Women Individuality: A Critique of Patriarchal Society in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

This paper examines the sense of women individuality as a critique of patriarch society in in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. As a matter of fact, Woolf is considered one of the most influential writers in English literature in the twentieth century and even before. Her writings reflect the modern literary realism in all its features. She writes in fictional modes that suggests departure from the previous literary fashion. In so doing, she provides experimental literary strategies which could be imitated by writers who follow her. Woolf tried her hands to write in new experimental forms to offer new insights into the literary modernism. At this point, she represents an outstanding figure in modernism. The aim if this study, therefore is to explore the realistic depiction of Woolf’s appropriation of women’s ordeals as an indictment of the contemporary patriarchal social attitudes awards women.

The fall of national identity in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

This article examines Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart within a postcolonial discourse. While the majority of postcolonial critiques argue over indigenous identity, this study explores the deterioration of national identity in Things Fall Apart. Such deterioration is brought about by the spiritual and tentative defeat inherent in the failure of the protagonist, Okonkwo, to face the colonial whites. Ultimately, the protagonist's failure leads to a tragic death. In the novel's context, Achebe exhorts the fall of national identity and its pathetic aftermath. The deterioration in national identity symbolically correlates to the protagonist's personal irresolute experience which is at first physically powerful but in the end spiritually weak. The focus of this article is a textual analysis of Achebe's Things Fall Apart, applying postcolonial theoretical concepts, especially aboriginality, hegemony, subaltern and identity. These concepts facilitate a smouldering conceptualisation of national identity as it is exterminated in the novel. Thus, the these terms will be cited mainly with reference to Bill Ashcroft, Gayatri Spivak, and Laura Chrisman's postcolonial critiques

Anthropomorphism as an Embodiment of Natural Gothic and Man in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

This essay examines anthropomorphism and gothic elements in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003). Atwood offers several textual clues regarding animals and birds that represent ideal environment. Moreover, she reinforces the narrative descriptions of such animals by polarizing other natural elements, like trees and bird. She constructs the decisive improvement of the literary characters’ lives. These character resort to natural places to elevate their peace of mind by spending time in tranquility among environmental circumferences since countryside helps them to live peacefully. Here, Atwood’s narrative appropriation of animals and birds essentially relates to the environmental capacity to make the characters relived and contended with nature desired by the characters. The study will apply the concept of anthropomorphism which encompasses the sense of gothic elements. Animals are one of the basic environmental components of the story’s natural milieus. Atwood appropriates the view of the Animals through inextricable natural elements, birds, water, forests, and woods. As for birds, they function as the equilibrium of the ecological integrity tackled in literary works. Thus, the study tries to reveal the vital significance of natural biodiversity; and its literary function lies in offering implied textual insights on biodiversity depicted in the novel.

Caribbean Displacement and the Question of Oppression and Cultural Changes of Post-colonialism in Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River

This article examines the conditions of the displaced individuals in Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River (1993). In essence, the displaced individuals undergo oppressive experience. They are forced to leave their homeland for other lands. The study is going to demonstrate how these displaced minorities cope with their conditional presence in the displacement lands. In the main, displacement involves the diasporic movement of the colonized people and their settlement in other lands which are not their own. The analysis will concentrate on the imperial practices exerted over the displaced individuals. As such, the study will apply a postcolonial methodological approach to explore the colonial relationship between the colonized individuals and their colonizers. The displaced individuals become prone to transformation in their new lands since they are negatively suppressed by the colonizers. In the course of the analysis, the focus will be on Phillips’s portrayal of the displaced individuals and their interactions with other characters whether the colonizer or other displaced individualities

Reversed Identity, the Problem of Fake Identity, and Counter-Identity in Selected Novels by Nadine Gordimer

This paper examines reversed identity in Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People, counter-identity in Burger’s Daughter, the problem of fake identity in The Conservationist. The discussion of these kinds of identity are explicated from a postcolonial perspective. The study sheds light on Gordimer’s depiction of identity within cultural, social, and ethnic considerations. The study’s methodology relies on the descriptive elaboration of the selected novels’ themes related to South Africa in post-apartheid periods when riots broke out for liberation and independence. It depends on some previous studies and critical books on identity in post-colonialism. It offers few analytical comments on Gordimer’s perception of identity and how she portrays it in different kinds, namely, reversed, counter, and fake identities. Thus, the analysis is supported by critical arguments about the multifarious meanings and implications of identity.

The Ethnic Intersection between Culture and Identity in Selected Postcolonial Works

This paper examines culture and identity in selected postcolonial works. The study looks into identity and culture to investigate the ethnic traits of Haitian, American, and Nigerian ethnicity depicted in the selected stories. It follows a close reading of the stories’ texts to explore the thematic nuances of Danticat’s, Walker’s, and Nwokolo’s postcolonial style. That is, the selected stories portray the literary reverberations created by Danticat and Walker, and Nwokolo to offer a universal view of the Haitian-American and Nigerian cultural changes that affected their native identity. By studying the characters and settings, the mythology applies the concepts of culture and identity to unravel the authors’ attempts to enhance their ethnicity teetering on the brink of postcolonial cultural transformation

Fear Mechanism in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart

This article studies anxious psyche in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The study is going to examine the story’s main character who suffers from bewilderment and anxiety. In the course of the story, there is an implicit mystery that makes the reader perceive the events in an unexpected way. Poe builds his story’s events on a narrative manner that make the reader suspicious. He gives the reader the opportunity to in interpret the story according to the expected events. Yet, the story does not end in according to the reader expectation. According, the current study will analyze the events from a psychological way. It will employ the concept of anxiety to discover the main character’s agitated psyche. The character meet unusual and abnormal coincidences ate the same time. These coincidences make him anxious. Here, my analysis will set out to discuss the gradual phases of the character’s anxiety. Additionally, my analysis will examine the character’s deteriorated psyche by using the concept of anxiety.

The Duality of Magic and Memory as the Structure of Narrative Repetition in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

This paper examines the repetitive narrative structure in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). Morrison writings focus on colonial issues and its relative issues. She deals with the colonial subjects that influence the world since the beginning of colonialism up to the present day. In her fiction, she depicts many thematic issues that have a universal appeal. One of these issues is color. This is issue is of paramount importance since it relates to the treatment of black people in different ways. Before the mid-twentieth century, color was a great subject to the public opinion in all over the world. The black people were deprived of their human dignity. They are treated in a lower position that affects their identity and human dignity. There were no serious steps to be taken in order to limit the treatment of black people in inferior positions. So, color was interrogated many times during the first part of the twentieth century because the colonial and imperial plans were spreading all over the world. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to explore Morrison’s repetitive narrative structure as a magical site of memory in Beloved (1987).

Aversion and Desire: The Disruption of Monolithic Ambivalence in Octavia Butler’s Kindred

This article is an attempt to explore colonial ambivalence in Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979). The significance of study brings to light a major issue which has been hardly emphasized in the existing academic scholarship on the novel. The study will reveal an ambivalent identity in an individual colonial locales and societies. It will analyze and show the many complex ways in which Butler uses her fictional savvy as a medium to broker, affiliate, and project the places, peoples, cultures, and ethnicity to work through the ethical, political, and affective conceptualization of ambivalent identities. Butler’s ambivalent writing, correspondingly, asserts a sense of belonging to the locality in which post-colonial subjects have evolved, and, at the same time, expresses the specificity of the actual racial experience of being ethnic, or alienated in homeland. The study will add to the remapping of contemporary postcolonial fiction and the reevaluation traditional ambivalent identities. It will testify to the increasingly progressive and long-awaited destruction of cultural national containment. The study addresses a vastly under-examined area, namely the impact of colonialism on the native identities of the blacks. Ambivalent subjectivities have always coexisted within and outside the long inherited history of the blacks’ nation, but their text has long been disregarded. As a mode of demonstration, the problem with politically correct perspectives on ambivalent relations and those with the neat postcolonial and colonial oppositions are manifold, including the effects of hegemonic policies. Such hegemonies will be scrutinized by applying Homi Bhabha’s concept of ambivalence as a conceptual framework for the study’s textual analysis

Feminism and the Question of Male Gaze in K.S. Maniam’s “The Loved Flaw”

This study attempts to explore the Male Gaze in K.S. Maniam’s “The Loved Flaw.” The study demonstrates how Maniam sheds light on the social circumstances that affect the position of women in a male-dominated social milieus. It attempts to interpret the story’s female characters who suffer from the sequences of male gaze which leads to their marginalization or position as being subaltern and passive. Hence, the discussion of this marginalization accentuates women’s ability to cope with their patriarchal circumferences in order to search for equality and subjectivity since they lack strong voice to express their voice regarding their right. As such, the study polarizes feminism as a way to delve deep into the story’s narrative depiction of women’s plights restricting their voices and potentials. Therefore, the study’s methodology depends on feminism to interpret the effect of make gaze upon the selected work’s female characters and how they resist it through self-autonomous subjectivity