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2024

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Ethical Dilemma And Narrative Strategies In David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly (1988 And 2017), Xin Zhang, Shumin He Dec 2024

Ethical Dilemma And Narrative Strategies In David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly (1988 And 2017), Xin Zhang, Shumin He

Kritika Kultura

David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly (1988), the first play written by an Asian American playwright to win the Tony Awards, remains his most renowned and controversial play. The play has been criticized for catering to mainstream discourse for reproducing the rather negative “Dragon Lady” stereotype in the name of subverting the “Madame Butterfly” stereotype. However, with the unreliable narration, the play connotes dual narrative dynamics which creates great aesthetic tension and powerful ironic effect. But such a rhetorical device has, to some extent, also led to the alienation between the play’s representing strategies and the implied author’s intention, which results …

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The Multispecies Soundscape In Mo Yan's Red Sorghum, Qianqian Chen, Joan Qionglin Tan Dec 2024

The Multispecies Soundscape In Mo Yan's Red Sorghum, Qianqian Chen, Joan Qionglin Tan

Kritika Kultura

Red Sorghum, the masterpiece of Mo Yan, the winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, is an exemplar of the Chinese root-seeking literature in the 1980s. Comparing the red sorghum field to an auditory field accommodating diversified species, the article unveils that its multispecies soundscape is characterized by its animated liveliness, tumultuous polyphony, and acoustic harmony between sound and silence. By delving into the historical and cultural context of the novel, as well as Mo’s personal background, this paper concludes that the clamorous multispecies soundscape in the red sorghum field can be attributed to Chinese ancient ecological philosophy, Gaomi …

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Lindey Collen: Indoceanic Solidarity, Felicity Hand Dec 2024

Lindey Collen: Indoceanic Solidarity, Felicity Hand

Kritika Kultura

The 2020 oil spill in Mauritius and the fictional events portrayed in Lindsey Collen’s novels both point to the major issues that recur in her work: the struggle for class equality, environmentalism, women’s rights, and the struggle for a communal-free society. In this article, I explore Collen’s novel Boy in order to tease out the concerns that link Mauritius to a larger Indoceanic community. The novel maps out the geography of Mauritius by which the local landscape is foregrounded as an active participant in the colonial history of the nation. Likewise, Collen underscores the importance of human contact and commitment …

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Suspended Paradise: Survival And Storytelling In Abdulrazak Gurnah's Afterlives, Esther Pujolràs-Noguer Dec 2024

Suspended Paradise: Survival And Storytelling In Abdulrazak Gurnah's Afterlives, Esther Pujolràs-Noguer

Kritika Kultura

Afterlives, published in 2020 is, to date, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s latest novel. This article reads Afterlives as an exponent of the interruption-continuation framework that defines the Gurnahian oeuvre. The abrupt ending that assails the narrative flow of Paradise (1994) with its protagonist, young Yusuf, hiding from the sight of the arrival of the German Army finds its continuation in Hamza (Afterlives) who has volunteered to fight with the Germans in the First World War. As expressions of the same Lukácsian literary type, Yusuf’s and Hamza’s delicate beauty is a constant reminder of the fragility of a world that survives by mere …

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Gurnah's Men: Rethinking Muslim Masculinities In The Indian Ocean World, Felicity Hand Dec 2024

Gurnah's Men: Rethinking Muslim Masculinities In The Indian Ocean World, Felicity Hand

Kritika Kultura

This article explores how Abdulrazak Gurnah illustrates the varieties of Muslim masculinity in the Indian Ocean world through an analysis of two of his youthful characters, Hassan Omar, from his debut novel Memory of Departure and Salim Yahya, from his more recent Gravel Heart. Both young men find themselves pitted against a more traditional male role which stifles them while, at the same time, encourages them to envisage a more fluid understanding of what it means to be a man in a predominantly Muslim society like Zanzibar. The fissures in the relationship that Hassan and Salim have with their fathers …

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What's Tropical About Nick Joaquin's Tropical Gothic?: Heat And Corporeality In "The Summer Solstice" And "The Dying Wanton", Ann Ang Dec 2024

What's Tropical About Nick Joaquin's Tropical Gothic?: Heat And Corporeality In "The Summer Solstice" And "The Dying Wanton", Ann Ang

Kritika Kultura

Since their first publication in magazines like Philippines Graphic and the Philippine Free Press, and their subsequent re-publication under the collection title Tropical Gothic, Nick Joaquin’s classic short stories from the 1940s have been mainly appraised within a gothic framework. While critics have read the doublings and monstrous excesses of these stories as expressing a postcolonial resistance to colonial modernity, or a desirous anxiety for a pre-colonial Philippines, this paper discusses tropicality as a further localization of such gothic elements. By adopting a new materialist approach to ecological imaginaries, this article argues that the discourse of the tropical in Joaquin’s …

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Memory, Haunting, And Duality: Malaysian Amnesia Within The Uncanny Home In Chuah Guat Eng's Days Of Change, Hannah M. Y. Ho Dec 2024

Memory, Haunting, And Duality: Malaysian Amnesia Within The Uncanny Home In Chuah Guat Eng's Days Of Change, Hannah M. Y. Ho

Kritika Kultura

This article analyzes Chuah Guat Eng’s Days of Change as a postcolonial Gothic fiction by discussing instances of haunting and repressed memory in the novel. It examines memory loss in the family and the nation, triggered by traumatic events and leading to haunting and the haunted. Using the concept of the uncanny, this study explores the postcolonial fears and disruptions that, paradoxically, open up creative thinking for revisionist history. It contends that Chuah Guat Eng’s novel offers a critique of postcolonial othering while also insisting on acts of remembering to mitigate amnesia. The paper evaluates desires for a reconciled home …

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Pulo: A Metonym, Christian Jil R. Benitez Dec 2024

Pulo: A Metonym, Christian Jil R. Benitez

Kritika Kultura

As an attempt toward a preliminary understanding of the islandic in its Philippine rendition, this study navigates with and through the Filipino pulo and its associations in various Philippine languages. In its recourse to linguistic and philological paradigms, the study relies above all on some creative invocation of the archipelagic form through the quintessential prose form of the essay. The commonly perceived isolation of islands in kapuluan is intuited here to be simultaneously relational (as kapuluan is also the Filipino assemblage of the pulo). In the process, the pulo is found, through a Tagalog lullaby examined here, to delineate in …

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A One-Off Foregrounding In Korean Film: Pornography, Erotica, Technology, Desire, Yu Taeyun Dec 2024

A One-Off Foregrounding In Korean Film: Pornography, Erotica, Technology, Desire, Yu Taeyun

Kritika Kultura

Although sex as a condition of possibility is heavily commodified in the romanticized selling points of advertisements and popular-culture products, the physical experiences most commonly associated with the act—pleasure and pain, commonly known as sadomasochism— remain proscribed in “respectable” modern society. The necessity of confronting both has nevertheless been argued, starting with Sigmund Freud’s groundbreaking studies. This accounts for artists and intellectuals inspecting sexuality at its core (“hard” core, so to speak), notwithstanding the risk of social and legal sanctions. Using Jang Sun-woo’s Gojitmal (1999) as key material for analysis, this study will attempt to shed some light on the …

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Gendering Genre In Korean Films With Filipino Women Characters, Maria Luisa Torres Reyes Dec 2024

Gendering Genre In Korean Films With Filipino Women Characters, Maria Luisa Torres Reyes

Kritika Kultura

The paper deals with the category of the Korean yosong yonghwa (yosong = women; yonghwa = film) and the place of the Filipino women characters in them. Especially in film genres where women play major protagonists from melodrama to vampire films, indelibly etched in their narratives is the all-too-familiar set of conventional roles and activities assigned to women, portraying a female identity constructed socio-culturally by a patriarchal society. As such, yosong yonghwa is associated with fictional images as well as actual experiences especially common in societies with a history of Confucian influence: from the suffering, hardworking, domesticated, and naïve wife …

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From Hostesses To Working Girls: Sex Workers In Late 1970s Philippine Cinema, Joel David Dec 2024

From Hostesses To Working Girls: Sex Workers In Late 1970s Philippine Cinema, Joel David

Kritika Kultura

The depiction of morally wayward women characters as protagonists in Philippine cinema emerged in parallel with the trend in presenting gangsters and so-called bad boys in the late 1950s. Drawing influence from the spread of the French New Wave and its transformation of American cinema into the New Hollywood, the Filipino counterparts (of both genders) required comeuppances that were either tragic or reformist. One other tendency was to provide confederates for these characters, to the point where duos or, more often, groups would dominate the narrative. This paper will look at the possible reasons for the narrative strategies used by …

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"Magsama-Sama Tayong Panoorin": A Creative, Collaborative, And Ongoing Ethnography With Sama Banguingui Women Dancing In The City Of Manila, Regina Salvaña Bautista Dec 2024

"Magsama-Sama Tayong Panoorin": A Creative, Collaborative, And Ongoing Ethnography With Sama Banguingui Women Dancing In The City Of Manila, Regina Salvaña Bautista

Kritika Kultura

For the Sama-Bajau and Sama Banguingui women living in Manila, the traditional dance pansak (or igal) is a vital dimension of life. This paper focuses on Radzmina Tanjili, a Sama- Banguingui from Zamboanga, well-known in her barangay1 for her dancing. Her life as a dancer is filled with performance opportunities and cultural exchanges for her and the group of Sama- Bajau women and children who belong to the same NGO she volunteers for. She and the group perform for government, non-government organizations, and academic institutions. Apart from this, she also continues to dance pansak in its traditional improvised form at …

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Dance After Lockdown: Living With Paradox, Simon Ellis, Rowan Mclelland, Rosemary Kostic Cisneros Dec 2024

Dance After Lockdown: Living With Paradox, Simon Ellis, Rowan Mclelland, Rosemary Kostic Cisneros

Kritika Kultura

This writing explores the experiences of people in the UK’s contemporary dance sector during the COVID-19 pandemic.1 It draws on qualitative data from a small research project—Dance after Lockdown—to examine how that sector understands their work, and how the language and ideology of the creative industries have shaped the lives and experiences of contemporary dance artists and institutions in the UK. The paper offers a range of diverse voices as one of the goals of the research was to examine the breadth of experiences, which we hope makes a case for the need to have a dance sector that is …

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Bodies, Landscapes, And The Air That We Breathe, Caroline Frizell Dec 2024

Bodies, Landscapes, And The Air That We Breathe, Caroline Frizell

Kritika Kultura

This article maps out material-discursive entanglements of bodies and landscapes, speaking from bodies-in-movement as ecokinetic poetic phenomena. The first-hand experience of waiting on the end of a phone line for information on disability support becomes a springboard to unpack the term material-discursive, locating it in posthuman thinking, with a focus on the way normative discourses become inscribed at an embodied level. When COVID-19 arrived, or perhaps erupted from within, bodies turned into sites of suspicion and precarity, mirroring the oppressive clout of normative discourses, that move invisibly and insidiously, creating and being created by relations of power. Hands, face, and …

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Assertions Of Truth Through Modes Of Fact And Fiction: Texts, Paratexts, And The "Autobiographical Pact" In Lualhati Abreu's Agaw-Dilim, Agaw-Liwanag And Mila Aguilar's The Nine Deaths Of M, Mary Grace R. Concepcion Dec 2024

Assertions Of Truth Through Modes Of Fact And Fiction: Texts, Paratexts, And The "Autobiographical Pact" In Lualhati Abreu's Agaw-Dilim, Agaw-Liwanag And Mila Aguilar's The Nine Deaths Of M, Mary Grace R. Concepcion

Kritika Kultura

Autobiographical narratives may resemble fictional narratives in textual form. Yet, autobiography differentiates itself from other literary genres through its truth-telling function. Autobiographies may be controversial as they expose contested historical events and reveal the private life of the author, who is established as the narrator. This paper examines the assertions of truth through modes of fact and fiction in Lualhati M. Abreu’s Agaw-dilim, Agaw-liwanag (2009) and Mila D. Aguilar’s The Nine Deaths of M (2013). They address sensitive events within the Philippine Left. Abreu recounts her own torture during the communist killings in Southern Tagalog under the Oplan Missing Link. …

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The Ecological Terrain Of Class War In The Cadre Poetry Of Mayamor / Maya Daniel / Roger Felix Salditos, Jose Monfred C. Sy Dec 2024

The Ecological Terrain Of Class War In The Cadre Poetry Of Mayamor / Maya Daniel / Roger Felix Salditos, Jose Monfred C. Sy

Kritika Kultura

In his cultural criticism, Edel Garcellano protests that literature is a politically partisan act in a “terrain of class war.” Cadre writings from “liberated” or “red” zones, Garcellano writes, demonstrate a clear partisanship with the peasants, workers, and other participants of the liberation struggle waged by the National Democratic movement in the Philippines. His commentary on the ideologization of writers invites us to investigate works produced in the context of the protracted people’s war to better understand the so-called “liberated consciousness” of cadre writers. Mobilizing Garcellano’s interpretive model of partisan symmetry between author and text, this paper critiques poems written …

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A Critique On The Practice Of Filial Piety In Confucian Culture, Donghyun Kim Dec 2024

A Critique On The Practice Of Filial Piety In Confucian Culture, Donghyun Kim

Kritika Kultura

The concept of filial piety has initially served as a social ethic in order to sustain the hierarchical family relationships in Confucian culture. Filial piety has also been implemented as an ideological weapon in an attempt to inculcate broader political virtue into the minds of people in Confucian culture. In essence, the everyday practice of filial piety denotes a mode of concrete ethical life, which fundamentally binds participants’ way of thinking to a particular tradition. However, such binding is not the result of a discursive procedure that provides a rational grounding to social and political authority. Given the difficulties with …

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How Animals Teach Us To Be Human: Brain Text And Post-Darwinian Animal Fable In Yann Martel's Life Of Pi, Xinyi Cao Dec 2024

How Animals Teach Us To Be Human: Brain Text And Post-Darwinian Animal Fable In Yann Martel's Life Of Pi, Xinyi Cao

Kritika Kultura

Animal fable, a genre that anthropomorphizes animals to convey moral lessons, demonstrates the possibility that animals can be tools to teach us to be ethical human beings. In this article1 I adopt ethical literary criticism, especially its conception of human-animal relations and the term brain text to investigate the role and place of animal fable in Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi to explore how the post-Darwinian animal might be exploited by fabulists to tackle human reality. In the novel, brain texts of Pi as the storyteller reveal his intention to use stories as ethical interpretations of his experience which …

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The Invention Of The Brain: Artificial Intelligence And Libidinal Symptomatology, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee Dec 2024

The Invention Of The Brain: Artificial Intelligence And Libidinal Symptomatology, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee

Kritika Kultura

In this essay, I discuss how the mechanical scan of the brain becomes to be identified with consciousness. For this purpose, I examine Angelo Mosso’s ergograph and its influence on modern psychology. The fundamental problem of his experiment lies in that nobody knows how he measured the blood flow in the brain. Mosso’s method to investigate the brain was unknown, but his description of the neural mechanism spread widely. However, Mosso’s basic assumption has not fundamentally changed, even in today’s neuroscientific context. The technological evolution offers more detailed images of the brain, but it does not necessarily allow us to …

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Brain Text And Traumatic Postmemory In Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, Ercong Gao, Junwu Tian Dec 2024

Brain Text And Traumatic Postmemory In Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, Ercong Gao, Junwu Tian

Kritika Kultura

By adopting Nie Zhenzhao’s conception of brain text, this paper explicates the generation of traumatic postmemories as represented in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, a third-generation descendant of Holocaust witnesses. The authors argue that the traumatic effects of great catastrophic events, such as the Holocaust during the Second World War and the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, can be transformed into brain texts of horror and trauma of the survivors, which, with time passing by, become the traumatic postmemories of the survivors’ descendants who have not experienced these events. As far as this novel is concerned, …

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A Morally Oriented Crusoe From The West To The East: Brain Text And The Formation Of A World Literature Canon, Haifeng Hui Dec 2024

A Morally Oriented Crusoe From The West To The East: Brain Text And The Formation Of A World Literature Canon, Haifeng Hui

Kritika Kultura

Robinson Crusoe is a world classic that has well transcended national and historical boundaries. Yet, its popularity with Anglophone and Chinese readers does not imply a similar interpretation of the protagonist and its moral lessons. From the perspective of readers’ reading expectations and interpretations, the brain text of a literary work functions as a negotiating agent in the interplay among the real author, the implied author, the implied reader, and the actual reader in the sense that it both projects prior understanding based on secondhand knowledge about the text and the framework of interpretation in the cognitive dimension during the …

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Ethical Literary Criticism And Ariel Sotelo Tabag's Panangsapul Iti Puraw A Kabalio, Mark Louie Tabunan Dec 2024

Ethical Literary Criticism And Ariel Sotelo Tabag's Panangsapul Iti Puraw A Kabalio, Mark Louie Tabunan

Kritika Kultura

Nie Zhenzhao’s ethical literary criticism provides a new take on ethics in literature, emphasizing the historicity of ethics and providing a new toolkit in understanding ethical dilemmas in literary texts. This article deploys ethical literary criticism in reading Panangsapul iti Puraw a Kabalio [Search for the White Horse], a marvelous realist novel by award-winning Ilokano writer Ariel Sotelo Tabag. Focusing on the ethical knots encountered by the four characters of the Tabaco clan, it examines the ethical choices they made against the backdrop of the ethical environments of the Second World War and the Martial Law period. Examining the life …

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Brain Text In Graphic Form: Ethical Identity And Ethical Choices In David Small's Stitches, Yun Lan Dec 2024

Brain Text In Graphic Form: Ethical Identity And Ethical Choices In David Small's Stitches, Yun Lan

Kritika Kultura

In the conceptual system of ethical literary criticism, “brain text” mainly accounts for literary production, reception, and circulation in connection with the moral dimension of literature. This paper1 attempts to broaden the application of brain text as well as ethical literary criticism through a detailed analysis of David Small’s graphic memoir Stitches. Comparing the life stories of David and his mother, we may find striking similarities: both fall victim to mental and physical violence inflicted by their family at a young age; however, their lives meet different ends. David eventually sets out on a promising journey towards becoming a writer …

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Brain Text Conversion And Cross-Cultural Integration: The Theatrical Adaptation And Performance Of Shakespeare's Comedies In China, Hui Su Dec 2024

Brain Text Conversion And Cross-Cultural Integration: The Theatrical Adaptation And Performance Of Shakespeare's Comedies In China, Hui Su

Kritika Kultura

By taking the concept of brain text, this paper1 attempts to illustrate that Falling Man by Don DeLillo is an exemplar of how brain text(s) can be processed into literary text(s). Firstly, this paper extends Nie’s concept to include four types of brain texts, namely, those pertaining to characters, readers, society, and writers, then probes into DeLillo’s trauma writing by showing how DeLillo (re)represents different characters’ brain texts in the novel. The silence and loud voice of Drew’s photo “The Falling Man” function to simulate and build up readers’ brain text, and DeLillo’s criticism of “us-them” ideology as society’s brain …

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A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Teenager: Ethical Literary Criticism And David Mitchell's Black Swan Green, Jiayi Chen Dec 2024

A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Teenager: Ethical Literary Criticism And David Mitchell's Black Swan Green, Jiayi Chen

Kritika Kultura

Inspired by ethical literary criticism, this article1 attempts to bring to critical attention the ethical dimensions of Mitchell’s war writing in Black Swan Green. By analyzing the way in which Jason’s brain text in relation to war formulates and develops, this article tries to throw light on Mitchell’s strategy of approaching and reconsidering the causes and consequences of war from the perspective of a teenager. It is argued that Mitchell has exploited diverse expressive resources—the art of the fragmentary, for example—to break new ground for rethinking the wars that fade into history. Instead of portraying violent scenes where bloody battles …

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Multiple Brain Texts And Trauma Writing: In Don Delillo's Falling Man, Qingji He Dec 2024

Multiple Brain Texts And Trauma Writing: In Don Delillo's Falling Man, Qingji He

Kritika Kultura

By taking the concept of brain text, this paper1 attempts to illustrate that Falling Man by Don DeLillo is an exemplar of how brain text(s) can be processed into literary text(s). Firstly, this paper extends Nie’s concept to include four types of brain texts, namely, those pertaining to characters, readers, society, and writers, then probes into DeLillo’s trauma writing by showing how DeLillo (re)represents different characters’ brain texts in the novel. The silence and loud voice of Drew’s photo “The Falling Man” function to simulate and build up readers’ brain text, and DeLillo’s criticism of “us-them” ideology as society’s brain …

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Introduction To The Forum Kritika On Ethical Literary Criticism, Brain Text, And New Readings Of World Literature Part Ii: In Honor Of Zhenzhao Nie, Biwu Shang, Maria Luisa Torres Reyes Dec 2024

Introduction To The Forum Kritika On Ethical Literary Criticism, Brain Text, And New Readings Of World Literature Part Ii: In Honor Of Zhenzhao Nie, Biwu Shang, Maria Luisa Torres Reyes

Kritika Kultura

This special section of Kritika Kultura is the second of two parts on “Ethical Literary Criticism, Brain Text, and New Readings of World Literature”; the first part appeared in Kritika Kultura no. 37, 2021. This part follows up from the first in offering diversified perspectives on brain text and ethical literary criticism, ranging from theoretical exploration to critical practice, from traumatic theory to moral philosophy, and from fiction to drama. Despite their respective emphases on relevant ethical issues, all papers collected in this forum attempt to do new readings of literary texts and unpack the ethical implications constituting their subtexts. …

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Relational Nation: The Appreciation Of Characters In Rizal's Noli Me Tángere In Two Philippine Public High Schools, Filomeno V. Aguilar Jr., Christian Jil R. Benitez, Ma. Elizabeth J. Macapagal Dec 2024

Relational Nation: The Appreciation Of Characters In Rizal's Noli Me Tángere In Two Philippine Public High Schools, Filomeno V. Aguilar Jr., Christian Jil R. Benitez, Ma. Elizabeth J. Macapagal

Kritika Kultura

In implementing the Rizal Law, the Department of Education’s K-12 Curriculum Guide emphasizes the study of characters in Rizal’s novels as a means to cultivate patriotism among the youth. In this light, this paper presents ethnographically how students from two public high schools in Rizal Province relate with characters in Noli me tángere. In the classroom, these characters have developed a status akin to “real” historical beings. Concomitantly, students use tropes that connect these characters to their own lives, relationships, and understandings of the social world. The students’ relationships elicit moral standards for imagining the nation and embodying their own …

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The Advanced Marginality Of The Ghetto Dwellers: Stigmatized Territory In Caryl Phillips's The Lost Child, Bahareh Nilforoshan, Bakhtiar Sadjadi Dec 2024

The Advanced Marginality Of The Ghetto Dwellers: Stigmatized Territory In Caryl Phillips's The Lost Child, Bahareh Nilforoshan, Bakhtiar Sadjadi

Kritika Kultura

Reading contemporary fiction through diverse disciplines appears to be a crucial part of recent narrative studies. The sociological approach to reading literary works provides a tenable framework for the analysis of fiction. Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child demonstrates the characters’ obsession with their sense of belonging and identity through finding new facets in the post-war metropolis and through delving into the past and the present to find the lost children of the Empire, their identity, and roots. The present paper endeavors to explore the novel’s characters Monica, Tommy, and Ben through Loïc Wacquant’s conceptions of advanced marginality, territorial stigma, and …

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An English Translation Of "Tahir And Zohra," An Azerbaijini Love Dastan, Krishnavanie Shunmugam, Amin Amirdabbaghian, Shahla Naghiyeva Dec 2024

An English Translation Of "Tahir And Zohra," An Azerbaijini Love Dastan, Krishnavanie Shunmugam, Amin Amirdabbaghian, Shahla Naghiyeva

Kritika Kultura

No abstract provided.

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