Relationships between women in Sarah Daniels' play "Neaptide"

This paper is an exploration of female relationships using feminist and psychoanalytic approaches in reading a British play "Neaptide." The findings provide us a unique way of explaining the bondage between mother-daughter relationships, and it also tells us that in the play "Neaptide" Sarah Daniels offers a positive future to her two female protagonists because both have been rescued by their mother Joyce. Daniels uses the Demeter-Persephone myth to illustrate the limited choices that her female character Joyce has in handling her family crisis. Like Demeter,Joyce keeps her family together by delivering them from male domination: Val from her unhappy marriage with Colin, and Claire and Poppy from the devious and ruthless Lawrence. Claire's bold and honest public confession of herself as a lesbian has clearly entailed suffering and sacrifice. However, Joyce has made the right decision to help both her daughters to get out of their predicaments

The female body in K.S. Maniam's play "The Sandpit: Womensis"

This is a psychoanalytic reading of K.S. Maniam's play "The Sandpit: Womensis" through Laura Mulvey's theory of the male gaze. The findings point to the fact that 'woman' on stage has most often been constructed by men, to be viewed by other men and other women as an object, not a subject. The female character Santha may be seen as taking up the position of the masculine protagonist in expressing her fetishisation of another female character Sumathi as an object of sexual desire. While Santha is represented as older, traditional and asexual, Sumathi's behaviour and appearance are coded as sexually confident and provocative. In this play the female characters enter a discourse in the male subject position and they occupy this constructed space 'docilely'. Thus, the women are able to expose the oppressive representation of the female body as ideological, but are unable to affirm a more adequate one. As a consequence the women are still constructed by male hegemony, lacking a speaking voice. This psychoanalytic reading provides us with a sophisticated understanding of women's present cultural condition. However, it also seems to confine women forever to the status of one who is seen, spoken about, and analysed

Lambda-Based Prioritisation In Multichannel Optical Ip Network

The explosion of the Internet and its application creates demand for more network resources and bandwidth. The internet traffics such as voice, video and interactive applications are more susceptible to delay and jitter while bursty data traffic such as e-mail and file transfer are more sensitive to loss. To accommodate the bandwidth demands, the trend of the network also experiences a major change from copper-based to optical fibre transmission link. Besides of its many superior properties, optical fibre has an extraordinary limitless bandwidth. However increasing the bandwidth in respond to the need of bandwidth demands is not necessarily an appropriate solution. As more and more applications use the bandwidth, congestion still occurs. Therefore, the Quality of Service (QoS) is introduced into the network. Different type of Internet traffic requires different treatment while propagating along the network and thus requires a specific QoS characteristic.In this research, the traffic is split into four levels of priority classes that require different levels of QoS treatment. Each class of traffic is transmitted at different wavelength (A). The highest priority class deserved the best QoS treatment while lower prichity classes needs the lower QoS treatment. Therefore, there are four channels to carr four types of traffic. The Sub-Carrier Modulation (SCM) technique is used to cal the optical traffic and it is transmitted on to the optical communication ink using Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) technology. The Fib( Delay Line (FDL) that acts as an optical buffer is used to resolve the contention on the input port at the receiver. During the contention resolution, the lower priority traffic is buffered while transmitting the higher priority traffic. The simulation results show that the highest priority traffic gets the best treatment while propagating in the network. The performance of the highest priority traffic is the best whereby it has low loss, low delay and yet high throughput and efficiency. The lower priority traffic sustains high loss, longer delay but low throughput and efficiency

Environmental concern and government regulations roles in influencing ecologically conscious consumer behaviour / Wan Kalthom Yahya

Environmental concerns have increased dramatically in recent decades. Individuals have become more concerned with their purchasing behaviour and the impact on the environment. As a result, marketers tend to be more committed in responding to the needs and desires of these individuals in a more responsible manner, considering possible environmental damages that may occur. This study pursued to establish the relationship between young consumers and ecologically conscious consumer behaviour (ECCB) by analysing their green environmental concerns (EC) and government regulations (GR) variables. The scope of the study was UiTM’s students ages between 18 to 30 years old pursuing their undergraduate studies. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 23 is applied to study the hypotheses. The results from the linear multiple regression analysis indicated that both EC and GR had a positive relationship on ECCB. Moreover, the overall results have confirmed that the government regulations have a strong direct influence on ecologically conscious consumer behaviour. Thus, the findings could offer important young consumers’ perceptions and views on environmental sustainability

Interpreting Melville’s Typee: a Victorian age journey to understanding savage and civilized societies

Herman Melville’s novel, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, is said to depict common travel writing themes such as confusion, discomfort, discovery and natural beauty. However, a more careful examination of the text reveals that there are strong social critiques of racism and imperialism and a struggle with what makes humans civilized beings or savages. The issue of cannibalism haunts the story, as do the abusive practices of colonial and whaling-ship officers, which provides the necessary suspense to carry the reader through the story to its end. Cannibalism as a cultural practice is explained according to the social and political context of contact with European aggression and devastation. By analysing the text using the concepts of hegemony and binary opposition, it is clear that Melville challenges the narrative that South Pacific natives were savage cannibals inferior to civilized Europeans. He shows that the apparent savage aggressiveness of the Typees and other South Pacific islanders, was not inherent to their culture but was provoked by attacks from outsiders, particularly Europeans and Americans

Binary opposition, chronology of time and female identity in William Faulkners A Rose for Emily

In any work of imaginative literature, binary oppositions, the specifics of time and the characterization of the protagonist play some role, no matter how small and insignificant. Reading Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily” in light of the conflicts of the old and the new, the tradition and the traditionless, the chronology of time and its effect on the reader, and the characterization of the female protagonist was indicative of the influence of cultural elements in analyzing the story. While Faulkner was doubtless a major artist in terms of depicting the life of Southerners of the time and changes in the norms and codes of their lifestyle, the reader and the cautious critic also will have a distinct, and often contradictory, interpretation of a given text from the point of view and theoretical perspective that he/she adopts

Historical poetics: revisiting gender in Isabella Bird's polychronotopic account of Malaya

This paper investigates the representation of time and space in Isabella Bird's The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither (1883), her travel narrative on Malaya, through a Bakhtinian discussion of the chronotope. The study examines the historical poetics of the text and compares the intra-textual relation between time and space, as described by Bird, with an extra-textual account of the historical cultural condition of Malaya in 1883. This paper further seeks to underline the issue of gender and its influence on the narrative. The Golden Chersonese can be seen as a portrayal of an imperial look at the land and people of Malaya; whilst the narrative thus points to the costumes and religion of the Malays, it cannot escape the influence of its narrator's gender. Bird's individuality as a female traveller against the background of her native land is discussed with regard to her gender. In addition, chronotopes of 1883-Malaya, with greater focus on social, cultural and religious issues, and 1883-England as an imperial power, besides the perception of gender, are also compared. Finally, by examining various chronotopic units in The Golden Chersonese, the paper concludes that Bird's narrative is a polychronotopic text. This research fills the gap in literature regarding a Bakhtinian perspective on travel narrative writing, with reference to time and space

The subversive feminine : sexual oppression and sexual identity in Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook.

Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook adopts a complex profile to present its characters’ complex lives. However, of all existing novel’s themes it is women’s oppression and subjugation that come under scrutiny here. The world this novel pictures is a patriarchal capitalist world highly unfavorable to women, and the society it portrays is marked by male-dominance and genderbased discrimination; a society in which – no matter how capable women are – their identity is defined by men and male-defined relations. Accordingly, this paper is looking at this novel from a socialist feminist point of view to identify the facets of sexual oppression and to show how the female characters resist, fight back and rely on their self-defined identity to subvert the oppressive structure they are living in. Based on the findings of this paper we argue that in the novel’s world sexuality, motherhood and mothering are outstanding facets of oppression through which women are overwhelmingly oppressed and exploited by the male-dominated society that discriminates against women as a secondary inferior class. To our understanding, while female characters of the novel have to deal with a lot of pressure imposed by society’s institutions (family and family-like circles) they are capable enough to shrewdly rely on their power and self-defined identity to fight back and subvert the patriarchal capitalist systems that intrude women’s lives in a variety of ways. As we conclude Lessing confirms socialist feminism’s argument that mothering and motherhood are facets of women’s oppression, but she also believes that these two aspects of feminine life can be a part of feminine power to subvert the oppressive systems that are designed to define and enfeeble women’s genuine identity

Body metamorphosis in dystopian cyber-capital of Don Delillos Cosmopolis

This study examines the metamorphosis of the body in cyberspace. From the late twentieth century to the early twentieth-first century, we have witnessed a remarkable development of new technologies that have affected our concept of being. The body has been metamorphosed into pattern and has lost its possession in order to gain immortality. Its function or meaning no longer depends on an interior truth or identity, but on the particular assemblages it forms with new technologies. In this study, we draw on the work of Hayles, Haraway, Deleuze and Guattari among some other scholars to explore what happens to the body when it is rethought as pattern in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003). In the present study, we argue on a departure from capital to cyber-capital with the idea of futurity. We also demonstrate the construction of a megalomaniac in the virtual realm and that how technology and cyber-capital have affected the human body

Exposing social constructions in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle through metareligion

Bokononism is a fictional religion Vonnegut brings into his narrative, Cat’s Cradle (1963), to create a self-conscious novel known as metafiction. This innovative mode of writing narratives, along with providing a critique of their own methods of construction, deals with the external real world to examine some established structures of the human society like religion. By exposing the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, Vonnegut’s novel gives readers an opportunity to think about the possible fictionality of the world structures outside the literary fictional text. The novel tries to reorder the world perception of readers through rearranging the values and conventions of the fiction he produced. Vonnegut’s fourth novel, Cat’s Cradle, is the first mature work which, in its use of metafiction, presents ideas about the nature of truth, dealing as it does with science and religion as its main topics. A novel telling the story of its writing shifts its metafictional focus on writing process to social concern of the novelist by means of those very metafictional strategies. What the study refers to as metareligion is an ideological product of metafictional writing which Vonnegut introduces in his novel. The same as metafiction that “self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact”, Vonnegut’s metareligion exposes the metaphor of its own duplicity and simulacrum not pretend any longer to pass for the reality of what human being keep as a sacred religion. As a metafictional novel, Cat’s Cradle aims at leading readers to question whether the world systems in general and religion in particular could be as constructed as the novels they are reading