American Research Journal of English and Literature

Junge Dou, Tao Li

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Elie Wiesel’s Day use the similar narrative strategy to discuss the relationship between memory and identity. Robinson Crusoeraces the hero’s transition from social isolation and disconnection to self-actualisation and social reintegration through the novel’s core narrative structure. While Daydemonstrates the mental isolation, haunting past memories and the painful journey of seeking the real identity of a Holocaust survivor. In a first person narrative structure, both of the protagonists converge their individual memory into a collective memory, Robinson Crusoe as a pioneer image of British capitalism and colonialism, “I” as the ashamed and suffering creature destroyed by one of the most widely known atrocities happened during World War II, the Nazi Holocaust from 1933 to 1945, which is partially caused by the development of capitalist and imperialism in the 1920s Germany, mirroring the relationship between center and margin of Self and Other, constructing their identities: one as the prototypical selected British middle class Christian male, the other as a castaway suffering figure without a future. What behind them is the collective memory and national identity. In a sense, there is a cause-effect relationship between the narratives.

Pan Li-na1, Guo Xiao-chun2

The Thick translation is paid more and more attention in academics in recent years, which is one of the translation criteria and translation strategy. It rises and develop abroad, and accepted by foreign scholars widely. Domestic scholars research it from different angles, which is a kind of interpretation of translation, to provide practical platform to transfer the source language culture, this paper introduces the development history and research status of thick translation, and introduces its application in sinologist Davis’ the Revolution of The Seasons from in-text translation and out-of-text translation, showing its practical functions.

Tek Bahadur Chhetry

The focus of this research is on the subversion of heroic identity. The hero in Avatar movie challenges imperial force. Such a study is important to reexamine the heroic deeds in the new light. It counters the preoccupied concept of seizing resources as a heroic deed. The approach adopted in this paper includes study of hero’s journey mainly in Joseph Campbell’s term. Instead of covering the entire process of hero’s journey, it concentrates on hero’s self-discovery for the benevolence of indigenous life and nature. The finding from this study provides an idea that mythical avatar for human welfare contradicts with modern man-made avatars for exploitation of others. The main conclusion of this research advocates against the human folly of the modern world over the insurmountable nature.

Dr. T Eswar Rao

Literary critics often do not indulge in forecasting as they seldom come true. But Earnest Schier proved it wrong when he proclaimed August Wilson is a better chronicler of the black experience than Alex Haley. Wilson has carved a special niche for himself as “a compelling new voice” of the American theatre in recent time. His reputation rests mainly on his deft chronicling of black experience which is a perennial source to supply him the necessary stuff that goes into the making of his plays in epitomizing his honest endeavors to confront in his works the glancing manner with which the blacks look at themselves and the majority community culture of Americans look at the blacks. He finds the gamut of black American experience as the inexhaustible source to provide a dramatist with relevant themes to write about. Wilson juts up his tribute to Loomis’ search by delving deep into the complexity of black experience and thereby seeks not only to help other blacks towards developing deeper understanding and insight of themselves but also to be an agent of a voyage of self discovery for the Americans at large - irrespective of caste, creed, color, and culture. This paper studies his work’s deep involvement with his ‘Racial Other’

Dr. Hanan Abdulaziz Alazaz

The representation of grieving mothers and fathers in American literature is shaped by gendered perceptions of how women and men should mourn the loss of their children in different ways. In what could be described as the surveillance of the modes of mourning maternal characters were granted more space to display emotions publicly while paternal characters were not. The scrutiny of public display of emotions by men due to perceptions of masculinity was challenged in two texts published in the 1990s. Although Jacquelyn Mitchard’s The Deep End of the Ocean (1996) and John Irving’s A Widow for One Year (1998) adhere at times to the representation of traditional norms of gendered grieving, both novels challenge the association of excessive emotionality to women and rewrite the narrative into what can be described as the sad man in the attic who shows his emotions in some instances in the narrative. Like the mad woman who lives in the attic in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) who sneaks into Jane’s room, the grieving father displays his emotions publicly in some parts of the novels then hides them in an attic of masculine conventions and expectations. The two texts, along with an earlier American text, question perceptions of masculine modes of grieving that is shaped by the norms of gendered grieving. The texts challenge these perceptions by shifting male grieving, making it a public display of emotions and associating it with hysteria and feminized modes of sentimentality.

Prof. E.A. Gamini Fonseka, Mr. P.N. Rathnayaka

Although the three classic postcolonial novels – Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958), The Village in the Jungle by Leonard Woolf (1913), and A Passage to India by E.M. Forster (1924) – were composed in three totally unrelated settings and without a predetermined timeframe, they efficiently contribute to a transcontinental and transcultural mural that powerfully relates a coherent and consummate metanarrativeof colonial justice with its three main junctures identified as the establishment, the operation, and the withdrawalas part of an oppressive administrative system maintained totally to the advantage of the colonizer and at the expense of the native. The trilogy fortuitously composed of the three novels reveals various strategies the colonizers used in the respective settings for the establishment and maintenance of their power by means of an alien institution of justice biased to English common law which was totally operated in English, capitalizing on the natives’ ignorance of the language and culture, law and order, custom and etiquette, and methods and practices it is associated with, and their failure to hold on at the point the natives became conscious of their true behaviour, challenged their hypocrisy, and resisted their dominance.While appreciating the authenticity of the narratives in the three novels in the context of their function as political critiques, this paper attempts to analyse the texts from a postcolonial perspective, compare the circumstances under which the heroes continue their respective struggles for existence, assess the literary and aesthetic potential the authors have demonstrated while articulating their political consciousness,interpret them from an historical point of view, and appreciate the impact they make on the political awareness of their worldwide readership.

Dr. Nour Seblini

While interest in Elif Shafak’s novel The Forty Rules of Love (2010) continues to grow, commentary on issues of narrative technique is limited. The focus of previous studies is on sufism and feminism. This article examines the politics of polyvocality in Shafak’s text, which aims to reflect the multiple and diverse voices within the Islamic community. While polyvocality can deconstruct the myth of the Muslim monolith, The Forty Rules of Love illustrates that this strategy is not neutral. Written in the bildungsroman form, the story follows the parallel life paths of Rumi and Shams Tabrez, a famous pair in the thirteenth century vis-à-vis the 21st century world of the Scottish (originally Christian) Sufi wanderer, Aziz Zahara, and the American Jewish housewife, Ella Rubinstein, who embraces Sufism at the end of the novel. In this article, I argue that Shafak’s novel uses polyvocality to draw distinctions between the soft face of Islam, Sufism, and a fundamentalist version of the religion perpetrated by the fanatics. The text privileges select voices that reinforce Sufism’s ostracism within the traditional Muslim community and prove it responsive to inclusion with the West while representing non-Sufi Islamic voices as cut out of the same cloth of fundamentalism, sanctioning phobia against Muslims who are not followers of Sufism.