Pub Date : 2021-12-29DOI: 10.21608/ttaip.2021.211447
Ikram Elsherif
The work of Anglophone Arab women writers, especially after the attacks of 9/11, 2001, attracted and still attracts a lot of attention in the West because it potentially offers an opportunity for western audiences to have access to and understand the Arab world. However, instead of paving the way for better understanding of and communication with Arab culture, this work, written from what Homi Bhabha calls the “Third Space of enunciation”, a place of liminality and hybridity, may conversely promote and recycle western neo-Orientalist stereotypical views about the Arab world and its culture, distract readers from grasping the work’s deeper issues and invite reductionist, orientalist readings which rob it of much of its depth and human value. This paper analyzes the novel Willow Trees Don’t Weep, by the Jordanian-British writer Fadia Faqir, to explore and expose the tension between the neo-Orientalist representations of her characters, both female and male, and the deeper expression of their human subjectivity. It argues that, taken at face value and given the fact that Faqir is preoccupied with problems of gender and patriarchy, the novel may be read and interpreted as reiterating neo-Orientalist stereotypical preconceptions of Arab/Muslim oppression of women. However, on a deeper level, Faqir appears to be more concerned with her two main characters’ (a father and daughter) expression of human agency as they embark on Odyssean heroic journeys of self-discovery and enlightenment, comparable to the classical hero’s journey as discussed by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, that humanize and help them to heal and be re-conciliated to self and other.
{"title":"Overshadowed by Neo-Orientalism: The Odyssey in Fadia Faqir’s Willow Trees Don’t Weep","authors":"Ikram Elsherif","doi":"10.21608/ttaip.2021.211447","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21608/ttaip.2021.211447","url":null,"abstract":"The work of Anglophone Arab women writers, especially after the attacks of 9/11, 2001, attracted and still attracts a lot of attention in the West because it potentially offers an opportunity for western audiences to have access to and understand the Arab world. However, instead of paving the way for better understanding of and communication with Arab culture, this work, written from what Homi Bhabha calls the “Third Space of enunciation”, a place of liminality and hybridity, may conversely promote and recycle western neo-Orientalist stereotypical views about the Arab world and its culture, distract readers from grasping the work’s deeper issues and invite reductionist, orientalist readings which rob it of much of its depth and human value. This paper analyzes the novel Willow Trees Don’t Weep, by the Jordanian-British writer Fadia Faqir, to explore and expose the tension between the neo-Orientalist representations of her characters, both female and male, and the deeper expression of their human subjectivity. It argues that, taken at face value and given the fact that Faqir is preoccupied with problems of gender and patriarchy, the novel may be read and interpreted as reiterating neo-Orientalist stereotypical preconceptions of Arab/Muslim oppression of women. However, on a deeper level, Faqir appears to be more concerned with her two main characters’ (a father and daughter) expression of human agency as they embark on Odyssean heroic journeys of self-discovery and enlightenment, comparable to the classical hero’s journey as discussed by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, that humanize and help them to heal and be re-conciliated to self and other.","PeriodicalId":276703,"journal":{"name":"Textual Turnings: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal in English Studies","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128794685","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-29DOI: 10.21608/ttaip.2021.211517
Alia Mabrouk
Multimodal analysis, as a technique of decoding the hidden messages within sign systems, has revolutionized the field of meaning-making and the process of interpretation. The process of communicating messages or forming ideologies is no longer dependent on the verbal input presented to the reader or the audience. The paralinguistic elements, that comprise all the audiovisual and kinesthetic content communicated to the recipient, are pivotal in understanding and interpreting the intended, as well as the unintended, messages revealed through the multimodal collage. The fact that multimodal analysis can unveil meaning and interpretations that might not have been intended by the author paves the way before reception theories to act as a complementary and an interdisciplinary discipline with multimodality. The aim of this paper is to investigate how Franz Kafka’s The Castle and its movie by Konstantin Seliverstov function as multimodal ensembles that disclose the mechanisms of sense-making, and how the text and the media text cast light on the cognitive process of interpretation itself. The paper also aims to point out, through the analysis of the text and the media text, the importance of reception theories when introducing a multimodal analysis and when studying the cognitive process of interpreting and reacting to a content. With the death of the author, the transience of meaning, the instability of the sign, the written text can no longer function as an enclosed entity and the reader is always summoned to reconstruct and recontextualize the meaning communicated to him.
{"title":"Multimodality in Franz Kafka’s The Castle and its Movie by Konstantin Seliverstov: A Reading in the Light of Reception Theory","authors":"Alia Mabrouk","doi":"10.21608/ttaip.2021.211517","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21608/ttaip.2021.211517","url":null,"abstract":"Multimodal analysis, as a technique of decoding the hidden messages within sign systems, has revolutionized the field of meaning-making and the process of interpretation. The process of communicating messages or forming ideologies is no longer dependent on the verbal input presented to the reader or the audience. The paralinguistic elements, that comprise all the audiovisual and kinesthetic content communicated to the recipient, are pivotal in understanding and interpreting the intended, as well as the unintended, messages revealed through the multimodal collage. The fact that multimodal analysis can unveil meaning and interpretations that might not have been intended by the author paves the way before reception theories to act as a complementary and an interdisciplinary discipline with multimodality. The aim of this paper is to investigate how Franz Kafka’s The Castle and its movie by Konstantin Seliverstov function as multimodal ensembles that disclose the mechanisms of sense-making, and how the text and the media text cast light on the cognitive process of interpretation itself. The paper also aims to point out, through the analysis of the text and the media text, the importance of reception theories when introducing a multimodal analysis and when studying the cognitive process of interpreting and reacting to a content. With the death of the author, the transience of meaning, the instability of the sign, the written text can no longer function as an enclosed entity and the reader is always summoned to reconstruct and recontextualize the meaning communicated to him.","PeriodicalId":276703,"journal":{"name":"Textual Turnings: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal in English Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127836970","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-29DOI: 10.21608/ttaip.2021.211521
Manar El-Wahsh
Humor is rooted within being human. According to Nash (1985), humor is a fundamental trait of humanity, he goes on to equate it with “the power of speech, the mathematical gift, the gripping thumb, the ability to make tools,” humor is a trait of being human (p. 1). Humor is examined in many fields, including psychology and linguistics (Attardo, 1994). This paper uses a cognitive stylistic approach to study humor by observing its building blocks or “narrative worlds” also known as “humorous worlds” (Marszalek, 2013). This study explores the humorous worlds in Norsemen, in which previous knowledge of the Vikings is required to unlock and grasp humor in this series. Norsemen is a Norwegian series that depicts the Vikings in a humorous manner showing them as men and women who are very skilled at raiding and killing but often failing at navigating their emotional and mental wellbeing. This study utilizes the premise that prior knowledge of culture, age, objects, characters, etc. has a great impact on understanding and appreciating humor. This paper argues that humor in Norsemen stems from an incongruity in these Norsemen’s lives between pillaging and raiding on the one hand and mitigating issues of mental wellbeing and inclusion on the other. This incongruity tests our usual schema of the Vikings, and it refreshes this schema causing a humorous effect.
{"title":"A Cognitive Stylistic Approach to Humor in Norsemen: Mental Wellbeing in the Viking Age","authors":"Manar El-Wahsh","doi":"10.21608/ttaip.2021.211521","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21608/ttaip.2021.211521","url":null,"abstract":"Humor is rooted within being human. According to Nash (1985), humor is a fundamental trait of humanity, he goes on to equate it with “the power of speech, the mathematical gift, the gripping thumb, the ability to make tools,” humor is a trait of being human (p. 1). Humor is examined in many fields, including psychology and linguistics (Attardo, 1994). This paper uses a cognitive stylistic approach to study humor by observing its building blocks or “narrative worlds” also known as “humorous worlds” (Marszalek, 2013). This study explores the humorous worlds in Norsemen, in which previous knowledge of the Vikings is required to unlock and grasp humor in this series. Norsemen is a Norwegian series that depicts the Vikings in a humorous manner showing them as men and women who are very skilled at raiding and killing but often failing at navigating their emotional and mental wellbeing. This study utilizes the premise that prior knowledge of culture, age, objects, characters, etc. has a great impact on understanding and appreciating humor. This paper argues that humor in Norsemen stems from an incongruity in these Norsemen’s lives between pillaging and raiding on the one hand and mitigating issues of mental wellbeing and inclusion on the other. This incongruity tests our usual schema of the Vikings, and it refreshes this schema causing a humorous effect.","PeriodicalId":276703,"journal":{"name":"Textual Turnings: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal in English Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134308971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-29DOI: 10.21608/ttaip.2021.211526
Rania Abdel Meguid
Language is one of the most powerful tools of gender discrimination and maintaining sexism. The linguistic structures used by the speakers of a certain language reflect their view of the world as well as how they view themselves and others who belong to different social groups (e.g., women). This paper aims to investigate how Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA), as used by a considerable number of Egyptian speakers, reflects discriminatory attitudes towards women. The paper presents an analysis of Khaled Al-Khamissi’s Taxi which includes a collection of authentic dialogues between the author and a number of taxi drivers with whom he wandered through the streets of Cairo. The study adopts a Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis approach, using Sara Mill’s (1995) model of feminist stylistic analysis, in order to reveal the sexism embedded in the Egyptian Colloquial Arabic expressions used mainly by the taxi drivers in the book through analyzing such expressions on the lexical, syntactic and discoursal levels. The study aims to shed light on how such expressions, used mostly without speakers being conscious of their sexist content, reflect a certain view of women among Egyptians.
{"title":"An Investigation of Sexism in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic in Khaled Al-Khamissi’s Taxi: A Feminist Stylistic Analysis","authors":"Rania Abdel Meguid","doi":"10.21608/ttaip.2021.211526","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21608/ttaip.2021.211526","url":null,"abstract":"Language is one of the most powerful tools of gender discrimination and maintaining sexism. The linguistic structures used by the speakers of a certain language reflect their view of the world as well as how they view themselves and others who belong to different social groups (e.g., women). This paper aims to investigate how Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA), as used by a considerable number of Egyptian speakers, reflects discriminatory attitudes towards women. The paper presents an analysis of Khaled Al-Khamissi’s Taxi which includes a collection of authentic dialogues between the author and a number of taxi drivers with whom he wandered through the streets of Cairo. The study adopts a Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis approach, using Sara Mill’s (1995) model of feminist stylistic analysis, in order to reveal the sexism embedded in the Egyptian Colloquial Arabic expressions used mainly by the taxi drivers in the book through analyzing such expressions on the lexical, syntactic and discoursal levels. The study aims to shed light on how such expressions, used mostly without speakers being conscious of their sexist content, reflect a certain view of women among Egyptians.","PeriodicalId":276703,"journal":{"name":"Textual Turnings: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal in English Studies","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122363220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-29DOI: 10.21608/ttaip.2021.211515
Marwa Alkhayat
The present paper investigates the topographical aspects of literature that have gained an outstanding academic attention within the last decades acknowledging the "spatial turn" in social sciences and humanities. My study espouses a "polysensuous" approach to places and the spatialtemporal scheme addresses postcolonial identities, exile and geographic displacement to argue forcefully the role of the subjective experience of places so as to enhance a textual geographic reading of colonial/postcolonial histories. The present geocritical reading examines the "reassertion of space" in Hadiya Hussein's Beyond Love and Radwa Ashur's Al-Tantouria to present, hopefully, a key contribution to the growing body of work in spatial literary studies within the paradigm of life-writing narratives to interrogate the "where" of postcolonial terrains. As such, a geospatial story-telling is a key trope to feature the interest in the interaction between spatial practices and life-writing narratives that depict the two Arab women writers as postcolonial cartographers. The two narratives have been selected since they are relevant to explore life-writing postcolonial geographic critiques to offer a montage of the Self within wounded nations and to blur the borderline between memoirists' personal stories and postcolonial turbulent histories. Within this rationale, the present paper interrogates the spatial discourse as a geographic rupture which represents the core of postcolonial critiques. This post-national comparative literature questions multiethnic zones as well as diasporas to map the postcolonial terrain of the speaking subaltern. The affective literary mapping offers an insightful illumination of poetic topos to experience cities through senses, to inspire spatial transgression and to record personal sensations.
{"title":"Cities in Life-Writing Narratives: A Geocritical Reading of Hadiya Hussein's Beyond Love (2003) and Radwa Ashur's Al-Tantouria (2010)","authors":"Marwa Alkhayat","doi":"10.21608/ttaip.2021.211515","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21608/ttaip.2021.211515","url":null,"abstract":"The present paper investigates the topographical aspects of literature that have gained an outstanding academic attention within the last decades acknowledging the \"spatial turn\" in social sciences and humanities. My study espouses a \"polysensuous\" approach to places and the spatialtemporal scheme addresses postcolonial identities, exile and geographic displacement to argue forcefully the role of the subjective experience of places so as to enhance a textual geographic reading of colonial/postcolonial histories. The present geocritical reading examines the \"reassertion of space\" in Hadiya Hussein's Beyond Love and Radwa Ashur's Al-Tantouria to present, hopefully, a key contribution to the growing body of work in spatial literary studies within the paradigm of life-writing narratives to interrogate the \"where\" of postcolonial terrains. As such, a geospatial story-telling is a key trope to feature the interest in the interaction between spatial practices and life-writing narratives that depict the two Arab women writers as postcolonial cartographers. The two narratives have been selected since they are relevant to explore life-writing postcolonial geographic critiques to offer a montage of the Self within wounded nations and to blur the borderline between memoirists' personal stories and postcolonial turbulent histories. Within this rationale, the present paper interrogates the spatial discourse as a geographic rupture which represents the core of postcolonial critiques. This post-national comparative literature questions multiethnic zones as well as diasporas to map the postcolonial terrain of the speaking subaltern. The affective literary mapping offers an insightful illumination of poetic topos to experience cities through senses, to inspire spatial transgression and to record personal sensations.","PeriodicalId":276703,"journal":{"name":"Textual Turnings: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal in English Studies","volume":"88 19","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120818850","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-29DOI: 10.21608/ttaip.2021.213215
S. Sabry
In Sofia Baig’s debut album Daughter of Sand (2009) the contested experience of MuslimCanadian women’s identity is explored and complicated through artistic enunciations of spoken word art. Within mainstream and popular culture, the Muslim woman’s body has been a prominent terrain embodying the West’s “Other,” a space upon which many prejudices and preconceptions are mapped out and propagated. This is why, through the homogenizing discourses of mainstream media, Islam, with its various cultural and spiritual aspects, has been increasingly constructed as the violent “Other” and the oppressed Muslim woman as its poster girl. Despite real instances of oppression against Muslim woman which are shaped by various social, political and historical aspects that cannot be simplistically reduced to religious practices, what interests me in this paper is the representations of Muslim women and Muslim-Canadian women artists’ resistance and engagement with the prevailing stereotype of the victimized Muslim woman. What is alarmingly disconcerting about such a victimized image is that it robs these women of their subjectivity, reviving Orientalist discourses of “Othering” which objectified these women as exemplified in past nineteenth century Orientalist discourse and art.
{"title":"Muslim-Canadian Women’s Enunciations: Sofia Baig’s Performative Identities","authors":"S. Sabry","doi":"10.21608/ttaip.2021.213215","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21608/ttaip.2021.213215","url":null,"abstract":"In Sofia Baig’s debut album Daughter of Sand (2009) the contested experience of MuslimCanadian women’s identity is explored and complicated through artistic enunciations of spoken word art. Within mainstream and popular culture, the Muslim woman’s body has been a prominent terrain embodying the West’s “Other,” a space upon which many prejudices and preconceptions are mapped out and propagated. This is why, through the homogenizing discourses of mainstream media, Islam, with its various cultural and spiritual aspects, has been increasingly constructed as the violent “Other” and the oppressed Muslim woman as its poster girl. Despite real instances of oppression against Muslim woman which are shaped by various social, political and historical aspects that cannot be simplistically reduced to religious practices, what interests me in this paper is the representations of Muslim women and Muslim-Canadian women artists’ resistance and engagement with the prevailing stereotype of the victimized Muslim woman. What is alarmingly disconcerting about such a victimized image is that it robs these women of their subjectivity, reviving Orientalist discourses of “Othering” which objectified these women as exemplified in past nineteenth century Orientalist discourse and art.","PeriodicalId":276703,"journal":{"name":"Textual Turnings: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal in English Studies","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128747465","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-29DOI: 10.21608/ttaip.2021.211523
Marwa Abuelwafa
The soft power of media and film making has always had a great contribution to the shaping of the ideology of communities. The way certain groups or even concepts and ideas are represented in cinema affects how these groups or ideas are evaluated. This influential platform influences public opinion and shapes the stance of viewers to a great extent. The way terrorism and terrorists are characterized in films has shaped the minds and corrected or created misconceptions in many communities depending on the ideology adopted by the film makers. This study analyzes key scenes from an Egyptian movie entitled Al-Irhaby (The Terrorist) using Conversation Analysis, Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory (1987) and Grice’s Cooperative Principle (1975). This analysis aims to compare the main character’s behavior before mingling with an ordinary middle class family to his behavior after staying with them for a certain period of time. The conversations between the characters throughout the movie unfold the stark differences in the main character’s (the terrorist) personality and how he started rebelling against his old beliefs, a development brought about after his stay. Kress and van Leeuwan’s (1996) theory of Visual Grammar is also employed but only in terms of the representational metafunction to analyze the visual techniques employed to trace such change.
{"title":"The Representation of Terrorists in Egyptian Cinema: A Conversation Analysis of Al-Irhaby (The Terrorist)","authors":"Marwa Abuelwafa","doi":"10.21608/ttaip.2021.211523","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21608/ttaip.2021.211523","url":null,"abstract":"The soft power of media and film making has always had a great contribution to the shaping of the ideology of communities. The way certain groups or even concepts and ideas are represented in cinema affects how these groups or ideas are evaluated. This influential platform influences public opinion and shapes the stance of viewers to a great extent. The way terrorism and terrorists are characterized in films has shaped the minds and corrected or created misconceptions in many communities depending on the ideology adopted by the film makers. This study analyzes key scenes from an Egyptian movie entitled Al-Irhaby (The Terrorist) using Conversation Analysis, Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory (1987) and Grice’s Cooperative Principle (1975). This analysis aims to compare the main character’s behavior before mingling with an ordinary middle class family to his behavior after staying with them for a certain period of time. The conversations between the characters throughout the movie unfold the stark differences in the main character’s (the terrorist) personality and how he started rebelling against his old beliefs, a development brought about after his stay. Kress and van Leeuwan’s (1996) theory of Visual Grammar is also employed but only in terms of the representational metafunction to analyze the visual techniques employed to trace such change.","PeriodicalId":276703,"journal":{"name":"Textual Turnings: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal in English Studies","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126337538","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-29DOI: 10.21608/ttaip.2021.211525
Olfat Nour El-Din
In the past, people thought that earth was the center of the universe. More recently, people think that they are the most important on Earth. These speculations raise the question: why do humans have this subjective view of the world? Uexküll’s (1934) theory of the umwelt provides a very reasonable answer. To Uexküll, each species perceives the surrounding world in a way that agrees with their perceptive abilities and their interests. Accordingly, people are oblivious to other parallel umwelts that exist beyond their borders. One umwelt they are oblivious to is that of the animals. However, writers across the ages have tried to depict animals’ lives in their narratives. Based on Uexküll’s theory, these accounts carry subjective views. In this regard, the current study attempts to examine two poets’ views of the feline umwelt. T. S. Eliot and Ahmed Shawqi are celebrated poets who belong to the same age; by comparing their conceptualization of the feline umwelt, much can be revealed about their subjective views on the one hand, and how these views are influenced by cultural ideologies, on the other. To conduct the analysis, Leech and Short’s (2007) stylistic approach to ‘mind-style’ is adopted, integrating some tools from Leech (1991) to spotlight some of the poetic devices employed in the poems. The study concludes that Shawqi and Eliot adopt many similar tools in their depiction of the feline umwelt; however, their overall depiction differs, which proves that their account of the feline umwelt is subjective and is bound to cultural influences.
{"title":"Into the Feline Umwelt: An Exploration of Eliot and Shawqi’s ‘Mind-style’ Conceptualization of Cats","authors":"Olfat Nour El-Din","doi":"10.21608/ttaip.2021.211525","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21608/ttaip.2021.211525","url":null,"abstract":"In the past, people thought that earth was the center of the universe. More recently, people think that they are the most important on Earth. These speculations raise the question: why do humans have this subjective view of the world? Uexküll’s (1934) theory of the umwelt provides a very reasonable answer. To Uexküll, each species perceives the surrounding world in a way that agrees with their perceptive abilities and their interests. Accordingly, people are oblivious to other parallel umwelts that exist beyond their borders. One umwelt they are oblivious to is that of the animals. However, writers across the ages have tried to depict animals’ lives in their narratives. Based on Uexküll’s theory, these accounts carry subjective views. In this regard, the current study attempts to examine two poets’ views of the feline umwelt. T. S. Eliot and Ahmed Shawqi are celebrated poets who belong to the same age; by comparing their conceptualization of the feline umwelt, much can be revealed about their subjective views on the one hand, and how these views are influenced by cultural ideologies, on the other. To conduct the analysis, Leech and Short’s (2007) stylistic approach to ‘mind-style’ is adopted, integrating some tools from Leech (1991) to spotlight some of the poetic devices employed in the poems. The study concludes that Shawqi and Eliot adopt many similar tools in their depiction of the feline umwelt; however, their overall depiction differs, which proves that their account of the feline umwelt is subjective and is bound to cultural influences.","PeriodicalId":276703,"journal":{"name":"Textual Turnings: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal in English Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133453214","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-29DOI: 10.21608/ttaip.2021.211524
N. Sarhan
The present study examines how Egyptian and Ethiopian officials seek to (de-)legitimize the course of action towards the so-called crisis of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) as exemplified in the two countries’ respective letters to the UN General Assembly in May 2020. Adopting a qualitative analysis of the two selected documents, I investigate how the crisis is cognitively and discursively framed in the two countries’ official discourse. This type of framing is seen as a subtle form of persuasion to prioritize some issues over others, and thereby promote a particular interpretation of reality. In fact, frames are seen as a means of gearing the audience’s cognition; specially to the direction of the speaker’s viewpoint. From a cognitive perspective, Cap (2013) proximization theory is employed to show how the crisis discourse space is constructed in both letters, hence, in both official discourses. This cognitive-pragmatic framework proves instrumental in both interventionist and crisis discourse to reflect how authors legitimize their actions to the public. Cap (2014a) specified strategies of proximization as linguistic resources of ‘legitimization’ in political interventionist discourse. Moreover, the discourse-historical approach (2001, 2009, 2016, 2017) informs the analysis of the letters to highlight the discursive strategies used to frame the crisis. Qualitative findings reveal how the linguistic choices evoke cognitive and discursive frames intended to influence the addressees’ preference for the speaker’s viewpoint. This is achieved through abundant use of framing strategies that include deictic expressions, discourse markers as well as metaphors. From a proximization perspective, emphasis is placed on spatial and axiological proximized threat devices in the Egyptian letter, in contrast to temporal proximized threat ones in the Ethiopian. Both letters employ similar framing and proximization strategies in addressing the UN Security Council.
{"title":"‘ItsMyDam’: Proximization and Framing Strategies in the Renaissance Dam Crisis Discourse: A Critical Cognitive Case Study","authors":"N. Sarhan","doi":"10.21608/ttaip.2021.211524","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21608/ttaip.2021.211524","url":null,"abstract":"The present study examines how Egyptian and Ethiopian officials seek to (de-)legitimize the course of action towards the so-called crisis of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) as exemplified in the two countries’ respective letters to the UN General Assembly in May 2020. Adopting a qualitative analysis of the two selected documents, I investigate how the crisis is cognitively and discursively framed in the two countries’ official discourse. This type of framing is seen as a subtle form of persuasion to prioritize some issues over others, and thereby promote a particular interpretation of reality. In fact, frames are seen as a means of gearing the audience’s cognition; specially to the direction of the speaker’s viewpoint. From a cognitive perspective, Cap (2013) proximization theory is employed to show how the crisis discourse space is constructed in both letters, hence, in both official discourses. This cognitive-pragmatic framework proves instrumental in both interventionist and crisis discourse to reflect how authors legitimize their actions to the public. Cap (2014a) specified strategies of proximization as linguistic resources of ‘legitimization’ in political interventionist discourse. Moreover, the discourse-historical approach (2001, 2009, 2016, 2017) informs the analysis of the letters to highlight the discursive strategies used to frame the crisis. Qualitative findings reveal how the linguistic choices evoke cognitive and discursive frames intended to influence the addressees’ preference for the speaker’s viewpoint. This is achieved through abundant use of framing strategies that include deictic expressions, discourse markers as well as metaphors. From a proximization perspective, emphasis is placed on spatial and axiological proximized threat devices in the Egyptian letter, in contrast to temporal proximized threat ones in the Ethiopian. Both letters employ similar framing and proximization strategies in addressing the UN Security Council.","PeriodicalId":276703,"journal":{"name":"Textual Turnings: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal in English Studies","volume":"99 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121171519","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.21608/ttaip.2020.133419
A. El-Sawy
British theatre of the 1990s has witnessed the rise of a new angry young generation whose works have been labeled provocative, speculative, confrontational, sensational, shocking, taboo-breaking, brutal, bleak, gloomy and dark. These writers have a contemporary voice and pursue the aesthetics of 'In-yer-face' experiential theatre which launches rebellion against the classic well-made play, and against more recent literary traditions. Of those writers, contributing to (a)political drama in the 1990s, Phyllis Nagy emerged as one of the most influential figures, providing an experiential theatre with deeply shocking images. This paper is an attempt to explore the in-yer-face aesthetics in Nagy's The Strip by examining her manipulation of space and non-linear plot structures. Nagy creates isolated characters within oppressive worlds, and in the face of this seemingly undefeatable oppression, her characters share a bond that cannot be contained by traditional notions of space and time. Nagy bent the rules of physical space to give the audience a new and alienated perspective on traditional character relationships. In doing this, she makes it very difficult for an audience member to understand why the things on stage are happening. The Strip instead leaves audience members with a few clear impressions about life and society. Thus, this paper is an attempt to explore Phyllis Nagy's The Strip, and prove that she creates oppressive worlds onstage through unfamiliar, non-linear plot structures and that she connects the isolated characters through the distortion of onstage fictional space.
{"title":"The Space Aesthetics of In-Yer-Face Theatre in Phyllis Nagy's The Strip","authors":"A. El-Sawy","doi":"10.21608/ttaip.2020.133419","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21608/ttaip.2020.133419","url":null,"abstract":"British theatre of the 1990s has witnessed the rise of a new angry young generation whose works have been labeled provocative, speculative, confrontational, sensational, shocking, taboo-breaking, brutal, bleak, gloomy and dark. These writers have a contemporary voice and pursue the aesthetics of 'In-yer-face' experiential theatre which launches rebellion against the classic well-made play, and against more recent literary traditions. Of those writers, contributing to (a)political drama in the 1990s, Phyllis Nagy emerged as one of the most influential figures, providing an experiential theatre with deeply shocking images. This paper is an attempt to explore the in-yer-face aesthetics in Nagy's The Strip by examining her manipulation of space and non-linear plot structures. Nagy creates isolated characters within oppressive worlds, and in the face of this seemingly undefeatable oppression, her characters share a bond that cannot be contained by traditional notions of space and time. Nagy bent the rules of physical space to give the audience a new and alienated perspective on traditional character relationships. In doing this, she makes it very difficult for an audience member to understand why the things on stage are happening. The Strip instead leaves audience members with a few clear impressions about life and society. Thus, this paper is an attempt to explore Phyllis Nagy's The Strip, and prove that she creates oppressive worlds onstage through unfamiliar, non-linear plot structures and that she connects the isolated characters through the distortion of onstage fictional space.","PeriodicalId":276703,"journal":{"name":"Textual Turnings: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal in English Studies","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114801963","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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