Rhetorical Analysis of Introduction Sections from Humanities and Sciences Research Theses Authored by Pakistani Scholars

This research aims to investigate the rhetorical structures of the introduction sections of Pakistani research theses at postgraduate level. The corpus of study contains 32 “Introduction” sections of Pakistani research theses from two faculties: Humanities and Sciences. The faculty of Sciences include theses from disciplines of Zoology, Chemistry, Botany and Biochemistry, whereas the faculty of Humanities include theses of Mass Communication, English, Gender Studies and Computer Studies. Both qualitative and quantitative methods including textual analysis and frequency percentages have been used for data analysis. The online software Compleat Lexical Tutor(Cobb.2015) was employed to extract the sentence units of the data. A hand tagged move analysis was conducted by following Swales’ Model (2004) as a reference framework. All the instances of moves and steps were calculated to explore the rhetorical variation across two faculties. Findings of the study disclosed that Pakistani authors follow their own pattern of Move 1 (Establishing the research territory) along with the variation in frequency of its constituent steps across two faculties. The demarcation between two faculties has revealed that, in the field of sciences, there is a stronger use of topic generalization than in humanities. Moreover, the inter-textual links to prior research in the field of sciences are provided more frequently than in the field of humanities. However, scholars from the faculty of Humanities represent their stance by claiming relevance of the field.

Contesting Discourses and Transmodalization in J.M.Coetzee’s Fiction

South African metafictive literature by white writers, specifically J. M. Coetzee (Nobel laureate, 2003), is essentially pivoted on the black-white dialectics of discourse. The narrative is informed with a variety of sociopolitical inflections that pronounce in various ways the contemporary ideology in South African literature. Critics have greatly delineated the racio-political quagmire of the colonial subject in metafictive literature appearing in the last few decades of twentieth century. However, a deeper analysis of the representation of the colonial subject that interrogates the discourses in narrative is still untapped. J.M.Coetzee’s South African-based novels, mainly Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Life and Times of Michael K (1983) and Age of Iron (1990), manifest a metafictional consciousness that investigates the constructs of reality of the colonial subject. It is significant to explore the logocentric premise in the representation of colonial subject and how this contributes to the meaning of the fictional word. This study is a narratological research of Coetzee’s technique of transmodalization (narrative mode shifts) between two types of discourses, the pedagogical and performative, and employs Homi K Bhabha’s (1994) theoretical framework of representative discourse. In examining the narrative mode shifts between frame breaks, metanarrative, narrative of words, narrative of dreams, and narrative of topography, this research argues that a non-position is generated between the contesting discourses. This research becomes a model for the study of colonial dynamics in metafictive white writing. It aims to unravel the elements integral in voicing the conditionality of the colonized subject and the contention of representation. This study also explores the metonymical relationships in narrative that reflect intrinsic aspects of the signification of representation.

Sexuality and Objectification in Dastan Narratives: Women as Objects of Desire in Hoshruba, the Land and the Tilism (Book 1)

The writers of dastan narratives reflect their age-old contextual desire(s) in fictional experiences. The never-ending popularity of these ideologically romantic tales is significant in the history of Urdu language and literature. Metonymically, the dastan, Tilism-e-Hoshruba, encompasses the much celebrated theme of Dastan-e-Amir Hamza—an eternal battle between virtue and vice—in its narrative discourse, but the quickness of the fantasized actions makes this dastan phantasmagorically more thrilling. Despite being enormous source(s) of narrative pleasure in the Subcontinent, these classical discursive practices prove to be an explicit reflection of the textual and sexual politics traditionally perpetuated in the Indo-Islamic patriarchal structures. The rendition of female characters, for instance, in the narrative discourse of Hoshruba, depends on the patriarchal modes of production and re- presentation pre-existing in classical cultural contexts. Presented as alluring objects of the ideological syntax, many of the women in these fictional texts customarily remain victim to the patriarchal narrative gaze. The narrators of dastan employ an evocatively figurative language in sensationalizing the graphic description of the female characters in Hoshruba. From seductions to submissions, all of their acts are pre-eminently destined to serve the phallogocentric desires of their authors, audience and chivalrous heroes. This paper, therefore, is the critical study of the patterns of desire(s) with reference to sexuality and the culture of objectification in Dastan Hoshruba, the Land and the Tilism, Book 1.1 By intersecting romance and sexuality, it also aims at exploring the narrative units of desire that objectify the sexuality of female characters through the mechanics of fantasy and gaze.

Image Schemas in Diasporic Visual Discourse: Peripheral Voices in the Selected Photographs of Afghan Migrants Living in Pakistan

This study explores the socio-cognitive dynamics of the photographic representation of Afghan Refugees residing in Pakistan. It aims to reveal counter discursivity present in the images of Afghan refugees and accentuate the visual nature of this counter discourse. Data sets taken for analysis consist of five photographs of Afghan refugees retrieved from the album collection of an international photographer Muhammad Muheisen. By adopting an interdisciplinary perspective based on three schools, i.e. Critical Discourse Studies, Social Semiotics and Cognitive Linguistics, the study proposed a Cognitive Grammar approach to traditional Transitivity Analysis. Cognitive transitivity analysis explored the discursive strategy of Structural Configuration by highlighting the cognitive systems such as image schemas, narrative structures and processes in both visual representations and textual taglines assigned to the images by the photographer. The findings of the study revealed the employment of CONTAINER, FORCE, SPACE, and SOURCE- PATH Schemas and dominant presence of agentive and transactional roles of Afghan refugees. The taglines of photographs revealed material processes dominating the discourse, thus, coinciding with agentive representation of Afghan refugees. The findings revealed that image schemas, narrative structures and processes, being embodied sources, preconceptual and mimetic structures, project Afghan photographic discourse as marginalized in the face of Pakistan’s Refugee Policies.

Research Article

The article examines The Wasted Vigil, a post-9/11 novel by Nadeem Aslam to find out how the writer articulates imperialist ideology in his composition. The study reveals that the writer internalizes the imperialist discourses on the war in Afghanistan and becomes a voice of the imperialist powers by consolidating their ideology. Some of the ideologies that the novel incorporates are Western cultural supremacy, fear of the ‘evil empire’, mystic East, human rights violation, stereotyping, Islamophobia, patriarchy, white man’s burden, rehabilitation and political economy. Inspired by the theories of Said, Dabashi, and Chomsky, the paper approves that the writer, obliterating some ground realities, extends on the persistent misrepresentation of the local culture and stereotypes the war-affected people of Afghanistan as established by the imperialists during the New Great Game.

Abjection and Taboo Objects in Edward Bond’s Plays

What is most striking about Edward Bond’s plays is his unconventional representation of visible forms of violence and insanity. His plays deeply probe political, economic, and societal norms and values in provocative and thought-provoking ways for which he has often been compared to such contemporary British playwrights as Pinter, Brenton, Osborne, and Arden who profusely use violence and cruelty in their works. This article draws on Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection and develops the argument that violence in Edward Bond can be placed within the field of abjection as its diverse manifestations appear as taboo objects, abject emaciated, festering bodies and sites of abjection that populate his dramatic world.

Between Form and Molecule: Investigating the Beyond in Chris Colfer’s The Wishing Spell

Fairy tales permeate the world with a magical charm, but time has brought changes in fairy tale narration, mode, context and interpretations. Under the post structural lens, the undertaken research investigates the transformations that occur at molecular level, beyond the physical and molar corporeality among selected characters in the fairy tale, The wishing spell (2013). The focus is not the examination of changes in physical anatomic structure or form of the selected characters, rather the exploration of body’s capability and potentials of undergoing phenomenological transformations through the lens of becoming molecular by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987). Becoming molecular promotes the idea that instead of comprehending the whole form of an issue, a fragment or molecule needs to be comprehended as it makes it easy to understand the entire form of problem. Becoming molecular is an internal or mind attachment of the body to another entity and the attachment or link is beyond the physical form of corporal state of being. The undertaken research endeavors to map multiple occurrences of becoming molecular in the characters of Snow White and the Evil Queen, by following the thematic model of textual analysis by Miles and Huberman (2014). The findings reveal that becoming molecular is an endless process that emerges in unlimited molecular links amid two different bodies. These links illuminate profound insights by influencing thoughts and bringing changes in actions and behavior. The changes cannot be perceived through senses as in the physical world. These links do not disrupt the physical appearance of either body, rather bring changes at molecular level.

CONSTRUCTING A SELF BETWEEN IMAGE AND TEXT: READING BECHDEL’S FUN HOME

Graphic memoirs offer a visual representation of the relationship between a moment and the construction of memory. McCloud describes the work of the comic author and the reader as a dance between “the seen and the unseen”. This is what makes the medium of graphic memoirs unique, as it “gives so much to its audience while asking so much from them as well” (1993, p. 92). My aim in this paper is to ascertain the impact using graphic conventions has on the effective and affective construction of meaning and identity in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) and howr The Gutter becomes even more significant in graphic memoirs, because the use of panels can fracture the flow of the narrative into the sequenced segments which alternate with the blank spaces of the gutters. These blank spaces represent an effort to redefine the “connections between memory and history, private experience and public life” via a written account and the “act of witness” represented by a combination of the visual and the verbal (Cvetkovich, 2008, 111-20). Using this mix of image and text, Bechdel creates an almost palimpsestic effect as a majority of panels show items layered over other images, indicating a blending between the narrative of Bechdel’s real life experience and the representation of that life experience in the text. For the reader, this can imply a way to address the gaps in knowledge not only for them but also for Bechdel herself.

The Progressive Face of Contemporary Pakistani English Novel: A Study of Ali’s Night of the Golden Butterfly (2010)

The present study is based in a departure from the currently abounding academic researches into contemporary Pakistani English novel exploring the cultural and religious identity crises of the local and diasporic Pakistani characters in the wake of 9/11 which constitute a single, superstructure-related segment of the aggregate social reality. The present research aims to bring to the fore a holistic and progressive strain within this corpus. Formulating a theoretical paradigm out of Marxist literary criticism as expounded in the seminal works of Leon Trotsky and K. Damodaran, the study thematically scrutinizes the narrative of Night of the Golden Butterfly (2010) by Tariq Ali for a realistic depiction of the socio-economic and political conditions of present-day Pakistan, and the delineation of the multiple spheres of life such as the economic, political, institutional, moral and intellectual as interconnected components of the composite unit of society. The study also appraises the novel for the representation of a vision for better collective future and suggestiveness in relation to the means and modes for a radical transformation of the social order.

Seesaw of Spatial Metamorphosis in Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower

Urban space is inherently uneven. Economic pursuits and commercial integrity translate urban space into categorization of haves and have-nots.Neo-Marxists theorize spatial disequilibrium through the dynamics of capital accumulation.Analysis of Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga helps to explorecity space as a commodified place that serves the interests of capital accumulation by converting it as a space of differences, struggles and negotiations. While examining spatial alienation, I probe the making of urban other who experiences, evictions, and displacements followed by the development projects of capital accumulation in the theoretical frame of David Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession. The urban space expands and grows not for the urban other but for the elitist consumption. This directs the argument to inspect the creation of a critical spatial consciousness to assert the urban other’s right to the city. By retaliating to their evictions and dispossessions they devise strategies for remaking their space through their lived daily experiences. This has been supported by the theoretical lens of Henri Lefebvre’s “The right to the city”. The selected fiction defines uneven city space whereby the spatial metamorphosis dispossesses and displaces the urban other andraises critical spatial consciousness to obstruct subsequent displacements.