American Research Journal of English and Literature

Prof. E.A. Gamini Fonseka, Mr. P.N. Rathnayaka

Although the three classic postcolonial novels – Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958), The Village in the Jungle by Leonard Woolf (1913), and A Passage to India by E.M. Forster (1924) – were composed in three totally unrelated settings and without a predetermined timeframe, they efficiently contribute to a transcontinental and transcultural mural that powerfully relates a coherent and consummate metanarrativeof colonial justice with its three main junctures identified as the establishment, the operation, and the withdrawalas part of an oppressive administrative system maintained totally to the advantage of the colonizer and at the expense of the native. The trilogy fortuitously composed of the three novels reveals various strategies the colonizers used in the respective settings for the establishment and maintenance of their power by means of an alien institution of justice biased to English common law which was totally operated in English, capitalizing on the natives’ ignorance of the language and culture, law and order, custom and etiquette, and methods and practices it is associated with, and their failure to hold on at the point the natives became conscious of their true behaviour, challenged their hypocrisy, and resisted their dominance.While appreciating the authenticity of the narratives in the three novels in the context of their function as political critiques, this paper attempts to analyse the texts from a postcolonial perspective, compare the circumstances under which the heroes continue their respective struggles for existence, assess the literary and aesthetic potential the authors have demonstrated while articulating their political consciousness,interpret them from an historical point of view, and appreciate the impact they make on the political awareness of their worldwide readership.

Dr. Nour Seblini

While interest in Elif Shafak’s novel The Forty Rules of Love (2010) continues to grow, commentary on issues of narrative technique is limited. The focus of previous studies is on sufism and feminism. This article examines the politics of polyvocality in Shafak’s text, which aims to reflect the multiple and diverse voices within the Islamic community. While polyvocality can deconstruct the myth of the Muslim monolith, The Forty Rules of Love illustrates that this strategy is not neutral. Written in the bildungsroman form, the story follows the parallel life paths of Rumi and Shams Tabrez, a famous pair in the thirteenth century vis-à-vis the 21st century world of the Scottish (originally Christian) Sufi wanderer, Aziz Zahara, and the American Jewish housewife, Ella Rubinstein, who embraces Sufism at the end of the novel. In this article, I argue that Shafak’s novel uses polyvocality to draw distinctions between the soft face of Islam, Sufism, and a fundamentalist version of the religion perpetrated by the fanatics. The text privileges select voices that reinforce Sufism’s ostracism within the traditional Muslim community and prove it responsive to inclusion with the West while representing non-Sufi Islamic voices as cut out of the same cloth of fundamentalism, sanctioning phobia against Muslims who are not followers of Sufism.

Hajer Khalid AlShishani

This study compares and contrasts a stage-to-film adaptation which is Sidney Lumet’s movie adaption of Eugene O’Neill’s Play Long Day’s Journey into Night, while focusing on Linda Hutcheon’s adaptation theory discussed in her book Theory of Adaptation. This study also addresses the manner in which an adaptor changed or did not change the original work for a different medium. It further focuses on the way Sidney Lumet made a reference to Eugene O’Neill’s play, while still allowing and urging himself to come up with something of his own and maintaining the unique characteristics of the original text.

Qiuping Lu

This article explores misogyny perpetrated by women represented in the novel, a fictional biography, Silver Sister by Chinese Australian author Lillian Ng. It demonstrates that misogyny is not only perpetuated by men, but also by women who internalise patriarchal ideology and carry out misogynistic practices. These women are what Ueno calls “transvestite patriarchy”. They exploit and oppress other women who are in disadvantaged positions. These women collude with men to maintain the patriarchal system that perpetrates and perpetuates misogyny from the past to the present.

Yousef Alhomouz

This paper deals with the notion of Diaspora regarding the short story of the land of Sad Oranges by Ghassan Kanafani. The orange in this work represents and remains metaphorical; a faded memory instead of a symbol of the happy existence the family lived before its children becoming exiles. The orange represents a psychological, familial, and social catastrophe in the tale. It represents the political asylum, pessimism, and acceptance of the reality of loss.The sorrowful country portrays the several multiple aspects of the Palestinian catastrophe in many shapes and it is a collection of several bends against sensation and memories, as well as a group of many bends at the front of the human agony contained in this mirror. Kanafani latest attempt to construct his rise to the concept of the Palestinian perspective, which he wants to depict with words, is The Land of the Sad Oranges. Kanafani here explains the sorrow and the bitterness of being an expatriate and expelled from the motherland by force.  

Shi Long

Toni Morrison’s black urban writing focuses on American blacks inequality in urban survival and mental situation, Morrison’s novels is characterized with sharp contrast of black personal experiences in city and different urban landscape, as well as the reaching of the spiritual appeal of urban blacks through art, in order to highlight the reconstruction of the spiritual home after the black mental and physical double injury in the city.

Pragya Dhiman

This paper attempts to explore the criticism brought forth against the art of writing by Plato via the use of Socrates in Phaedrus, acting as a mouthpiece, in order to better understand Plato’s philosophical discourses through the lens of a reader trying to question, understand, critique or agree with him in the 21st century. In this essay, I shall be attempting to use a modified version of the dialectical method itself to arrive at a conclusion. 

Acheoah John Emike, PhD1, Shittu Fatai1, Okonkwo Linus Lebechi2, Garba Arzika Jega2

Lorries are among the vehicles that convey goods across Nigeria. Many of such lorries have fascinating captions expressed in Nigerian Pidgin. This paper attempts a sociolinguistic overview of selected captions on lorries. In using written language, the writer is expected to convey relevant information in terms of making the message such that can be processed easily via encoder-decoder shared knowledge. Indeed, language is the medium or vehicle for conveying ideas. The use of Nigerian Pidgin on lorries is informed by its communicative potentials, being a language that conveys the users’ socio-cultural nuances at individual and collective levels. Hinging on Stance and Engagement Theory, this study concludes that Nigerian Pidgin is used as captions in lorries to transmit knowledge, lampoon societal vices, and awaken the readers’ consciousness on states-of-affairs. 

Milorad Ivankovic

There is an old wise saying coming to us from remote antiquity, viz. ‘Better is one’s own water than other man’s wine”. Most people, however, do not adhere to it but rather follow another diametrically opposed maxim “Better is other man’s water than one’s own wine”. Modern Westerners seem to be unaware of the hidden spiritual treasure they dwell upon, while incessantly seek to obtain treasure from some other side, mostly from Asian and Far Eastern traditions. Fortunately, there was a man of great insight named Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who recorded and preserved some precious Western treasure for posterity and eternity.