American Research Journal of English and Literature

Olusegun Oladele Jegede

The study investigated participant roles in selected editorials in Nigerian newspapers. The data for the study were editorials. The editorials were taken from The Nigerian Tribune, The Punch and The Vanguard. Seven editorials were selected and each editorial was labelled T1, T2, ... T7 for proper analysis. Each main clause of the editorials was also numbered for accurate accountability and reference. The selected editirials were critically read and the participants were identified and their roles were interpreted and discussed. The findings revealed that most of the messages of the texts were realised by participants such as actor, carrier, attribute and goal. The study concluded that the dominance of participants such as actor, carrier, attribute and goal in the editorials showed that editorials were not meant to tell us what happened, but rather, how things were and should be. 

Guifang Wang

Chinese new generation science fiction refers to the science fiction after the 1990s because of their diverse creative con cepts, aesthetic values and new narrative modes. This paper summarizes the development of Chinese science fiction liter ature, and analyzes the utopias in Chinese new generation science fiction. The types of utopias in new generation science fiction can be divided into two aspects: temporal and spatial utopias and technological utopias. The characteristics of Chinese new generation’s utopia include extraordinary Imagination, new and different ways of thinking. The functions of Chinese utopia are mainly reflected in the affirmation of ultimate values and the criticism of reality. The creation of new generations has brought new hope to Chinese science fiction literature, but in general, Chinese science fiction literature has a long way to go.

Shireen Ahmed Khorsheed Khorsheed

Following the consequences of the Second World War, the majority of authors wrote their literary works to respond to the world’s massive destruction. The dominant idea that engaged authors’ minds during a time when there was a big need to be free from all authorities that led man to encourage him blindly to kill his brothers and sisters in humanity and to destroy the world. The writer John Fowles assumed man has to be free from following those rules and constraints. John Fowles’s novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman was written in Neo-Victorian prose’s style but with Postmodernism per spectives. This paper attempts to analyze and apply the theoretical perspectives of “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes and “The Birth of the Reader” on the novel of John Fowles which is regarded to be a postmodern novel from mul tiple perceptions. Firstly, the storyteller’s involvement to a variety of opinions as well as substitute endings. The second point, considering this book as a historical text, by applying the method of Linda Hutcheon, Historiographic metafiction, includes the meaning of rewriting history since postmodern writers do not believe in the originality of historical truths or the existence of absolute truths. Fowles wanted to free people from those dogmas. Those entire methods in this text disclose Fowles to reconstruct and deconstruct the Victorian culture through the main character Sarah woodruff that makes Fowles’s novel a perfect example of Postmodernism.

Magdalene Mbotiji Titamoh

It is an ultimate reality that women are facing subjugation and stigmatization all around the world. Especially, in the case of black women, this is much more worsened due to racism and gender disparity issues. African American literature has laid its foundations on the marginalization of black women. The term womanism was invented by Alice Walker in the year 1984, which emphasizes the idea that black women must be treated equally on grounds of race, gender, and class. The books The Colour Purple and The Temple of My Familiar strongly depict the true conditions of black women surviving under oppression and gender disparities. Alice Walker has depicted the nature of black women facing atrocities of sexism and class discrimination in both of her works with equal aplomb. 

Imasuen Osasumwen Sofia

This study illuminates the lives of the abjected women in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, as they undergo as liminal process and how they are able to get feminine subjectivity in the course of their lives. This study also sheds light on how women are being stereotyped, treated, in the patriarchal society. While focusing on The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and The Awakening by Kate Chopin, this study further addresses the different ways women are able to acquire subjectivity for themselves and by doing so are able to create a new identity for themselves that does not align with the stereotypes and norms created by society that favours men as compared to women

Taimoor Younus

The paper investigates the silencing of women in the patriarchal society of Japan and explores the reasons that contribute towards female subjugation with specific focus on the primary character Sayuri in the light of Marxist Feminism. The paper illustrates the factors responsible for silencing of women, which goes on to violence, oppression, and economic dependence, which ultimately leads to treating them as subaltern. Moreover, this paper avers the issues concerning taboos of sexualization and commodification of women leading to alienation, which is imposed, on women who seem to be self-reliant and deeply access their full potentials

Linyi Tan

This paper compares the Chinese and English languages, trying to clear the argument that the two are from different worlds. To explain this claim, we collected data from both the speaking and writing perspective, providing links between these languages. Our results showed that the languages have certain similarities and should clear the aging stereotypes.

Junge Dou, Tao Li

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) are the best representative of the Gothic works in British and American literature. Not only do they inherit the Gothic traditions, they also put forward the genre by creating their own country’s styles. Poe founds the traditional writing mode of American psychological and introverted Gothic by creating “the terror of the soul”, meanwhile, Brontë undercuts the distinction between Gothic and domestic narratives in the nineteenth century British literary history. In depicting Madeline Usher’s Gothic death, mysterious resurrection and the disembodiment and mental breakdown of Roderick Usher, Poe, presents the incest-taboo, his view of after-life and the ghost haunting the House of Usher, the text and democratic America. Brontë, on the other hand, portraying Catherine Earnshaw’s death and ghost, Heathcliff’s revenge and dubious identity, suggests the instability caused by slavery, racial and colonial issues, Gothic and domestic novels, which makes the novel becomes the dark secret at the heart of the history of 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.

P.V. Laxmiprasad