Hearing Voices: A Corporeal Expression of Trauma in Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle

The study aims at giving the clinical symptom “Hearing Voices” a literary conceptualization through an analytical reading of Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle (1976). Shedding light on the synergy between the body, the voice, and trauma, the study specifically examines how the protagonist’s childhood trauma returns through the cracks of her consciousness in a form of hallucinations and hearing ghost voices in adulthood. The study also aims to explore how Atwood problematizes the notion of hearing voices to project her protagonist’s inner world. The ensuing discussion utilizes Sigmund Freud’s theorization on trauma’s embodiment through corporeality, as well as Cathy Caruth’s emphasis on the manifestation of trauma through both the voice and the body. Also relevant is Laura Di Prete’s focus on the interplay between embodied voices and speaking bodies. Keywords: Childhood memories; Corporeality of trauma; Hearing voices; Margaret Atwood,;Lady Oracle.

The “Vernacular Process” and the (Re)construction of Tradition in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

The present paper is an attempt to explore, in and through the prism of Ralph W. Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), the workings of Ellison’s “vernacular process” as a concept that informs the author’s critical views incorporated in the novel. More specifically, Ellison’s revisionary enterprise in this narrative demonstrates his view of African-American tradition as integrated in American and Western tradition. While the form of “invisible criticism” in which Ellison engages is a rather self-conscious manifestation of his critical model of the “vernacular process,” the present work contends that this Ellisonian model actually foreshadows Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s critical paradigm of “Signifyin(g).” What Gates names “literary Signification” stands for an indigenous African-American form of literary revision consisting in a black text’s repeating with difference of another black text’s tropes or rhetorical strategies, or such text’s appropriation of aspects of form in a white antecedent text. Through “literary Signification,” Invisible Man revises African-American texts exemplified in the present article by Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945) and Native Son (1940). Likewise, Ellison’s narrative also revisits American and European texts, an enterprise to be seen in the present work’s examination of Ellison’s revision of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Walt Whitman’s romantic poetry, and T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). By establishing through “literary Signification” his African-American literary “relatives” as well as his Western and American “ancestors,” Ellison ultimately constructs the African-American literary tradition as embedded in the Euro-American tradition and thus underlines the syncretic character of American literature and culture. Keywords: Integrative, Revision, Tradition, Signifyin(G), “Vernacular Process”.

Mécanismes Narratifs dans La Salle de Bain de Jean–Philippe Toussaint

e récit minimaliste, qui est apparu après le Nouveau Roman tente de revitaliser la langue et le roman. Cette nouvelle approche d'écriture romanesque est qualifiée par les critiques comme un concept de la littérature postmoderne. L'auteur postmoderne tente de se retirer de la société pour pouvoir voyager dans son monde intérieur. L'errance, l'absurdité et l'ambiguïté sont des termes qui reviennent régulièrement sous la plume des critiques quand il s'agit de caractériser la littérature postmoderne. Dans cet article après avoir défini le sens du récit minimaliste, nous comparerons les différences et les similitudes de ce courant littéraire avec le Nouveau Roman. Ensuite, nous essayons de montrer les mécanismes narratifs dans La Salle de bain de Jean–Philippe Toussaint. La structure fragmentée de cette œuvre oscille entre un seul mot et quelques pages. Pour le lecteur moderne, la lecture du roman de Toussaint, auteur minimaliste du XXe siècle, peut être choquante. Cet auteur brise la linéarité en faisant éclater l'espace et le temps. Les caractéristiques du style de Toussaint détruisent celles du roman réaliste. A cela s'ajoute le langage qui aide la fragmentation de l'histoire et cause sa démolition. Mots-clés : Le Récit Minimaliste, La Littérature Postmoderne, Le Nouveau Roman, La Salle de Bain, Jean–Philippe Toussaint.

Acquisition des Collocations en Classe de Français Langue Etrangère dans les Universités Jordaniennes

La présente étude vise à évaluer les stratégies d’apprentissage et d’acquisition de collocations françaises par les étudiants des universités jordaniennes. A cette fin, un test de 30 phrases contenant 30 collocations incomplètes a été distribué auprès de 60 étudiants du niveau des troisième et quatrième années ; ils devaient compléter ces collocations en choisissant le mot approprié parmi 4 choix proposés. L’analyse des réponses des étudiants a révélé une certaine confusion au niveau des contraintes syntaxiques d’association des collocations, une influence de la langue maternelle, l’arabe, sur le choix du collocatif et une confusion au niveau des synonymes français. Par conséquent, nous proposons un enseignement insistant sur les contraintes syntaxiques et lexicales des collocations françaises, la comparaison avec les collocations arabes de même sens et même emploi et, enfin, l’introduction des dictionnaires électroniques de cooccurrence. Mots-clés : Collocations, Contraintes, Acquisition, Evaluation, Enseignement, Français Langue Etrangère.

The "Motherland": An Archetypal and Postcolonial Reading of Ghassan Kanafani's Umm Saad

Working at the intersection of postcolonial and archetypal criticism, this article investigates the role of women in resistance literature by looking at a piece of postcolonial Arabic fiction, Ghassan Kanafani's Umm Saad (1969). Rooted in Arab politics concerning land rights and anti-Zionist struggle, the text offers a related archetypal approach to the depiction of women in politicized literature. Umm Saad allegorizes the struggles of Palestinians to reclaim their land. A poor peasant woman, the titular heroine embodies the intimate connection between Palestinians and their land, acting as a helper to combative men and a primal symbol for attachment to the enduring land. Umm Saad is a personal mother and a trope for a feminized colonized territory, metaphorically representing the Palestinian nation and assuming mythological features enabling her to identify with the Earth Mother to send a message against dispossession. Since she embodies positive mother archetype symbolism (the personal mother and the Earth Mother), she acts as a source of fertility and protection. Expressing a political statement via the mother archetype, Kanafani appeals to a basic human need, i.e. the need to settle down in one’s land, which makes woman an indispensible part of the collective unconscious of any nation. Keywords: Archetypal Criticism; Kanafani; Mother(land); Postcolonial Arabic Fiction; Umm Saad.

A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Pictures in ELT Textbooks: Modes of Communication in Focus

There is a tight nexus between visual literacy and textbook picture representations. This is of paramount importance when textbooks in general and ELT textbooks, in particular, are under question. To conduct a visual and verbal discourse analysis based on modes of communication, ELT textbook pictures were analyzed under the assumption that visual and verbal discourse interacts with reflected modes of communication. To this end, 50 ELT textbook pictures were used as the corpus and analyzed according to KvL's (2006) visual images analytical strategies in multimodal texts and Halliday’s (1985) transitivity system for verbal analysis of textbook pictures. The analysis of multimodal resources revealed that the analyzed visual images were used to represent non-human images; close-up images, frontal images, left-right compositions were the most frequent visual modes in the selected pictures. In the case of verbal mode, the relational main-type and verbal minor-type level with 39% and 2% were the most and least frequent verbal strategies, respectively. The findings might have significant theoretical and pedagogical implications for scholars, L2 teachers, and ELT textbook designers to consider the potential of using multimodal resources for non-pedagogical purposes while integrating textbook visual images and verbal strategies to create meanings. Keywords: Multimodal Discourse Analysis, Transitive System’s Processes, Visual Images Interpretive Strategies, Modes of Communication, ELT Textbooks.

Women of War in Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark

Auster’s Man in the Dark includes numerous war stories that altogether contribute to its overall message about the different shape of the world if there were no wars. Most of these war stories are about the miscellaneous effective roles of women during wartime and its aftermath; their contributions to the progress of wars; their victimization as wives and captives; their sufferings as widows and laborers; and their drastic change of identity in accepting new social roles traditionally unachievable. These images of women of war make Man in the Dark a novel about women, although it literally seems not to offer any points about them. This paper is thus to argue that Auster seems to be presenting himself as a pro-feminist in this novel, which is basically about war and what causes war, in highlighting women’s roles during wartime and how their contributions have been unfairly silenced. Keywords: Auster, Man in the Dark, war, women.

The Effect of Using E-Mental Schemata Strategy on Improving EFL Students’ Reading Comprehension Sub Skills

This study examines the potential effect of E-mind mapping on the development of reading comprehension sub-skills among seventh-grade students in Jordan. To achieve the aim, a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design was used. The experimental group consisted of 25 students who were taught reading texts by using electronic mind maps, and the control group consisting of 25 students was taught by following the teacher’s guidebook. A pre-post reading comprehension test was developed. The results revealed significant differences in favor of the experimental group. Students in the E-mind mapping group outperformed the control group in their overall reading comprehension as well as in the reading comprehension sub-skills. Identifying the critical idea is the most developed sub-skill, and the least developed sub-skill was identifying cause and effect sub-skill. Keywords: Reading Comprehension, Reading Comprehension Sub-Skills, E-Mind Mapping, EFL

The Relationship between Learning Vocabulary via Mobile (Mobile-Assisted Language Learning) and Iranian EFL Learners’ Social Anxiety and Loneliness

The present study has investigated the relationship between learning English vocabulary via mobile phone and the learners’ social anxiety and loneliness. The participants of the study were thirty-two intermediate English as foreign language (EFL) learners studying English at the University of Zanjan, Zanjan, Iran. Sixty American English idioms were chosen and became available in a Telegram channel, during a six-week period of treatment to provide the participants with Mobile-Assisted Language Learning (MALL). A researcher-designed achievement test was administered to assess the learners’ vocabulary learning via mobile phone. Interaction Anxiousness Scale (IAS) (Leary 1983) and UCLA Loneliness Scale version 3 (ULS) (Russell 1996) were used to estimate the learners’ social anxiety and loneliness, respectively. The results showed no significant correlation between the variables; thus, it can be concluded that MALL not only frees the learners from the restrictions of time and place, but also minimizes the possible intervention of some socially and emotionally affective variables, such as social anxiety and loneliness in the process of language learning. Keywords: Learning Vocabulary, Mobile-assisted Language Learning, Social Anxiety, Loneliness

ENGAGE Model as an Innovation in Teaching Speaking: A Case of Cognitively More and Less Active EFL Learners

This study investigated the effect of using the ENGAGE Model on the speaking performance of cognitively more and less active EFL learners. The participants of the study were 60 intermediate level male EFL learners who were non-randomly selected from a pool of intermediate students (N=80) based on their performance on a standard version of Preliminary English Test (PET). The selected participants were assigned to the two groups of the ENGAGE Model and Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT). They were also specified in terms of their cognitive ability as cognitively more or less active learners based on their answers to a validated cognitive profile questionnaire. The results revealed that learners in the ENGAGE Model group outperformed students in the TBLT group in terms of their L2 speaking, regardless of whether they belonged to the cognitively less or more active group. It was also concluded students with a cognitively more active profile benefit more from the ENGAGE Model. Keywords: Cognition, ENGAGE Model, Speaking Performance, TBLT, EFL Learners.