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English Language and Literature Commons

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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature

Witness, Justice, And The Silent Confessional, Kortney Sebben Oct 2022

Witness, Justice, And The Silent Confessional, Kortney Sebben

Graduate Review

Stories depicting injustice are inherently complicated by the limitations of language. Jacques Derrida’s “Circonfession” uses deconstructionist theory to describe the flawed nature of the confession in that proximity becomes problematic: those who experience are unable to authentically deliver the truth of that experience. Language also becomes an imperfect channel through which to deliver the truth; the truth lies in both a person’s ability to bring meaning to individual experience, but also, in an audience’s ability to interpret that experience; however, both sides of the conversation are challenged through an imperfect channel of communication. Therefore, silence of human behavior may very …


Racial Spatial Relationships In Claudia Rankine’S Citizen, Thomas Jenson Jan 2022

Racial Spatial Relationships In Claudia Rankine’S Citizen, Thomas Jenson

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine addresses topics from segregation to police brutality to indicate the extreme spatial relationships between racial groups. Her work reveals the geographic mechanisms that confine African Americans to certain locations as well as the coerce them to violently share space with their white counterparts. Drawing upon spatial theory, which exposes the structures of unjust geography, my analysis also considers language as an additional spatial force that harms the black community as much as more physical phenomena.


Complete Issue Jun 2018

Complete Issue

Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language

The complete issue 1 of volume 8, Landscapes Journal.


Confession, Hybridity, And Language In Gina Apostol’S Gun Dealers’ Daughter, Cecilia Nina Myers Sep 2016

Confession, Hybridity, And Language In Gina Apostol’S Gun Dealers’ Daughter, Cecilia Nina Myers

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

In Gun Dealers’ Daughter, Gina Apostol creates multiple tensions reflecting the relationship between the United States and the Philippines and among different linguistic codes. Languages mix throughout the text, set in the Marcos Era Philippines, as symbols of fluidity and disorientation. Other characters’ frequent complex linguistic mix proves alienating for protagonist and narrator Soledad Soliman. Apostol renders Soledad as a young girl disoriented by her inability to competently use native Filipino languages because she spent most of her childhood in the United States and simultaneously traumatized by her role as the daughter of a member of former President Ferdinand …


Reflections On Linguistic And Literary Colonization And Decolonization In Africa, Eric Sellin Jan 1991

Reflections On Linguistic And Literary Colonization And Decolonization In Africa, Eric Sellin

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Despite the cultural diversity found in Africa and the complexity ofthe psychology of the colonizer and the colonized, several fundamental facts emerge regarding the function of language and literature in recent African history. The colonizer sought to instill a sense of inferiority in the colonized as part of the dynamics of conquest, placing special emphasis on education and language. These notions, lucidly discussed by such social thinkers as O. Mannoni, Frantz Fanon, and Albert Memmi, have analogues in the defense of language everywhere where lingua-political oppression occurs, be it in colonial Africa or on an Arapaho reservation in the American …