Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Calling In Antiracist Accomplices Beyond The Writing Center, Hillary Coenen

Writing Center Journal

A reflective, ethnographic study of a grassroots, antiracist educational workshop (The Conversation Workshops, TCW) reveals that writing center (WC) pedagogy and feminist invitational rhetoric’s (FIR) influence on TCW enables participants to recognize their own and their partners’ expertise, meaningful experiences, valuable perspectives, and their need to be listened to, accounted for, and understood. In an invitational model, particularly one based on a one-with- one, interpersonal dynamic, participants are more like collaborators than audiences, an approach that can be applied in diverse educational settings, and which reflects the WC’s model of one-with- one pedagogy. This dynamic also reveals one of TCW’s …

Where Are The Women?: An Ecofeminist Reading Of William Golding’S Lord Of The Flies, Hawk Chang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The absence of female characters and their voices in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) has been previously examined. On the surface, this fiction focuses on the struggle and survival of a group of boys who are left alone on a Pacific island against the background of nuclear warfare. The only presence of women in the story seems to be the aunt via a boy’s narration. However, when approaching the fiction through the lens of ecofeminism, we can find a range of feminized entities which are metaphorically embodied in the natural surroundings of the secluded island. The boys’ interactions …

“No Roses, White Nor Red, Glow Here”: The Motif Of The Garden In Two Proserpine Poems By A. Swinburne And D. Greenwell, Cristina Salcedo González

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In this article, I discuss Algernon Swinburne’s and Dora Greenwell’s engagement with the myth of Proserpine through an analysis of the motif of the garden, which takes central stage in both accounts. The examination will illustrate how the authors’ outlined images of the garden challenge the dominant representation of the motif within Western literary tradition, offering a re-interpretation of the myth as social commentary.

Exploring The Emotional Language In The Twilight Novel As A Literary Discourse: An Appraisal Theory Analysis, Susan Ataei

Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference

Emotions have always been a mysterious realm of human beings gaining an understanding of which requires the collaboration of scholars from multiple disciplines. This study employed the Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005) of evaluations and emotions to explore the manifestation of emotions in a popular modern prose fiction, the first book of the twilight series by Stephenie Meyer (2009) - Twilight. The objective of the study was to gain a deep understanding of how a bestselling literary prose fiction, Twilight, employs human emotions, and thus “affect”, to impose its “effect” on the reader. I applied the affect sub-system of …

Ellipsis In Iraqi Arabic: An Analysis Of Gapping, Sluicing, And Stripping, Saja Albuarabi

Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference

The purpose of this paper is to explore the syntax of ellipsis in Iraqi Arabic. The paper sheds light on three types of ellipsis in Arabic and English, namely: sluicing, gapping, and stripping and puts each of them in a comparison between Iraqi Arabic and English languages in addition to Arabic dialects. To the best of my knowledge, these elliptical structures have not been studied in Iraqi Arabic before. Therefore, this study offers the first description of these phenomena from a generative standpoint. The paper argues that the three types of ellipsis mentioned above can be the result of Phonological …

Optimizing L2 Vocabulary Acquisition: Applied Linguistic Research, George H. Borawski

Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference

Any acquisition in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) starts as word recognition; as such vocabulary acquisition is integral to language learning as a whole and is a precursor to fluent communication (Ellis, 1996; Moore, 1996). To maximize SLA, vocabulary acquisition must be optimized. However, vocabulary acquisition is understudied and underutilized, especially compared to other aspects of SLA (Paribakht & Wesche, 1997). Cook states, “…the vast bulk of examinations, syllabuses, and course books around the globe show little overt influence from SLA research” (1998, p.10). Courses, teachers, and students would benefit from directly addressing SLA research, rather than utilize inefficient methods (Cook, …

"A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words, And So Is An Emojis 🙂" Emojisfication Of Language: A Pragmatic Analysis Of Facebook Discourse, Alienna Kazmi, Arooj Rana, Uzma Anjum, Madiha Khan

Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference

This research study aims to examine language change occurring in written discourse due to increase in the usage of emojis and the way emojis, in comparison to words, are performing communicative functions on social media platforms such as Facebook. The study focused on Pakistani Facebook users. For the study, Facebook is one of the most authentic social media platforms because 71.75 % (Internet Word Stat) of Pakistani internet users use Facebook which is the highest statistics among all social media applications. In order to investigate the recent language change and communicative functions performed by emojis, we utilized Speech act theory …

The Acquisition Of Diminutives In Moroccan Heritage Speakers In France, Amal El Haimeur

Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference

This study addresses the acquisition of diminutive forms by Moroccan heritage speakers in France. Diminutive formation depends on stem modification. 15 Moroccan-French participants took part in this study. In a production experiment, participants were asked to form diminutives for 6 types of stems, since the stem type determines the diminutive pattern. The findings of this study show that the mean percentage of source-like use of the diminutive forms is 38%. The results revealed that just two patterns that were acquired by a significant number of participants: CCiCa and CCiCjCjəC. Diminutive forms that do not require complex processes are acquired by …

Linguistic Ideologies In The Performance Of Bulgarian Identity, Chelsey Norman

Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference

Since the end of Communism in 1989 and joining the European Union in 2007, Bulgarians have experienced much greater mobility and access to the global community. Despite this more global perspective, Bulgarians maintain a strong sense of national identity. Given this interplay between global and national identities, Bulgaria is an apt location to conduct this ideological research. Using a combination of ethnographic observations (June-July 2018) and semi-structured interviews with bilingual Bulgarians in Sofia, this study examines how large-scale phenomena like nationalism and globalization are found in the micro-scale interactional construction of identity. Results show that a great deal of ideological …

Violence, Suffering, And Social Introspection: James Baldwin's Another Country, Hollis Druhet

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

This research examines and expands on the critical outlook concerning the scope and function of identity in the literature of James Baldwin. Looking at Another Country specifically, the essay expounds on the universality of oppressive conditions shown to operate across factors of race, gender, and sexuality. Critical discussion has largely focused on Baldwin’s construction of male identities and sexual experiences; this essay argues for the importance of the novel’s female psychological depictions and how these character profiles operate in relation to male profiles. A significant universal aspect considered is the visibility of trauma: how its appearance communicates repressed pain and …

Urban Landscape In Mcewan's Narrative Representation Of Berlin, Barbara J. Puschmann-Nalenz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Urban Landscape in McEwan's Narrative Representation of Berlin," Barbara J. Puschmann-Nalenz discusses the image of Berlin created in Ian McEwanﹸs novel The Innocent (1990) and the chapter titled "Berlin" in Black Dogs (1992). It starts from the hypothetical statement that while British literary fiction set in Berlin is rare after 1970 the genres of spy and detective novel, where crime and violence take center stage, shape the image of the city in highbrow narratives as well. The perspectivization of the cityscape, including its monuments, through the protagonists fundamentally influences its image. In The Innocent the limited view …

Motherhood, Vulnerability And Resistance In The Elysium Testament By Mary O’Donnell, María Elena Jaime De Pablos

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Mary O’Donnell’s novel The Elysium Testament (1999) narrates the story of Nina, an accomplished grotto restorer, but a neglectful wife and mother according to the Irish patriarchal symbolic order –the “register of regulatory ideality” (Butler, Bodies that Matter 18). Estranged from her husband, Neil, she sends him a series of letters, her “testament,” where some of the most significant aspects of her life are exposed. Readers discover that Nina’s and Neil’s marriage begins to crumble after the birth of their second child, Roland, to whom Nina attributes a frightening dual nature, which she tries to control through physical and psychological …

Sex Between Women And Indianness: Vulnerable Casted Bodies, Antonia Navarro-Tejero

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her essay, "Sex Between Women and Indianness: Vulnerable Casted Bodies," Antonia Navarro-Tejero examines the lesbian experience, using two heterosexual voices representing the lesbian abject: Shobha Dé’s popular bestseller novel Strange Obsession (1992) and Karan Razdan’s Bollywood film Girlfriend (2004), as they espouse the dominant ideology of heteronormativity, rendering homosexuality as a western illness that taints the Indian culture. First, the author provides an overview of the history of lesbian desire in India, and how it is rendered by Hindu nationalists. Then, following the postulates of Michel Foucault, she analyzes both cultural texts with respect to how same-sex desire is …

Trauma, Ethics, And The Body At War In Brittain, Borden And Bagnold, Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article “Trauma, Ethics, and the Body at War in Brittain, Borden and Bagnold,” Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo discusses how the autobiographical accounts of the conflict by Vera Brittain, Enid Bagnold and Mary Borden, inspired by their experiences as voluntary nurses in the front, deconstruct the meanings of femininity, masculinity and patriotism, contesting the official rhetoric of passivity that defined the role of women in World War I. Their extreme engagement with the precariousness and vulnerability of others elicits an empathic response that can be interpreted through Judith Butler (2004; 2009), Emmanuel Lévinas (1969) and Alan Badiou’s (1993) ethics of …

Subverting Transnormativity: Rage And Resilience In Kim Fu’S For Today I Am A Boy, Andrea Ruthven

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article analyzes the affective politics of rage and resilience in the novel For Today I Am a Boy (2014) by Kim Fu. The novel explores the dis-identification (Muñoz 1999) of gender identity through the protagonist, focusing on the rage, sadness, fear, and secrecy that function as the glue holding the body together, but that also work to constrain the process of self-identification. The novel is not the celebration of self-realization, nor is it the lamentation of a traumatized protagonist. Instead, the narrative pays attention to the various ways in which non-binary, or non-normative gender identities are marginalized, and to …

Trespassing Physical Boundaries: Transgression, Vulnerability And Resistance In Sarah Kane’S Blasted (1995), Paula Barba Guerrero, Ana Mª Manzanas Calvo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Sarah Kane’s Blasted has been analyzed from various perspectives that address the layers of destruction it exposes. From the questioning of its title and meaning, to the unravelling of the protagonists’ abusive relationship, the analyses have emphasized the depiction of vulnerability as the defining human trait that Jean Ganteau observes in contemporary British literature. However, a key aspect has been overlooked in the critical response to the play: for Kane vulnerability does not equal helplessness, but rather stands in opposition to it. Hence, this article concentrates on how Blasted formulates a new understanding of vulnerability that fits Judith Butler’s later …

Resilience As Regeneration In Kate Atkinson’S Life After Life, Beatriz Domínguez García

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In Life After Life (2013), British writer Kate Atkinson returns to the rewriting of History as her-story that characterized her early fiction. The protagonist’s lifespan overlaps with the major historical events of the twentieth century, allowing the writer to explore how those affected the individual lives of women and, at the same time, problematizing history, memory, and the past. Above all, Life After Life highlights the deep vulnerability of women to systemic gender violence, although it also emphasizes women’s resilience. The purpose of this paper is to examine Atkinson’s peculiar rendering of resilience, which interestingly she locates in the body, …

Decolonizing Adoption Narratives For Transnational Reproductive Justice, Sung Hee Yook, Hosu Kim

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article “Decolonizing Adoption Narratives for Transnational Reproductive Justice,” Sung Hee Yook and Hosu Kim examine narratives emerging from transnational adoption practices, focusing on how birth mothers’ narratives—in which a victim-mother makes choices to give a child for adoption in hopes of a better life for the child, and awaits that child’s return—develop alongside and deviate from the normative orders of motherhood. While birth mothers’ self-transformative narrative illuminates their subjectivities—apart from victimhood, simmering in the latent form of agency—Yook and Kim argue that a compelling narrative of self-mastery produces another discursive trap which renders the numerous less-masterful birth mothers …

The Sin Of Pride In Dressing Bodies In Spanish And Anglo-American Ballads, Ana Belén Martínez García

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Sin of Pride in Dressing Bodies in Spanish and Anglo-American Ballads" Ana Belén Martínez García argues that trying to decipher the reasons for characters to dress in a certain way may help discover the underlying sociocultural mechanisms that prevail. The author aims to reveal the gender divide associated to clothing through a comparative approach towards popular literature in Spanish and English. She uses Judith Butler's theory of performative acts in order to conduct the text analysis. Clothes-related acts feature prominently in the case of popular balladry. Spanish "romances" and Anglo-American ballads are poems that were and …

Bowles's Up Above The World As Beatnik Murder Mystery, Greg Bevan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Bowles's Up Above the World as Beatnik Murder Mystery" Greg Bevan discusses Paul Bowles's fourth and final novel, which at the time of its publication was met with mixed reactions from reviewers and its creator alike, and has seen relatively scanty critical attention in the years since. Gena Dagel Caponi perceives in the novel a reflection of Bowles's struggle for control, during the time of its writing, in the face of his wife Jane's terminal illness. Building on this insight, the current essay notes the same tension in the writings of the Beats—a movement with which Bowles …

Theories Of Opiate Addiction In The Early Works Of Burroughs And Trocchi, Richard English

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Theories of Opiate Addiction in the Early Works of Burroughs and Trocchi" Richard English discusses William S. Burroughs's and Alexander Trocchi's representations of opiate addiction with special reference to their early writings. English examines the concept of homo heroin that can be attributed to Burroughs and lists and expounds its qualities. Among these are: immorality, criminality, mono-objectuality, self- and other-indifference, and, most importantly, the radical physical transformation into a new species, which Burroughs extends in Naked Lunch. English shows how homo heroin relates to Trocchi's conception of a heroin addict, which serves to illustrate that homo …

Perceval's Sister And Juliet Capulet As Disruptive Guides In Spiritual Quests, Joanna Benskin

Open Access Dissertations

Perceval’s sister in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur and Juliet in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet act as disruptive guides in spiritual quests by contradicting the expectations placed on them as women characters.

Though women are banned from the quest for the Holy Grail, Perceval’s sister accompanies the Grail knights as an authoritative spiritual guide and a symbol of the Eucharist. Previous critics have not recognized Perceval’s sister as a fundamental disruption to the systemic misogyny of the Morte or her Eucharistic significance. She challenges both the chivalric misogyny that sees her as an object of rescue and the …

Bad Girls In Corsets: Women And The Transgressive Body In The Nineteenth Century, Colleen Warwick Green

Open Access Dissertations

Women, and their bodies, posed an increasing anxiety for Victorian society. Culturally and outwardly, the Victorian era strove to maintain a level of decorum that, increasingly, the nineteenth-century woman were, rebelling against. The urge for women to break through social barriers and constraints binding them to the century created a divergence in thought from the traditional mores of the past, in turn affecting the ways in which womens’ bodies were portrayed, displayed and manipulated by the authors and artists of the century.

As women entered actively entered into spaces once closed to them, they furthered the rift of uncertainty and …

Introduction To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided for the introduction.

Thematic Bibliography To New Work On Immigration And Identity In Contemporary France, Québec, And Ireland, Dervila Cooke

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Staging Famine Irish Memories Of Migration And National Performance In Ireland And Québec, Jason King

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In "Staging Famine Irish Memories of Migration and National Performance in Ireland and Québec" Jason King examines recent community theater productions about the Irish Famine migration to Québec in 1847. King explores community-based and national ideas of performance and the role of remembrance in shaping and transmitting the diasporic identities of Québec's Irish cultural minority. While most of the plays re-enact French-Canadian adoptions of Famine orphans as spectacles of Irish integration in Québec, David Fennario's Joe Beef: (A History of Pointe Saint Charles) (1984, published 1991) rehearses the history of the Canadian/Québec nation in terms of recurrent labor exploitation epitomized …

Cooking, Language, And Memory In Farhoud's Le Bonheur À La Queue Glissante And Thúy's Mãn, Simona Emilia Pruteanu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Cooking, Language, and Memory in Farhoud's Le Bonheur à la queue glissante and Thúy's Mãn" Simona Emilia Pruteanu discusses two moments in the evolution of (im)migrant writing in Québec. Abla Farhoud's 1998 novel shows the struggle of Dounia, a Lebanese immigrant living in Montréal, who in her seventies finds a voice with the help of her daughter's writing and starts to reflect on her identity. Themes of language and cooking overlap and reinforce one another and offer a new perspective on memory and the act of remembering. Language, cooking, and memory also intertwine in Thúy's 2013 …

Genre Categorization In Contemporary British And Us-American Novels, Carlos Ceia

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Genre Categorization in Contemporary British and US-American Novels" Carlos Ceia discusses a certain type of resistance to genre categorization in many novels in contemporary literature. Many British and US-American contemporary novels show patterns in narrative creativity where novel-writing techniques are sometimes more important than the traditional subject matter driven work of fiction. Ceia reviews experimental/metafictional novels which do not show intent to fulfil an aesthetic role pre-determined in a certain moment in history. Not having this kind of burden before them, many contemporary British and US-American novelists devote their artistic imagination more to the "potential" of the …

Reconsidering The Emergence Of The Gay Novel In English And German, James P. Wilper

Purdue University Press Books

In Reconsidering the Emergence of the Gay Novel in English and German, James P. Wilper examines a key moment in the development of the modern gay novel by analyzing four novels by German, British, and American writers. Wilper studies how the texts are influenced by and respond and react to four schools of thought regarding male homosexuality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first is legal codes criminalizing sex acts between men and the religious doctrine that informs them. The second is the ancient Greek erotic philosophy, in which a revival of interest took place in the …

Ethics Of Counter Narrative In Delillo’S Falling Man, Qingji He

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Ethics of Counter-Narrative in DeLillo's Falling Man" Qingji He analyzes Don DeLillo's counter-narrative in his post-9/11 novel Falling Man. The objective is to show how ethical dimensions function fundamentally in formulating an appropriate counter-narrative and why DeLillo's counter-narrative echoes views expressed in his "In the Ruins of the Future." He argues that DeLillo's counter-narrative entails the necessity of ethical consciousness and responsibility. It is Giorgio Morandi's still life paintings instead of media representation that become pivotal in Lianne's transformative and redemptive process after the terrorist attack. Similarly, David Janiak's performance art and Richard Drew's picture …