Multiculturalism and feminist concerns in South Asian diaspora novels

The importance of multiculturalism within the parameters of feministic theory has become a new element for South Asian diaspora writers. They are keenly interested in debating the issues of cultural conflicts, differences, identity, assimilation, integration, negation, oppression, sex discrimination and gender inequality in their works. This paper with a focus on Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers brings out the features of female oppression that lead to their fragmentation on emotional, social, cultural and physical levels. Thus the focus of this paper is to analytically perceive how some prominent writers have shown feminist concerns about these situations

Creativity, Psychoanalysis and Eugene O’Neill’s Creative Process

O’Neill is undisputedly one of the most autobiographical artists in modern literature. His creativity consistently moves around subjective exploration and autobiographical representation in his art. Therefore drama for him involves primarily dramatization of self and close relations such as mother, father and brother, and this association between life and art goes back to early amateur plays. This factor has exposed the artist to discreet psychoanalytic explorations and analysis. Clearly a depressive and predominantly oedipal pattern emerges in his writings that could be traced in the whole range of his plays. However, preoccupation with the self and pervasive obsession to dramatize peculiar relationships and psychic conditions create its own archeology of limitations in his art that have remained unaddressed so far. The study debates on creativity, psychoanalytic traditions of creativity, O’Neill’s creative process and highlights some of the limitations that pertain to representative and intellectual aspects of his ar

Strategies for improving English language Listening Skill (The Case of Distract BANNU)

This study aims to provide some innovative strategies for improving listening skill of English Language of secondary level students at district Bannu. Effective Listening in English language, guiding the students towards effective oral communication, is the problem with all the ESL students at secondary level and as such it creates problem for English language teachers. The objective of the study was to help the English language teachers and students to overcome this problem by showing the results of application of innovative strategies for improving English language listening skill. Specifically, this study aims to guide the teachers of district Bannu to bring innovation in their teaching and thus enable their students to overcome their listening problem. For this purpose, first of all, data was collected from English Language teachers of secondary level in order to know about the steps taken for the improvement of listening skill of their students. The data was collected through rating scale questionnaire. After that an experimental study was carried out for which a 10th grade class was selected. For the collection of data t-test was used. Results indicated that a visible change occurred in the listening skill of the treatment group, after the application of innovative strategies on this group. Hence it proved that the application of innovative strategies for improving listening skill had a very positive impact on the students. Keywords: Listening Skills, English Language, Innovative Strategies, t- Test

Female Sexuality in Contemporary Pakistani English Fiction

Female sexuality has remained a taboo subject in Pakistani literary and cultural representations. However, a considerable shift has occurred in contemporary Pakistani English fiction. Focusing on female bodily behaviour, the fiction explicates multiple shades of female sexual relations and experiences outside the cultural and religious norms in an unusually direct and explicit fashion. This study analyses the way Pakistani fiction, written in English, responds to the variety of different ideologies imposed upon women’s bodies and sexuality. It analyses some key sexual experiences of pubertal sexual awakening, postmarital sex, women’s urge for proactive sexual intercourse, and disavowal of motherhood, pregnancy and birthing. The collective representation of female sexuality in each case embodies a transgressive experience outside the shame/shameless, licit/illicit binaries. However, the representation, despite its explicitness, does not constitute in any way women’s sexual autonomy against the predominant masculine discourses. The issues have been analyzed within the framework of debates on the female body, heterosexuality, the male gaze and commodity fetishism

Language, Power and Gender: A Case Study of Code Switching by Less Educated People In Pakistan

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relation between language, power and gender among less educated people. Less educated people here mean those who passed only middle class examination. Foucault’s theory of power and discourse gave new dimensions to languages. Language is used to exert power (Foucault, 1998). Due to this relationship of language and power, the speakers try to use that language as is enjoying power and high status in their speech community. Those of high status enjoying language is very much seen in the process of code switching where the speakers do code switching from low status enjoying language to high status enjoying language. The major aims of this research were to find out the relation between language and power and how speakers’ use of powerful language varied across gender. This study was quantitative. Data collection was done through questionnaire comprising of two sections. The first section was consisted of 10 close ended questions to know the relation between language and power. The second section of the questionnaire comprising of 10 close ended questions measured the status of Punjabi and Urdu. After careful inquires 30 less educated L1 Punjabi speakers were randomly selected from the city Sheikhupura. Among these 30 participants 15 were male and 15 were female. Audio recording was taken from 14 participants, 7 males and 7 females who had also took part in survey questionnaire to get the data about Urdu code switching. The results collected through the gathered data revealed the L1 Punjabi speakers regarded Urdu as powerful language and they asserted that language and power are closely related with each other. Further women used more powerful language and for this purpose they did more Urdu code switching as compared to men

Text Classification in an Under-Resourced Language via Lexical Normalization and Feature Pooling

Automatic classification of textual content in an under-resourced language is challenging, since lexical resources and preprocessing tools are not available for such languages. Their bag-of-words (BoW) representation is usually highly sparse and noisy, and text classification built on such a representation yields poor performance. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of lexical normalization of terms and statistical feature pooling for improving text classification in an under-resourced language. We focus on classifying citizen feedback on government services provided through SMS texts which are written predominantly in Roman Urdu (an informal forward transliterated version of the Urdu language). Our proposed methodology performs normalization of lexical variations of terms using phonetic and string similarity. It subsequently employs a supervised feature extraction technique to obtain category-specific highly discriminating features. Our experiments with classifiers reveal that significant improvement in classification performance is achieved by lexical normalization plus feature pooling over standard representations