'And the Light in his Eyes Grew Dark': The Representation of Anger in an Egyptian Popular Epic (original) (raw)
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When, over ten years ago now, the AIDS crisis was labeled "an epidermc of signification,"! critical attention was drawn to the fantasy spectacle of disease as the absolute borderline between health and unhealth, subjectivity and nonsubjectivity. Queer lifestyles were so blatantiy put on display for the scrutiny of straight spectators that, as one commentator remarked, "when they come to write tiie history of AIDS, socio-ethnologists will have to decide whether the 'practitioners' of homosexuality or its heterosexual 'onlookers' have been more spectacular in fheir extravagance."^ For at stake in this decision conceming how to handle history is the spectacular way tiiat certain sexual practices are constructed as extravagant, a word, Jonatiian DoUimore reminds us, that immediately signals perversity and deviance firom tiie norm.' Posing the question of history here as a split between homosexual practice and heterosexual inspection assimies tiiat the specter of deviance haunting both extravagant acts is itself the cause of introspection. Deviance, we assume, somehow inhabits tiie core of identity. In tiie case of the heterosexual spectator, the difference or deviance that engages introspection functions as the defensive tactic of disavowed, or faUed, intiospection. What tiie heterosexual subject cannot tolerate is the acknowledgment that its very constitution craciaUy depends on tiie enjoyment of tiie deviant spectacle. This is be-
Appropriating women: The violence and potential liberation of textual revolutions
2009
This dissertation relates the violence perpetuated by phallogocentric traditions of reading and writing to the violence of appropriating traditional categories of gender and asks whether or not and how texts that resist these traditions might help us change the way we think about identities, our own and others', opening up a space for new and as yet un-thought ways of exchanging texts and the identities they make possible. Focusing on the ways in which Jacques Derrida's Éperons, Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, and Elena Garro's "La culpa es de los Tlaxcaltecas" and "El árbol" interminably reverse the roles of readers and writers, further disorienting them with the complex blend of genres in their texts and the networks of other texts that they juxtapose with their own, leads to the conclusion that the ultimate revolutionary function of these texts is to be found in the ways that they suspend the processes of appropriation and identification indefinitely, giving time, namely the time of waiting, but also time that is filled with the constant weaving of narratives, maintaining the possibility that a way out of historical cycles of violence, especially the violence of being forced to fit within current categories, might be found. iii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Cristina Dahl received a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English from California State University, Chico in 1997, a Master of Arts Degree in English from California State University, Chico in 2001, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University in 2009. She currently teaches full time in the English Department at Butte Glenn Community College in Oroville, California. Her primary interests lie in comparing historical representations of gender in a variety of different genres and media in European and Mexican culture, including fiction, philosophy, painting, photography, sculpture, and film. She is also interested in the relationship between ethics, hermeneutics, and pedagogy. iv I would like to dedicate this dissertation to Michael and Groverlee Dahl. Without their constant support over the past two years, I could never have completed this project. I would also like to thank Aaron, who continues to inspire me and who patiently and unwaveringly supported me through many years of just reading, writing, and thinking, a gift and a debt that I can never fully return. I would like to thank Lisa Patti, Ana Rojas, and Angela Naimou for showing me what an ideal network of reading and writing can look like, another gift that defies response, and I will be forever grateful. Finally, I would like to thank Jonathan Culler, Ellis Hanson, and Debra Castillo for their thoughtful and thought-provoking feedback on my first draft, which I will continue to take into consideration as I proceed to other projects. I also want to thank them for exposing me to so many rich texts and asking so many provocative questions in the seminars they taught. Again, I hope I may continue to respond to these questions for many years to come. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to acknowledge the graduate school at Cornell University, for the Sage Fellowship that allowed me to focus exclusively on my research during my last year at Cornell and for the Provost's Diversity Fellowship, which also allowed me to take a semester off from teaching to complete that research.
The 'Language' of Gender Conditioning as Reflected in Literary Works
2013
This study investigates the role of social conditio ning in the home in the construction of gender consciousness in children an d the perpetuation of a tilted gender sociometry as reflected in literature. Throu gh an examination of the upbringing of children, the study drags the gender debate to the altar of the ancient nature-nurture controversy by investigating, primar ily, literary art on whether gender differences are a biological and divine prescriptio n or are a social and psychological construction. The paper, which is based on a study of selected African literary works of art by both male and female writers, explores wh at it terms 'gender language' which has been used as the medium of instruction i n the education of children to accept their socially defined gender paths. In this study, the 'language' of gender should not be viewed as a literal speech or any par ticular world language but rather as ways through which society attempts to show how maleness is ...
Men’s Tears Also Matter: A Study on the Patriarchal Oppression of Men in Literature
OALib, 2021
The present study focuses on the popularly established idea that women are almost always oppressed under the patriarchal system while all men enjoy its benefits. Concerning some selected literature, the study argues the possibilities of “certain” men being the victims of patriarchy, carrying both manly and womanly qualities (according to patriarchal interpretations) to be more successful in their roles as men. Victims of patriarchy in this context refer to those who do not satisfy the gender stereotypical characteristics drawn by the patriarchal system and whose voices are unheard in society. The sample of the present study which falls victim to their effort to act upon the gender expectations of their culture includes Okonkwo in the novel “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe, Macbeth in the drama “Macbeth” by William Shakespeare, and Viscount Gontran-Joseph de Signoles in the short story, “A Coward” by Guy de Maupassant. The analysis of the protagonists’ failure of these literary w...
Journal of Arts & Social Sciences (JASS)
The present study is aimed to explore how women and men characters are constructed through linguistic choices in Ali’s novel The Book of Saladin (TBOS). Halliday’s (1985) transitivity model as suggested by Mills (1995) in her Feminist Stylistics has been employed for data analysis. To strengthen the analysis, Eggins’ (2004) insights are also given consideration. The data comprises 6 extracts from the novel. A sample size of 107 clauses was drawn to focus on process-participant analysis. The findings indicate that Ali (1998) in TBOS makes a use of all types of processes but with different frequency of occurrences. The women characters are portrayed mainly through Material (41%), Relational (5%) and Behavioral (5%) processes while the men characters are ascribed with more mental (9%) and verbal (4%) processes. These findings indicate that Ali (1998) has represented his women characters more active as compared to his men characters as far as romantic scenes are concerned. The current s...
2020
This study is concerned with investigating the treatment of women and gender roles in Glasworthy's Forsyte Saga and Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy from a sociopragmatic perspective. The texts studied for this paper have not been evaluated to socio-pragmatic analysis that reflects the little application of this approach to literary works. As thus, the goal of this paper is to advance sociopragmatic analysis to these novels-there is salience from the style, narrative techniques, and language utilized by both writers in their books, which indeed points to pragmatic undercurrents that must be explored. The results indicate that social and political aspects are key elements for understanding women and gender issues in the selected texts. The integration of these contextual elements revealed how the two authors manipulated literary discourse to reflect on the power relations and struggles between men and women of their age. It can be claimed that sociopragmatic approaches provide opportunities for understanding the hidden layers within the selected texts in terms of social practices and interactions among characters. It is finally suggested that sociopragmatic approaches should be integrated into literary studies for a better and deeper understanding of literary discourse in general and crosscultural issues in particular.
When Language Limits the Lust: Moments of Desire in Ungendered Narrative
Trames: A Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2019
Desire knows no boundaries. However, when an author depicts an amorous scene that involves ungendered characters – those whose gender is not disclosed in the text– language creates boundaries around the desire. Desire is chained and shackled under the restriction of language in an effort to keep the gender hidden. In ungendered narrative, bodies express desire, but we never know to what gender the bodies belong. The reader is in constant search of clues to gender-segregate the bodies, but the author does not let the reader succeed. Moreover, the gendered nature of language comes to the fore, making hiding gender a daunting task for writers. The author manipulates the language to depict the lust of bodies, devoid of gender. The description of intimate moments in gendered narratives is pleasure-inducing for readers, but in ungendered narratives it becomes a thorny issue. The solution to this problem is to stop searching for clues to a character’s gender by looking beyond the binaries of gender. The lovemaking should be treated as an act that does not require the knowledge of what is between legs, but the genuine desire in the heart. This realisation makes the readers sense the same passionate experience felt by the bodies of the characters. The readers witness how love transcends the limitation of gender and achieves greater significance at the hands of writers of ungendered narratives.
Graduate Student of English Language and Literature, University of Kurdistan, Sanandaj, Iran
2019
The present study attempts to demonstrate how different texts with various author attitudes depict the oppressed subjects of Stalin's time. For this purpose, Roland Barthes' notion of 'Modes of Writing' and Michel Foucault's concept of 'author' are employed in reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1963) and Julian Barnes' The Noise of Time (2016). The two novels mainly address the politically subjected characters in the Stalinist regime with different standpoints of author figure. Originating the authors' modes of writing in the mentioned texts, on one hand, and the analysis of author-function, on the other, shall satisfy the comparative tendencies in this research and show how these theoretical frameworks can help a critical understanding of the texts. The subjects described in these novels, although similar in their situations and characteristics and subjected to the same institution of power, are narrated from different author roles and provide a somewhat similar subjectivity. The author figure as a subject of ideology and the text as a created object of an author can be thoroughly analyzed within the proposed theoretical framework; therefore, the main objective of this paper is to explore the depicted subjectivities of similar subjects from different standpoints of distinguishable author figures.