Innocent Texts Conspiring with Imperial Desire: A Critique of Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran

'Native informant' acclaims the transmission of stereotypical representation of Muslim society as a general rule and women specifically. The present work provides a comprehensive prospect of women status defined by religion Islam to build consciousness globally. Through qualitative inquiry, the present study critically analyzes Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003). Iranian writer Azar Nafisi assumes the role of 'native informant' who amplifies the narrative to authenticate her account. The study employs 'amplification' as apparatus to scrutinize fundamentalist perspective of religion Islam reflected in Iranian fiction. Spivak's concept of 'native informant' is reproduced in the narratives to establish the narrator's role as a hybrid character whose thoughts regularly record and oppose the assumed fundamentalist obligations set by the Islamic regime. The narrative begins in the narrator's house, who ardently assembles her university students and discusses various classical literary works. The memoir recounts a woman's experience in Tehran before, during, and after the revolution. Names of characters are concealed to keep individuals safe from probable vengeance and degradation. Primarily, the study enquires how knowledge production through writing personal narratives runs into mainstream culture, characterizing the representation of stereotypes. Narratives inform about a specific culture and mirror the role of 'native informant' in amplifying fundamentals of native culture and religion. Nafisi's account of extensive cultural and religious judgments from context-specific attempts to extrapolate that Islamic Republic Iran vehemently formed a desperate unobtrusive region, which maltreated women. Nafisi may have a self-protective standpoint for women, but she emerged more like a "native informant" rather than a social reformer by amplifying the situation.

The Acoustic Effect of Urdu Phonological Rules on English Speech

The paper is about the acoustic effect of Urdu phonological rules on Pakistani Urdu speakers' English speech. The objective of the study is to discuss the phenomenon of multiple pronunciations of an English word that has the same spellings, meaning, and part of speech but different pronunciations in the English speech of Urdu speakers. Sometimes these alternative pronunciations are considered mispronunciation rather than multiple pronunciations. The primary purpose of this study is to make a boundary-line between mispronunciations and multiple pronunciations of English vocabulary. Thus, an acoustic analysis of Urdu speakers' English speech has been done by collecting speech data of 30 Urdu speakers from the Public sector universities of Pakistan. Consequently, this paper caters to language-dependent variations of Urdu. This paper only deals with three phonological rules, i.e., segment alternation, ellipsis, epenthesis, which become the cause for re-syllabification of English words. These three foci of research have been selected because the data analysis has confirmed that the 'multiple pronunciation' is mainly occurred due to these three elements. These three categories cover several sub-categories that cover many instances in the data analysis. The data also confirms that phonological variations occur due to stress shifting in Urdu speakers' English speech in Pakistan.

Archetypes and Creative Imagination in ‘Ode to Psyche’: A Jungian Analysis

John Keats’ ‘Ode to Psyche’ is steeped in mythology and dream symbolism, which encourages us to understand it from the perspective of depth psychology/archetypal criticism. The odes of John Keats have been studied from historicist, feminist, and biographical perspectives. This paper aims to complement these perspectives by elaborating the mythical dream imagery of the poem as referring symbolically to the process of psychic integration and poetic creativity. The paper also views the poem as exemplifying the need for a complementary ongoing communication between the conscious and the unconscious aspects of the mind to maintain a holistic psyche. Archetypal theory is used to frame the figurative structure of the poem as a symbolic mythical variant of the process of poetic creativity. The paper employs three theoretical constructs, namely syzygy or complementation of opposites; active imagination; and individuation, as a framework to analyze the poem from an archetypal perspective. Employing a depth psychological perspective to understand poetry enhances the aesthetic pleasure derived from reading poetry and enhances the 'healing effect' of poetry by illuminating the psychological connotations of the poem. The paper concludes by attempting to answer two research questions explored in the analysis. First, does archetypal perspective contribute to enhancing readers' aesthetic pleasure derived from reading poetry? Second, what are the theoretical contributions of the current analysis towards contemporary Jungian literary theory?

An Analysis of Universality in Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet

This research article portrays the comprehensive picture of a society in which Khalil Gibran is found giving numerous principles aimed at the prevalence of harmony and peace. His book (The Prophet) is comprised of twenty-six different essays that lead towards a perfect society. Gibran’s art of depicting Universality in The Prophet inspires people towards the creation of an ideal society. The themes of the book, which are universal, are not only concerned with one nation but with all nations and religions across the globe. This study highlights the issues of people along with solid solutions through given essays. The study explores, discusses, and critically analyzes multiple socio-psychological issues facing men in his/ her brief sojourn on the planet earth. The study exploits qualitative design using textual analysis based on the novel's close reading to arrive at results.

Case Valuation in Transitive Clauses: A Comparative Study of Punjabi and English Syntax

Case is a morphological realization on a noun phrase (NP) to represent the NP's grammatical relationship with the main verb of the clause. With respect to case, languages, in many cases, can be broadly divided into two alignment systems, i.e., ergative-absolutive and nominative-accusative. In the former type of languages, e.g., Punjabi, the subjects usually receive an ergative post position in transitive clauses (with perfective aspect) while in the latter type of languages, e.g., English, the subject, i.e., in nominative case receives, no post position. There has been a widespread controversy on whether ergative is a structural case or a lexical/inherent case and how the arguments are, i.e., subject and objects valued case in case of ergative clauses. With this ongoing debate in the background, this study aims to compare the marking of case on the arguments, i.e., subjects and objects in the transitive clauses of English and Punjabi. The study is conducted under the minimalist framework of Chomsky (2008), who emphasized on Strong Minimalist Thesis (SMT): language provides the best possible solution to the interface conditions imposed by other systems of the human mind, i.e., related to meaning and sound, which interact with language through their interfaces Conceptual Intentional (C-I) and Sensori-Motor (SM) respectively. In this framework, a feature valuation mechanism is induced by the probes, i.e., C and v*. The study finds that in split ergative languages (the languages which take both case patterns, i.e., nominative and ergative) like Punjabi, the EA, i.e., subjects of perfective transitive clauses are assigned the ergative case by the functional heads v* at [Spec-v*] while the IA, i.e., objects are valued accusative case by the same functional head v* under Agree operation. A consequence of this finding concludes that T has default agreement in such languages, which is possible because Punjabi (like its other South Asian counterparts, e.g., Urdu-Hindi, Bengali, and Kashmiri) is a pro-drop language. So, it is easy to assume that EPP and Agree features of T are an option

The Translation of Name Labels in Spider-Man Comics

This paper investigates the translation of address terms or name labels in comics from English to Malay. The two aims of this study are: (i) to identify the main translation strategies used in the target text regarding Baker's (1992) typology of translation strategies and (ii) to discuss how effectively the source author’s name labels are transposed in Malay by using Eugene Nida’s (1964: 182) basic principles of "the general efficiency of the communication process" and "comprehension of intent" as a yardstick. The data comprises 187 name labels identified in 14 series of the Spider-Man comics and their Malay counterparts. The findings revealed that the three most frequently used strategies are paraphrasing by using related words followed by omissions of name labels and translating by using less expressive or neutral words. With regard to the efficacy of the Malay translations in conveying the semantic robustness of the English name labels, it was found that the translator has prioritized a transparent translation to achieve easy comprehensibility for the target reader over a faithful preservation of the author's style and the finer nuances expressed by the name labels.

Derivational Morphology in Urdu: A Lexical Morphology Approach

From the theoretical perspective of lexical morphology (LM), this paper analyzes neutral and non-neutral affixes and their general organizational position in the morphology of derived words in Urdu. It explores the properties and behavior that Urdu affixes exercise during their attachment or insertion into roots/bases to produce new words, to question the assumptions of LM. Nine hundred and eighty sample words were randomly selected from our observations, articles in Urdu newspapers, and Urdu news television channels in Pakistan. While LM helps a lot regarding the analysis of neutral and non-neutral affixes, its assumptions concerning the hierarchical organization of affixes in derived word-formations do not correspond with the morphology of words in Urdu. This paper contributes as an initial step toward formulating a theory of the morphology of derived words in Urdu – a language rarely theoretically analyzed regarding the morphology of its derived words.

A Multidimensional Analysis of Pakistani English Written Discourse

The present study analyzes Pakistani English written discourse through multidimensional analysis. For this purpose, two corpora types, including Pakistani universities' newsletters and Pakistani human rights NGOs' annual reports, have been complied. It has been investigated how the language of newsletters of Pakistani universities differs from that of annual reports of Pakistani human rights NGOs on D1 and D2 of the multidimensional approach. Biber’s (1988) multidimensional analysis provides the theoretical grounding to the present study. MAT software (1.3) has been used to tag and analyze the data. Co-occurrences of linguistic features are quantitatively analyzed and then qualitatively interpreted through D1 and D2 of multidimensional approach. The results reveal that the language of this written discourse of Pakistani English is informational on D1. By comparing it with Biber's work of 1988, it has been revealed that this genre is close to the official documents on D1. The language of Pakistani universities' newsletter is more informational on this dimension than that of the genre of Pakistani NGOs annual reports as the mean scores for both are -26.79 and -25.13, respectively. The analysis of the D2 indicates that the genre of the selected written discourse is non-narrative. However, Pakistani universities' newsletters are close to broadcasts, whereas the annual reports of human rights NGOs are close to the personal letters. Moreover, the newsletters discourse is strongly non-narrative than that of the annual reports.

Albert Camus’ The Plague in Twenty-First Century’s Pandemic Covid-19- A Reification Model in the Capitalistic World

Covid-19 has emerged as the new global pandemic in 2020, engulfing thousands of lives in the capitalistic economic system. Reification, in such a materialistic world, commodifies human beings for possessing use-value. The workers transform themselves into dehumanized labor product of Capitalism as a historical project. The economic loss during the current pandemic has changed the outlook of the global capitalist system. The human beings have transformed into productive devices. Lukacs’ Theory of Reification has been applied to Albert Camus' The Plague (1948) to analyze how the epidemics change human conditions and convert them into lifeless products. Such reification leads to alienation of the human beings. The social, political, religious, and medical references and their applicability in the current world suggest the parallelism and universality of Camus' works, especially in the context of current capitalistic society, under siege of Covid-19. The research is a breakthrough in comprehending Capitalism as historically and materialistically intertwined in the current pandemic world, whereby human beings have lost human traits and become reified models of Capitalism. Now, the urge to reform compels to re-determine the morality of human beings.

Reflexivity of Modernity: Conceptualizing Modernity in Contemporary Pakistan during COVID-19

This article utilizes Anthony Giddens' concept of 'the reflexivity of modernity' to account for the dichotomy of traditional knowledge and scientific knowledge in the Pakistani context during the outbreak of COVID-19. It analyzes the concept of reflexivity as a form of criticism of irrationality and critiques notions of certainty. This article analyzes the concept of modernity endorsed by tradition in general, and by society in particular. Modernity is a constant process of interpreting and reinterpreting tradition in the light of knowledge at any given point of time. It also argues that pre-modern society refuses to reflect upon the nature of reflection itself. Self-reflexivity is the most crucial feature of modernity. The article views Pakistan as a society where reflexivity is not a part of contemporary culture, and it struggles to accept modernity. The article argues that modernity is intrinsically sociological, and contemporary Pakistani society shows resistance to modernity. It also states that the appropriation of scientific knowledge is not made homogeneously in contemporary Pakistan during COVID-19. Pakistani society is predominantly influenced by religious discourse, which does not believe in self-reflexivity. The study will pave the way to employ the theory of reflexivity to analyze and interpret literary texts in terms of sociological perspectives.