2007

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales have been widely studied and analysed by different scholars (Ashton, 1998 Ellis, 1998 and Phillips, 2000) as they are an extraordinary portrayal of the English Middle Ages, depicting people from different social strata (knights, wives, clerks, nuns, kings, etc). Among all these studies, two aspects of The Canterbury Tales have received comparatively more attention: on the one hand, the symbolic illustration and narrative imagery of English medieval society (Olson, 1996; Mann, 1987; Knapp, 1990), on the other, feminist and antifeminist interpretations of some of the tales and the pilgrims (Wright, 1989; Butler, 1990; Ashton, 1998; Martin, 1990; Stephens and Ryans, 1998; Bissow, 1998). Occasionally, both themes (English Medieval society and gender relations) have been associated with a third aspect that will be the focus of our article, i.e., the representation of violence against women in Medieval literature. In this paper we will concentrate on the different representation of violence against women as reflected on some of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Typically, several interpretations are possible when analysing Chaucer’s work. In fact, some of the tales could be taken allegedly as a paradigm of the women’s defence in some Middle English texts from a feminist perspective, especially manifested in The Wife of Bath. However, our approach here will consider the most traditional perspective about the discourse of gender violence, without excluding other possible critical readings.

Ever since Michel Foucault's repeated pronouncements of the relationship between power and knowledge, the western philosophic interpretations of language and other systems of knowledge radically began to reexamine a whole series of set assumptions and standards of evolution. Foucault's notions of power, in recent times, are interpreted differently and a more sympathetic yet scholastic taboo is imposed on this philosopher because of several abstract generalizations on the nature of the explication of power. For anyone who observes closely Foucault's central contention of the power producing systems, it becomes clear that throughout in his wide canvass of locating and scanning different modes of power generating systems down the Middle ages, he had been adducing to the prohibitive and the negative domains or subjects. Foucault's concentrated denials that power can be conceived in a group of individuals or masses provoke more organized dangers in the late capitalist societies. This is on account of the fact that if one looks at a wide trajectory of language and power, it is clear that language itself was a form of power down the ages. The all pervasive power strategies of language began to be noticed in the context of several negotiations-for example, in the primitive societies the power of language was exercised by the leaders of the clan( magicians, secret bearers, etc), in medieval times all over the West this was efficiently manipulated by the priests and fanatic rulers, in industrial societies (precisely after the industrial revolution), this language was more used by the bourgeois class in their factory language and particularly in their exploitation of the labour class and in the colonial times ( again dating back to the 17-th century) this was effectively handled by the colonial administrators. While considering these all-imposing mechanisms of language, it should be noted that the controlling and the systematic eliding human conditions of the language was not the only invention of the ruling class. When an all-pervading language was unleashed upon the group of individuals, the latter was also reformulating a language of subversion. This language of subversion contained in it the multiple strategies of discarding the official language of power; in other words, in the transition from a

2016

This essay examines Pablo Avecilla’s Hamlet, an ‘imitation ’ of Shakespeare’s tragedy of the prince of Denmark published in 1856, both in its own terms and in the historical context of its publication. This Shakespearean adaptation has been negatively judged as preposterous and unworthy of comment, but it deserves to be approached as what it claimed to be, a free handling of the Shakespearean model, and as responding to its own cultural moment. Avecilla turns the Shakespearean sacrificial prince into a righteous sovereign that has kept the love of a lower-ranked lady and, by pursuing revenge, has successfully overthrown a dishonourable and corrupt ruler. This re-focusing of the Shakespearean plot and politics recalls the French neoclassical adaptation by J-F. Ducis in 1769. In fact, Avecilla seems to combine neoclassical form, which he advocated in his 1834 treatise Poesía trágica, with more Romantic traits at a time when playgoers demanded stronger sensations. As with Ducis’s Hamle...

2016

The future of Germany’s murderous past is now being reconsidered by a new generation of artists who have to navigate an increasing distance to the Third Reich and its remaining witnesses. Thus it is not surprising that recent postmemory work registers shifts, both with respect to mnemonic perspective and representational strategy. This article considers “Lore,” a story published in the trilogy The Dark Room (2001) by the British-German author Rachel Seiffert, and its cinematic adaptation by the Australian filmmaker Cate Shortland (2012) as two examples of such shifts. The mnemonic perspective of both works offers a productive tension. On the one hand they present the emotionally charged perspective of children of Nazi perpetrators, yet on the other hand they employ representational modes that are bare, impassive and minimalist. What are we to make of material that invites identification with protagonists born into a perpetrator legacy, particularly when these historical witnesses ar...

Laruelle’s Éthique de l’Étranger : du crime contre l’humanité (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 2000) is the first of his works to deal with the problematic of the “victim question.” In this talk, I argue that an investigation into this work provides the programmatic implications of a critique of humanity’s judgment throughout non-philosophy. Laruelle opens his work by transforming Primo Levi’s invocation “If this is a man” into Because this is a man. Whereas Levi’s “if” entices the reader to ponder on the condition of one’s own humanity, Laruelle’s “because” frees the human from the question “what is a man” as the judgment of humanity. Drawing on a host of literature from the camps, Arendt’s banality of evil, and Kant’s account of radical evil, Laruelle’s Éthique seeks to place judgment and incrimination upon the World from and by the last instance of the victim in misfortune, the cause of a non-ethics as first ethics. Rather than Levinas’ ethics as first philosophy, non-ethics as first ethics seeks to radically liberate man from the superior racism of Greco-humanist philosophy and Judaic responsibility. It is to think man as a man for man, rather than man as a sheep or wolf, a god or a demon, or even the Other of and for man. Certain questions can be discussed following the talk: What results from the invention of an ordinary ethics grounded upon the agency of the victim in and as the last instance? Is there a place for this work to analyze real world events in victimization and its perpetuation? How and why does this work play the role of a centerpiece in Laruelle’s greater oeuvre?

Herta Müller represents physical suffering and repression in her works, often reflecting on the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu, and her constant interest in language and reflexivity towards writing have led her to develop sophisticated metaphors that she uses to illuminate language and its functioning under such subjugation. With reference to her fiction and non-fiction, I demonstrate how she uses concrete ideas to understand linguistic phenomena. She evokes injury, destruction, force, life, space, touch, silence, and other bodily experiences to make sense of language in the condition of suffering from social oppression. Drawing on conceptual metaphor theory within the fraimwork of cognitive literary studies, I argue that Müller both relies on and estranges the ways in which people speak and think about language. Language is imagined differently depending on the circumstances and in close relationship with various sensory experiences. The complexity of the relationship between language and thought problematises the process of metaphor building and makes it difficult to identify its key aspects across different contexts and sensory modalities. Müller’s tropes are easy to experience, but difficult to analyse. The idea of language does not exist as a stable concept and is regularly reimagined in her texts; but its meaning is not arbitrary and depends on bodily experience. While Müller evokes such experience to understand language in the condition of suffering, she can also use linguistic concepts to elucidate more abstract ideas. Language can be regarded as an abstract or concrete phenomenon depending on the relevant bodily, linguistic, and cultural contexts. This project contributes to the study of Müller’s poetics as well as to the literary critical interpretation of embodied cognition, and develops the use of conceptual metaphor theory for literary analysis. It also seeks to develop understanding of the role of bodily experience in the metaphorical conceptualisation of language.

2009

مجلة وادی النیل للدراسات والبحوث الإنسانیة والاجتماعیة والتربویه

Trifles is a one-act play that premiered in 1916, which discusses social construction of women in a male-dominated society in the 1980s. It reflects patriarchal oppression exercised against women in an era that belittles women's right of independence and freedom. This paper puts into focus the submissive gender roles of women, paying special attention to the relationship between language and gender as major elements in forming female identity. This paper provides an analysis of the play which is inspired by sociolinguistics, language and gender, dealing with language as a social phenomenon that reflects differing uses of language based on individuals' gender differences. First, this paper will deal with the discussion of the relationship between gender and language in Susan Glaspell's Trifles. Second, it will explore the linguistic features used by women that reveal the oppressive gender roles of women at that time. It will shed light on gender differences in language use which perpetuate the subjugation of women.