Textual Turnings: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal in English Studies最新文献

{"title":"The Cyborg Consciousness: Human Reality and Virtual Reality: A Close Reading of Karel Capek’s Play R.U.R (Rossum’s Universal Robots) A Fantastic Melodrama and an Epilogue","authors":"Maha Munib","doi":"10.21608/ttaip.2023.331302","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21608/ttaip.2023.331302","url":null,"abstract":"Garfield Benjamin in his book The Cyborg Subject: Reality, Consciousness, Parallax (2016) poses an important question regarding the issue of identity. He points out an intriguing relationship between cyborg consciousness and its relation to the human subject’s consciousness. He suggests that there is a rivalry relationship between the human and the cyborg. The conflicting relationship or rivalry as he describes it is a result of the “irreducible gap” between physical and digital reality. Therefore, he focuses on “parallax” or the shift in perspectives as an important process that defines both the human and the cyborg’s consciousness. This research paper is a close reading of R.U.R (Rossum’s Universal Robots) A Fantastic Melodrama and an Epilogue by Karel Capek. The paper attempts through a theoretical framework to define cyborgian consciousness and its relation to the human consciousness. It triggers questions about the nature and the construction of the cyborgian consciousness with its three stages. The paper also sheds light on the definition of the cyborgian condition and the possibility of embracing a dystopian reality with a futuristic version of a cyborgian consciousness. Moreover, it examines the work of authors who analyze the cyborg condition and the representation of cyborgs both in popular culture and in contemporary theory. Those authors include (Benjamin Garfield 2016, Adam I Bostic 1992, Donna Haraway 2006). The theoretical framework focuses on the stages of constructing a cyborgian consciousness, the relationship between the play’s main themes and the cyborgian condition as well as the power relations governing the relationship between humans and cyborgs. The research concludes that the cyborgian condition is not an either or one but is more of a complex state embracing contrasts in some cases and acknowledging diversity as well. It also finds out that the dystopic existence at the end of the play is not necessarily a negative state but could be considered as a different type of existence that has its own nature and condition.","PeriodicalId":276703,"journal":{"name":"Textual Turnings: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal in English Studies","volume":"33 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139188493","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reporting the Iraq War: A Corpus-Assisted Critical Stylistic Analysis of Selected English Translations of Iraq War Poetry","authors":"Lubna A. Sherif","doi":"10.21608/ttaip.2023.331326","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21608/ttaip.2023.331326","url":null,"abstract":"The Iraq War started in 2003 and ended in 2011. The Iraqi battlefield raised the consciousness of Iraqi poets, especially the exiled, who reported the war in their poetic narratives. Translating these poems into English facilitated the promotion of the poets’ ideology among a larger audience. In this respect, this study adopts a corpus-assisted critical stylistic approach to investigate the similarities and differences in the ideological positioning of the English translation of Dunya Mikhail’s poem,","PeriodicalId":276703,"journal":{"name":"Textual Turnings: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal in English Studies","volume":"29 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139187715","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Surveillance Capitalism and the Critique of Social Media in Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010)","authors":"Muhammad ‘Aql","doi":"10.21608/ttaip.2023.331303","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21608/ttaip.2023.331303","url":null,"abstract":"This study seeks to explore speculative fiction’s response to the growth and influence of surveillance capitalism on human values and social relations through a case study of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010). Prompted by unprecedented advancements in technology, surveillance capitalism is a novel and worrying economic system that underpins contemporary digital culture and capitalizes on the manipulation of human users’ data for purposes of power and profit-making. Following an interdisciplinary approach, the study relies primarily on the theory of surveillance capitalism articulated by the American economist Shoshana Zuboff in 2019. It seeks to provide an in-depth analysis of the relationship between dataveillance and new social media in Shteyngart’s novel and the influence of this syndicate on the digitization of human identity and social relations under surveillance capitalism. Employing Zuboff’s concept of ‘instrumentarianism’, it further investigates how surveillance capitalism functions through instrumentarian power to control human behavior and instrumentalize social relations. The study ultimately concludes that there are eerie similarities between the observations of Zuboff and the fictional society created by Shteyngart as they both work to demystify and argue for resistance to surveillance capitalism which has transformed the way in which humans perceive their identities and the world surrounding them.","PeriodicalId":276703,"journal":{"name":"Textual Turnings: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal in English Studies","volume":"10 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139189349","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Representation of Gender Identity in Egyptian Students’ Graphic Adaptation of Chekhov’s “Anna on the Neck” – A Multimodal Discourse Analysis","authors":"Ingy Emara","doi":"10.21608/ttaip.2023.331317","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21608/ttaip.2023.331317","url":null,"abstract":"The present paper provides a (multimodal) discourse analysis of gender identity representation in Anton Chekhov’s short story “Anna on the Neck” and its graphic adaptation created by Egyptian university students as a requirement of a community service-based graduation project. The selected texts are analyzed in terms of the ideational and interpersonal meta-functions of discourse proposed by Halliday (1994) and Halliday and Matthiessen (2004), Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal theory and the representational and interactive functions of visual grammar introduced by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006). The paper provides a quantitative-qualitative analysis which shows that the female protagonist in the original text is portrayed as a submissive shallow character using her beauty to acquire gains and take advantage of her hypocrite husband, whereas the female protagonist in the graphic adapted text is attractively depicted as a dynamic character who is capable of initiating change, standing up for her beliefs and freeing herself from a tyrant husband while adhering to social norms. The multimodal discourse analysis presented herein also throws light on how graphic text adaptations can be used as community service tools to inform, persuade and reform social practices and attitudes.","PeriodicalId":276703,"journal":{"name":"Textual Turnings: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal in English Studies","volume":"3 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139190902","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Talking Back to the Empire of Science in Postcolonialism: The Autistic Poet Tito Mukhopadhyay as a Model","authors":"Dina Shalaby","doi":"10.21608/ttaip.2022.277158","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21608/ttaip.2022.277158","url":null,"abstract":"This study explores the persistent, and eternal attempt of some of the neurotypicals who belong to the West or those who could be called as \"the neurotypical occidentals\" to stabilize the differences between them, and \"the autistic Third World immigrants\". In the era of colonialism, and even after it, there has been multiple paranoiac, and imperialist Western medical debates which have objectified the disabled Third World immigrants including the autistics. This study examines two selected poems by the autistic Third World immigrant, and Hindu poet Tito Mukhopadhyay (1988- ). His poems, namely, \" Misfit \" (2010), and \" Poem 1 \" (2013) talk back to the Western empire of science, and its paranoiac medical myths concerning autism. In these poems, Mukhopadhyay portrays his suffering from the elite Western medicine in the United States which has only spotted the autistic Third World immigrants, and pursued to cure, and normalize them. He has realized that such process of normalization is only an imperial strategy to exclude, and objectify him, and his likes because, basically, they do not belong to the West. That is why in these poems, Tito Mukhopadhyay attempts to resist the colonial medical hegemony of the West, and reconfigure some of its myths concerning autism.","PeriodicalId":276703,"journal":{"name":"Textual Turnings: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal in English Studies","volume":"06 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127201458","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Force Dynamics in Sadat’s Speech to the Knesset","authors":"H. Shaarawy","doi":"10.21608/ttaip.2022.277134","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21608/ttaip.2022.277134","url":null,"abstract":"After forty-five years of its delivery, Sadat’s speech to the Knesset is still an unprecedented outstanding speech in human history, that if fully implemented by then, the Arab Israeli conflict would have come to an end. Sadat’s oration has been an allure to many researchers, and previous studies have been concerned with Sadat’s rhetorical strategies. However, Sadat’s speech to the Knesset was primarily centered around the concept of establishing peace as a force conquering war, an inspection not proposed in any available literature. The present article provides a different viewpoint of investigating Sadat’s speech to the Knesset through analyzing it within the framework of force dynamics as a cognitive semantic category. Findings indicated that the most frequent force dynamic patterns used are “onset causation” that marks out the beginning of the road to peace, and “cessation of impingement” that delineates the start of a new era of accepting each other through peace. The article is considered one of the prior attempts in the application of force dynamics to political speeches, and it is recommended to try it out to other genres as it is an innate feature of language construction.","PeriodicalId":276703,"journal":{"name":"Textual Turnings: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal in English Studies","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129586512","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"I’ll Make an American Out of You: Reflections on the Orientalism of Disney’s Mulan (1998)","authors":"Nehal Amer","doi":"10.21608/ttaip.2022.284389","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21608/ttaip.2022.284389","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":276703,"journal":{"name":"Textual Turnings: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal in English Studies","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114765589","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Collective (Un)Consciousness: A Magic Realist Reading of Carpentier’s The Kingdom of this World (1957) and Wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat (1967)","authors":"Fatma Khalil Mostafa el Diwany","doi":"10.21608/ttaip.2022.277160","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21608/ttaip.2022.277160","url":null,"abstract":"The uniqueness of Latin American and African experiences has rendered them subject to detailed research and thorough discussion. Throughout the course of history, most Third World nations have witnessed various switches in ruling regimes which have in turn resulted in traumatic shifts of consciousness. Among these nations are the Latin American and African countries that have long been subject to colonialism which have exercised political and social domination over them, inducing a traumatic consciousness that can only behold itself as isolated and discontinuous. This paper selects the Cuban Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of this World (1957) and the Kenyan Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat (1967) as representatives of these two unique historical and cultural cases. Dealing with such special political and cultural nature requires an equally unique means of expression, hence the use of magic realism. This study traces the use of magic realism as a mode of writing adopted by Alejo Carpentier and Ngugi wa Thiongo in their novels The Kingdom of this World and A Grain of Wheat respectively, to represent the common individual and collective traumas induced by two seemingly distinctive colonial experiences that have led to the presence of hybrid communal identities. Besides investigating the role of magic realism as a means of political and cultural resistance in both Cuban and Kenyan","PeriodicalId":276703,"journal":{"name":"Textual Turnings: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal in English Studies","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133708434","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Capitalist and De-Industrialized Identity: American “National” Allegory in John Updike’s The Centaur and Philipp Meyer’s American Rust","authors":"R. Youssef","doi":"10.21608/ttaip.2022.277165","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21608/ttaip.2022.277165","url":null,"abstract":"Jameson’s national allegory of the third world literature uses post-colonial identity to represent the embattled intellectual. In this paper the post -colonial identity will be replaced by a capitalist and post-industrial identity, since the American society has been subject to these two major molds during the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the millennium. John Updike’s The Centaur (1963) and Philipp Meyer’s American Rust (2009) represent not Jameson’s “embattled intellectual” but the average downtrodden American citizen who struggles to provide the basics of life in a relentlessly materialistic society. The feeling of unworthiness of the protagonists dooms their lives, but only the allegory of sacrifice gives unity and meaning to the otherwise meaningless world and gives dignity to the mediocre middle and (non)-working class. The use of allegory for both writers helped them to draw in words the disappointment of the American citizens towards their country which left them to face their predicament on their own in an everchanging society.","PeriodicalId":276703,"journal":{"name":"Textual Turnings: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal in English Studies","volume":"140 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131473626","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Women Representation in Crisis Memes – Humour and Beyond: A Critical Discourse Analysis","authors":"R. El-Wakil","doi":"10.21608/ttaip.2022.277156","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21608/ttaip.2022.277156","url":null,"abstract":"During social, economic or natural crises, people embrace unpredicted personal attitudes and social behaviour. Amid the absurdity of the Covid-19 pandemic context, humour could be detected as means of adaptation and coping mechanism as well as a platform of social critique. As a result of the intricate nature of human communication and technological advancement, variable forms of humour are produced. Memes are humorous viral forms of expression based on mutation and intertextuality. Surfing a number of pandemic memes on a variety of websites, it has been noticed that particular social and psychological outlines are employed when representing the impact of the pandemic on the social behaviour and personal attitude of women. Based on Attardo & Raskin’s (1991) General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH), and Machin & Mayr’s (2012) iconography and attributes semiosis, the paper attempts to reveal the ideological bearings of the pragma-semiotic structure in selected pandemic memes. Examining the representation of women in 30 memes on Covid-19 pandemic, the study reveals that memes are not mere digital artefacts with humorous bearing; they are digital relics of profound pragmatic and semiotic bearings. They are built mainly on incongruous scripts that construct distorted, dehumanized, or unstable identities of the represented female figures. The satirical effect is heightened by employing visual templates of semiotic iconographies with negative social and personal attributes. Hence, memes have proven to be stancebuilding arenas that contribute to the recursive construction and recognition of social identities.","PeriodicalId":276703,"journal":{"name":"Textual Turnings: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal in English Studies","volume":"60 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132305602","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}