The Hysteric Belongs to Me: Helen Oyeyemi’s The Opposite House

The term hysteria has undergone several substantial changes throughout its history. A charged concept, deemed for a long time as pejorative and offensive to womanhood, it has lately been re-appropriated for literature under the concept of the “hysterical narrative.” This new trend purports to redeem hysteria and, together with it, redeem the feminine and show all its complexity. Helen Oyeyemi’s 2007 novel, The Opposite House, conflates the private and the public in two female characters, one human, the other divine. Through this double perspective the work self-reflexively re-evaluates hysteria both in the self and in the community.

Languages and the U.S. Federal Congress: Attitudes, Policies and Practices between 1789 and 1815

The present paper examines the link between language and cultural identity by exploring the language-related attitudes, policies and ideologies as reflected in the written records of the U.S. Federal Congress from 1789 until roughly the end of the “Second War of Independence” in 1815. The results are compared and contrasted with the findings of a previous study which examined the founding documents of the United States from a similar perspective. The most salient language policy development of the post-1789 period is the overall shift from the symbolic, general language-related remarks towards the formulation of more substantive and general policies.

Self-(de)constructions in J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands

The Nobel Prize-winner South African author, J. M. Coetzee in his debut novel, Dusklands (1974), allows the reader to take a look into the astonishing worlds of vulnerability and violence through the juxtaposition of two locally and temporally discrepant narratives, whose fictional world is dominated by authority. This paper attempts to explore the collapse of the individual identity of the narrators, along the prevailing literary discourses around the time of the novel’s publication, with special regard to the changing concept of the self in post-modern works and to the manners of rewriting its Cartesian concept.

Postmodern Children and The Cement Garden of Ian McEwan

Postmodern childhood narratives often explore disturbing themes, break social conventions and taboos. In order to comment on this kind of representation, this study will introduce Ian McEwan’s controversial novel The Cement Garden (1978), the story of four children who, in the middle of a particularly hot summer, find themselves orphaned. The novel narrated by fourteen-year-old Jack explores such themes as sexuality, incest, death, the struggles of coming of age, isolation, gender roles and parent-child relationships.

Shakespeare and Witchcraft in Neil Gaiman’s Marvel 1602

Representing the cultural phenomenon of witchcraft and showcasing liminal existence was of great importance in the literature of 16-17 -century England. From political pamphlets to Shakespearean stage plays, the character of the witch and the marginalized have become a central topic of conversation in early modern texts. The primary goal of this research paper is to examine how Neil Gaiman’s comic book series, Marvel 1602 adapts aspects of certain early modern English works to create a graphic narrative that explains liminality and the modern ‘witchcraze.’

Cultural and Natural Roots of Puerto Rican Mestizaje in Rosario Ferré’s The House on the Lagoon

The paper explores the conversational orchestration of family anecdotes as a dominant experimental narrative strategy underlying Puerto Rican author Rosario Ferré’s historical novel, The House on the Lagoon. The study reads Ferré’s narrative through Mikhail Bakhtin’s philosophy of the dialogic nature of language to highlight the interplay between environmental and cultural images of hybridity. The close reading of this representative piece of US Caribbean literature elucidates how Ferré utilizes the dialogic form to contest the Puerto Rican cultural and national politics that tend to suppress and silence the nonwhite (black and indigenous) components of Puerto Rican identity.