing of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man by Albert Erskine. Over the course of the piece, I deploy letters, drafts, and other material drawn from both Ellison's archive in the Library of Congress and Erskine's own archive at the University of Virginia to unpack how Erskine, as a white editor at a powerful international publishing house, conceived of his role in shepherding to market and marketing what he saw as a major literary work by an African American author.

An Eco-critical Analysis of Moby Dick

Moby Dick is well acknowledged as a world masterpiece by the American author Herman Melville. This paper attempts to analyze Melville’s Moby Dick by the theory of eco-criticism. In order to better approach the American society before the 1950s, the author aims to scrutinize the novel with eco-criticism from three such aspects as nature, society and spirit so that the present society can gain some insights in preventing and solving similar problems. Divided into several parts as follows, this paper introduces Melville and Moby Dick as well as eco-criticism first and then interprets the novel via eco-criticism in three aspects, and finally ends with its realistic significance as a conclusion.