The mysterious and unspoken secrets of life can be a source of fascination for young people. The bildungsroman quest for identity is often coupled with a protagonist’s attempts to decode a range of ...secrets. Jamaica Kincaid’s work of fiction,
Annie John
(1985)
,
illustrates this journey. In this novel, the female protagonist’s maturity and character development become possible only through her persistent efforts to decode the secrets of life. This paper discusses how, in a series of adventures, those secrets are embedded into Annie’s story and how her coming-of-age mystery is ultimately resolved.
As the previous discussions demonstrate, Shakespeare is not only a poet who is well versed in the ebb and flow of love but a virtuoso choreographer of poetry. His insights on love and life are ...eminently audible through the arrangement of sound and music. Listening to the music inherent in his poetry helps us rediscover the long-neglected silence of sound and reexamine sense through sound. The sense in line with the sound in Sonnet 129 is an apt illustration.
While humans in the twenty-first century are still troubled by controversial issues such as race, gender, and class, a non-human movement has been restlessly advancing in the past few years, ...prompting people to reexamine their connection with Artificial Intelligence in a range of forms. Reading stories from Issac Asimov's classic short story collection, I Robot, Chang aims to investigate the problem of humanlike robots, their challenges, and their potential impact. The story tells of the intimate relationship between a girl called Gloria and a robot called Robbie, their separation due to the doubt cast on Robbie by Gloria's parents and neighbors, and their reunion after a range of trials and frustrations.
John Millington Synge’s play The Playboy of the Western World features the playwright’s adoption of Hiberno-English, a mixture of English and Irish, to highlight a peculiar Irish identity. This ...unique language feature, simultaneously similar to and different from Standard English, marks the playwright’s resistance to British colonization and his Irish cultural identity. By reading Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, the translated versions of the play from English to Chinese, and translation theories by Eugene Nida and Walter Benjamin, this paper discusses Synge’s Irish identity via the lens of language and translation. It was found that the use of language in The Playboy and the Western World signals Synge’s strong sense of indigenous language and the emphasis on highlighting one’s language awareness and cultural identity. This inextricably linked relationship between language and identity is evidenced by Synge’s play and reinforced by Perng’s and Chang’s Chinese translations.
The year 2017 was pivotal for women because of the #MeToo movement's global momentum. People were alerted to the abuses of power and sexual harassment by male authorities in different fields such as ...government, entertainment and industry. These scandals also helped bring attention to the objectification of women's normalised bodies and their subjugation in patriarchal cultures. Yet neither this disempowerment of women nor women's coming forward new, because they have been widely explored in contemporary women's writing. Examining Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill's poetry from the prism of #MeToo, this paper discusses women's imprisonment and silence, their harassment and victimisation and the docility of their bodies in traditional patriarchal discourse. This paper aims to investigate how women are monitored physically and mentally in male-centred contexts, how they are molested in traditional societies and how they can be empowered by coming forward and telling their own stories.
Female characters are often foils in Brian Friel's plays. However, Friel's Molly Sweeney (1994) focuses on women's central problem--the question of female identity. Although much has been examined ...regarding national identity, history, religion, emigration, and translation in Friel's works, issues relevant to women and female identity are less addressed. This paper discusses female identity and difference in Friel's Molly Sweeney via French feminist theories, exploring the extent to which women can move towards a position outside and beyond the male logocentric logic of A and B, a position of otherness or difference. Keywords: Irish women, identity, difference, Brian Friel, Molly Sweeney
Acclaimed as one of the best poets of the twentieth century, William Butler Yeats is often the focus of critical attention. The connections between Yeats's work and the Abbey Theatre, Irish ...nationalism, language arts, and his love affair with Maud Gonne have been widely explored. Many of Yeats's poems focus on death, a universal topic which engenders fear and enchantment simultaneously, so his attitude toward the inevitability of decrepitude merits further exploration. This paper discusses Yeats's early poems, such as 'When You Are Old' and 'The Folly of Being Comforted' as well as his later poems, such as 'The Municipal Gallery Revisited' and 'A Dialogue of Self and Soul.' These poems are analysed in a comparative study of Yeats's conception of life and death. Additionally, Derrida's deconstructive reading strategy and his creative interpretation of death expounded in The Gift of Death (1996) are included to trace the elusive nature of death in Yeats's poetry and illustrate its personal and cultural implications. It was found that whereas in his earlier poems the hierarchical opposition of life and death is strategically subverted to help resolve his unrequited love affair, Yeats deals with death with energy and confidence in his later poems.
...the concept of Hong Kong's identity has been controversial for decades. ...more often than not, the female protagonist submits to the linguistic superiority of her lover. ...although the Joint ...Declaration promised the Hong Kong people unchanged capitalism and legal and social systems, as well as a high degree of autonomy (Shipp 1995: 122), the break-up of the extramarital couple metaphorically connotes the Hong Kong people's suspicion of the promise. ...taken in tandem with Deng's remark that "It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice," Xu Xi seems to suggest that politics is far beyond the comprehension and concern of common people in Hong Kong. ...the extremely important event in its history paradoxically turns out to be something insignificant.
PDF
