International Journal of
English and Literature

  • Abbreviation: Int. J. English Lit.
  • Language: English
  • ISSN: 2141-2626
  • DOI: 10.5897/IJEL
  • Start Year: 2010
  • Published Articles: 277

IJEL Articles

The taxonomy of Nigerian varieties of spoken English

November 2014

The dream of a Nigerian English dictionary has recently been actualized. The academic body of teachers and researchers known as NESA recently published a dictionary of the Nigerian English. The corpus of words and expressions in the dictionary represents the meaning and pronunciation of words as used by Nigerians.As a headlamp into the major and minor languages spoken by a vast population of Nigerians, this article...

Author(s): Oladimeji Kaseem Olaniyi

Telling Stories in a World That Doesn’t Fit Them: Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient

November 2014

This paper explores the tension between the human need for the form of story and the lack of structure in reality, and how such tension is presented and dealt with in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Proceeding in a fragmented, discontinuous, and cyclical narrative pattern, this late-twentieth-century postmodern novel shows no intention to tell a coherent, structured, meaningful story but confronts its...

Author(s): Lee Wan-lun

Migration, disillusionment and diasperic experiences in Segun Afolabi’s Goodbye Lucille and a Life Elsewhere

November 2014

This paper ‘Migration, Disillusionment and Diasperic Experiences in Segun Afolabi’s Goodbye Lucille and A Life Elsewhere’ centres on the issues that have defined Nigerian migrants abroad. The paper seeks to identify the various regrets that have attended Nigerians’ quest for greener pastures abroad. It also focuses on the abandonment syndrome that has characterized the lives of Nigerian...

Author(s): Ugwanyi Dele Maxwell

Canonization of Chinese literature in the English-speaking world: Construction, restrictions and measures

November 2014

Researches on the canonization of Chinese literature in the English-speaking world focus on the canonization of a very limited sum of works such as Waley’s translation of Chinese poems, English translation of Han Shan poems and Liao Zhai Zhi Yi, etc. Till now, there have been no macro-researches on the canonization of Chinese translated literature in the English-speaking world. This paper explores the...

Author(s): Ping Li

The social animal: A scrutiny of Philip Larkin’s “Wants”

November 2014

A humanistic and analytical approach has been applied to comprehend one important longing that is solitude, hidden at the bottom of the human heart. At heart every person is lonely and likes to be alone. A case has been made for this quaint social creature called the human. He is studied intrinsically to uncover the essential vacuum of his heart. On the other hand, three gloomy and poignant truths such as futility,...

Author(s): Puja Chakraberty

Speciality of Ruskin Bond’s Writings

October 2014

Ruskin Bond is considered to be an icon among Indian writers and children’s authors. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1999 for contributions to children’s literature. Ruskin Bond was born towards the end of the British Raj. a somewhat lonely childhood, marked by his parents’ divorce and his mother’s remarriage.  India gets an exquisite reflection in his stores. This paper intends...

Author(s): Latha K. Reddy

Which change, what change? Glamourising social misfits in selected Nigerian home movies

October 2014

Nigeria is Africa's most populous nation with a vibrant emerging theatre culture; the home movies. Currently, Nigeria is ranked the second largest producer of films in the world. Nollywood, as the home movies industry is called, has produced films in their thousands reflecting various aspects of the Nigerian culture and tradition. Prominent amongst such pre-occupations of directors and producers of Nollywood is the...

Author(s): Emmy Unuja Idegu

"Grief for what is human, grief for what is not": An Ecofeminist Insight into the Poetry of Lucille Clifton

October 2014

This paper seeks to present an understanding of Lucille Clifton's poetry through the theory of ecofeminism that finds a connection between the exploitation of nature and the oppression of women. According to ecofeminists, among all the human groups threatened by the devastation of the environment, women in particular are exposed to the greatest dangers. This can be seen in the births of deformed babies, miscarriages...

Author(s): Abdel Mohsen Ibrahim Hashim

“Representing the African cultrure in Buchi Emecheta’s The Bride Price- A Study."

October 2014

The social institution of marriage and the culture of paying bride price are interlinked and form an important part in the lives of African men and women. Like other communities, the African society has its own series of events that take place before and after marriage such as the hunting of bride by going to the prospective bride’s hut before marriage and the inheritance of a widow and her family by the...

Author(s): G. Sankar and T. Rajeshkannan

The exuberance of immigration: The immigrant woman in Bharati Mukherjee’s

October 2014

South Asian women and in this context Indian women have always suffered subjugation and rejection in a chauvinistic society restricting them to a life of domesticity. However, by migrating to a foreign country as spouses and participating in the labour market to get education and to live for their children, women migrants experienced social and emotional emancipation and financial independence for the first time. This...

Author(s): Debadrita Chakraborty

(Re) writing postcolonial Bildungsroman in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus

October 2014

The paper will explore what is Bildungsroman and its history and how this genre has been tackled distinctively by the third generation African woman novelists. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is unique in using the genre Bildungsroman. The political- historical background of the text Purple Hibiscus will be focused on as well as the development of the protagonist Kambili both physically and psychologically in each stage of the...

Author(s): Nilima Meher

"Twenty-first Century English Poetry towards Mantric Planes of Consciousness"

October 2014

Sri Aurobindo, a man of the supramental plane of consciousness has found ‘Mantra’ to be the future of Poetry, the poetry which expresses the deepest spiritual reality. He discovers that poetry written from some higher plane of, what he calls, the Intuitive Mind Consciousness and Over mind Consciousness, the two uppermost planes of spiritual consciousness on the plane of Mind is the Mantra. Since man is yet...

Author(s): Nikhil Kumar

Politics of religion in partition novels: Rahi Masoom Reza’s Adha Gaon and Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan

October 2014

People have moved many a times from one place to another. Ideally such movements should be voluntary but it is not always so. There are several instances, in the history of mankind, of mass migrations to escape perceived prosecutions on the name of racial/ ethnic cleansing, political strategies etc. A few of these experiences, especially of the modern times, are well-documented and attracted people with the human...

Author(s): Raichura Komal

An evaluation of an English as Second Language (ESL) Pakistani college textbook: Meeting the needs of the Pakistani students

September 2014

  This study investigated how textbooks influence learning experiences and aims to highlight the pedagogical implications of the incorporation of materials as the backbone of language-teaching programme.  It analysed and evaluated a prescribed textbook (“Prose and Heroes” – a Compulsory English course book for intermediate classes in Pakistan), and explored the degree it benefited and...

Author(s): Asma Aftab, Ayesha Sheikh and Isabel William

Investigating the washback effect of the Pakistani Intermediate English Examination

September 2014

  The impact of a test on teaching and learning is commonly referred to as the washback effect.  This study investigated the nature and scope of the washback effect from the Intermediate English examination on teachers and students of a public sector college in Pakistan.  The research relied on qualitative approach utilizing interviews to collect data from six teachers and six students.  The data...

Author(s): Asma Aftab, Sabeen Qureshi and Isabel William

Teachers’ emotional intelligence and sense of self-efficacy beliefs: A study on public second cycle primary school English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers in Bahir Dar Town, Ethiopia

September 2014

The purpose of this study was to examine public second cycle primary school English as Foreign Language   (EFL) teachers’ level of emotional intelligence (EI) and self-efficacy beliefs and the relationship between the two constructs. Forty-   three randomly selected EFL teachers were taken as a sample of the study. To generate data and answer the research questions, the researcher adapted two...

Author(s): Girma Wossenie

Indian mindscape: Caste, class hegemony with reference to Kannada short story ‘Classmate’

September 2014

  Caste identity is not just a question of consciousness; it is a matter of structure, of power. Can the category Dalit merely represent a perspective? Can it just be a standpoint? And what are the tools/ideas/texts that would enable a Dalit perspective? Can a Dalit perspective be divorced from the experience of being termed an untouchable? Untouchability is not a singular experience; what holds Dalits together...

Author(s): Agrawal Shuchi

Marxist Study of Miss Julie

August 2014

Class stratification and efforts to bridge a gap between high and lower strata of society is among the chief aims of social Marxist writers. Strindberg's Miss Julie though labelled as a Naturalistic work possesses such strains of social Marxism and is to presented from this angle in this paper.   Key words: social Marxism, Class distinction in Miss Julie, bridging the gulf between two classes.

Author(s): Hasan Huma

Background of French revolution in Dickens’s ‘A Tale of Two Cities

August 2014

Charles Dickens (1812 to 1870) is a foremost representative novelist of the Victorian era, a great story-teller and social reformer. A Tale of Two Cities has always been one of his most popular and best-loved novels. It is the second attempt on historical fiction by Dickens and French Revolution is his subject. Always interested in the interaction between individuals and society, Dickens was particularly inspired by...

Author(s): Saravanan Sarpparaje

Phonological features of Basilectal Philippine English: An exploratory study

August 2014

This paper attempts to describe the result of a data-based investigation of the phonology of the Basilectal Philippine English as a response to Tupaz’ (2004) challenge to conduct Philippine English studies that would describe not only the “educated English” (the acrolect and mesolect speakers), but the “linguistic practices of genuinely marginalized voices (the basilect speakers) in Philippine...

Author(s): Eden Regala-Flores

Use of media as an instructional tool in English Language Teaching (ELT) at undergraduate level

August 2014

The present scholar’s experiments in the class room related to the media using the print media while teaching English at the undergraduate level and the students’ enthusiastic response has been the source of inspiration for the present paper.  Here is an effort to concretize unplanned language teaching experiment into a well planned, syllabus-oriented and academically productive package. Key words:...

Author(s): Bolla Mallikharjuna Rao

Othering syndrome at work: Anita Desai’s in custody

July 2014

Anita Desai mostly concerns the questions of survival and existence in her novels. She tries to understand and explore the machinery which subjugated and conditioned othering process. In the novel, Urdu poetry, and two women- Sarla and Imtiaz Begum- are othered through power. Power operates always in a network and extends its reach everywhere. The othering process is accelerated by power syndrome. It is a desire to rule...

Author(s): R. K. Mishra and Ma D. Phil

On “strategy” as the pivotal concept in transfer operations

July 2014

No consensus has been reached on an umbrella term for covering various macro- and micro- transfer operations in translating in the field of translation Studies. Writers have offered a wide spectrum of terminologies of their own for the operations in the past decades. This paper first discusses the reasons for use of “strategy” from a dictionary-based translational perspective. Then, it deals with the global...

Author(s): Chuanmao Tian

Narrating a subaltern consciousness: Bama’s ‘Sanagti’

July 2014

Bama is one of the first dalit women writers whose work has been translated into English. While ‘Karukku’ was personal in nature, ‘Sangati’ deals with the community at large: the community of Dalit women who are marginalized both on grounds of caste as well as gender. This paper looks at Bama’s ‘Sangati’ as a narrative of resistance and voicing. Bama loosely strings voices that...

Author(s): Smriti Singh

Women by the woman – Kamala Das

July 2014

Kamala Suraiya (also known as Kamala Das or Madhavikutty) had made it clear to readers, critics and family that she do not want to be “categorized”. Das’s poetry have  flung open its doors to let in, topics that women had kept decorously out (the boredom of marriage, the thrills of love, the pains of being a woman, of being a writer, the loneliness of being unloved, the joy of being in...

Author(s): Sofia C. Jose

Gender and disharmony in Shashi Desphande’s that long silence

June 2014

That long silence seeks to represent the plight of women especially Jaya Kulkarni (the main protagonist) in a given social structure, attempting to rigorously scrutinize the portrayed gender roles that impose social norms, expectations and traditions on the grounds of gender discrimination. The research paper presents Jaya’s submissive revolt against the constant psychological pressure of male superiority and...

Author(s): Chandramani

So it goes: A postmodernist reading of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five

June 2014

The paper offers a postmodernist reading of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five to verify the long-debated premise that postmodernism really departs from and even challenges the modernist philosophy. The state of epistemological skepticism that throws its shadows on our cognitive apparatus challenges the rationalist ideals; and the state of ontological uncertainty – both intratextually and extratextually...

Author(s): Fatma Khalil Mostafa el Diwany

The Seeds of communism in christianity: Reality and limitations

June 2014

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.» Karl Marx. Communism, in its chauvinistic fervor, often takes the form of a religious section not to say an orthodoxy in its own right. Paradoxically enough, in communism, the world is not there save as a mass of materials and it is for this reason in particular that it offers no room for deity at once. All...

Author(s): Mariem Khmiri

Landscape: Psychological, geographical and cultural nexuses

May 2014

Through the different forms of landscape, the writers of South Asia render their texts with an indigenous flavour as well as a universal one. This paper aims to unearth the South Asian novels, Noor and Ladies Coupe with reference to the geographical, psychological and cultural landscape in these works of fiction. The paper will explore the psychological nexuses of landscape with reference to Sorayya Khan’s novel,...

Author(s): Sadia Riaz Sehole

A web-based English to Yoruba noun-phrases machine translation system

May 2014

The field of natural language processing enables machines to read and understand the languages human being speaks. There are three major languages in Nigeria: YorÌ€ubá, Igbo and Hausa. YorÌ€ubá, a major Nigeria language spoken by over fifty million people which has the potentials of serving as medium for scientific and technological development deserves more recognition than it is in Nigeria today....

Author(s): Abiola O.B, Adetunmbi A.O, Fasiku A.I. and Olatunji K.A

Magic realism in Kiran Desai’s novel “Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard”

May 2014

Kiran Desai was born in 1971 and educated in India, England and the United States. She studied creative writing at Columbia University, where she was the recipient of a Woolrich fellowship. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and Salman Rushdie's anthology Mirrorwork: Fifty years of Indian Writing. In 2006 Desai won the MAN Booker Prize for her novel The Inheritance of Loss. Kiran Desai depicts the contemporary...

Author(s): Ritu Sharma

Mophophonological changes of borrowed words from English to Lubukusu dialect of Western Kenya

April 2014

This study set out to investigate how Lubukusu borrows words from English and yet the two differ widely in terms of phonemic inventories. Borrowing of words form English to Lubukusu required assimilation processes to enable the transfer of characteristics of one language into the other. The study identified and described the morphophonological change that the loan words from English go through to fit into Lubukusu...

Author(s): Watera Muambu Evans

The role of intertextual relations in cultural Tradition

April 2014

The aim of the present paper is to analyse intertextual relations based on activation of textual codes in the famous chain of works by Virgil (The Aeneid 1990), Dante (The Divine Comedy) that continues through romanticists and up to the modernist literature (T. S. Eliot The Waste Land, Ash Wednesday, Four Quartets) taking T.S. Eliot`s essays on literature as the basis for our analysis. Homer`s Odyssey and Iliad serve as...

Author(s): Tamar Mebuke

Aga Shahid Ali as a Diasporic poet

April 2014

This paper attempts to study the diasporic dimension of Indian diasporic writer late Aga Shahid Ali who emigrated from Kashmir to America. Aga Shahid Ali narrates the loss of his homeland due to enforced migration and exhibit the original exilic resonance of diasporic experience. In his poetic collection ‘the country without a post office’, the poet articulates diasporic experience of exile, loss, pain and...

Author(s): Bilquees Dar Arshiddar

Redefining Group-man:An application of the “flexible phalanx” theory

January 2014

Steinbeck’s earlier works, “The Vigilante” and In Dubious Battle are described with a tangibly cynical tone towards the nature of man, and the destructive potential of misguided “phalanxes.” However, his later works, The Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row offer a positive and even hopeful view on the potential of these phalanxes. The reason for this shift lies within...

Author(s): Christopher Berardino

Irigarayan divinity and Tantric Yogic breath

January 2014

This contribution offers a reading of Luce Irigaray’s recent works of Western thought in relation to Eastern yogic tradition of “breath”. Irigaray as a French feminist in her theories of ‘feminine divinity’ and ‘sexual difference’ relies on Eastern notion of ‘breath’. This paper aims to reveal the concept of ‘breath’ in the West and East. Unlike Tantric...

Author(s): Shiva Hemmati

An evaluation of post-colonial African leadership: A study of Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born, and Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People

January 2014

This paper centers on how post-colonial African leaders in Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Achebe’s A Man of the People have shifted from democratic leadership to an autocratic type of governance. The paper denotes a form of corruption that departs from cherished values and ideals of post-colonial Africa. The key method of this paper is textual analysis. The paper seeks to show the...

Author(s): Mavis Thokozile Macheka

The theme of “alienation” and “assimilation” in the novels of Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri: A socio – literary perspective

January 2014

Words like “Expatriate” and “Diaspora” need no introduction in postcolonial literary scenario. Indian -iaspora, today, has emerged with the “multiplicity of histories, variety of culture, tradition, and a deep instinct for survival.” Indian Diaspora, though counting more than 20 million members world-wide, survives in between “home of origin” and “world of...

Author(s): Shilpa Shukla and Niroj Banerji

“Tremulations on the ether”: The sublime and beauty in Graham Swift's humanist art

January 2014

This paper aims at investigating the interplay of the sublime and beauty in Graham Swift’s attempts at communicating humanly and vividly with readers about human experience. In the author's works, both the sublime and beauty convey a sense of order and destabilisation. Both can be construed as  enlightening transitions. Sublime patterns of human transgression trigger a quasi-divine sublime revenge and...

Author(s): Nathalie Massoulier

Translating silence, transmitting faith: Personal and cultural understanding in Leila Aboulela's The Translator

January 2014

This Article is Retracted.

Author(s): Alghamdi Alaa

Representation of postcolonial identity in Naipaul's works

December 2013

This paper attempts to explore representation of postcolonial identity in V. S. Naipaul’s three works A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River and An Enigma of Arrival. This paper attempts  to relate  how these three works are replete with the theme of identity as the chief protagonists of all these three novels hanker after to find a place for them in the world to assert their identities. Their minds...

Author(s): Bijender Singh

Subjugation: A study of the women characters in Khalid Hosseini’s and Arundhati Roy’s novels

December 2013

This paper is a serious attempt to portray the exploitation and discrimination of women in the patriarchal social systems of the Afghan society and the Indian subcontinent as delineated in the novels of Khalid Hosseini and Arundhati Roy. In both the novels: A Thousand Splendid Suns and The God of Small Things, the women share the common plight of suffering, where the male folk treat them as mere objects and subject them...

Author(s): Nanda Silima

“I come to bury Shakespeare, not to praise him”. Glocalizing drama as reclamation of the African academy in Raisedon Baya’s Tomorrow’s People.

December 2013

The paper argues that Baya’s play, Tomorrow’s People, advocates the transformation and localisation of the African theatrical industries as a part of the educational system that aims at liberating the mind and promoting an Afro-centric worldview within a global framework. It explored the dramatisation of the school system and showed that the reclamation of the African academy requires the enactment of an...

Author(s): Amos Mushati

Admixture of socio-personal history in the biographies of The Black Panthers

December 2013

The paper is an endeavour to study the revolution brought about by the Black Panther Party through a detailed study of the two autobiographies: ‘Revolutionary Suicide’ by Huey P. Newton and ‘Seize the Time’ by Bobby Seale. Formed in 1966, in the United States of America, The Black Panther Party for self-defence was a revolutionary organisation that served the community. The Black Panther Party...

Author(s): Sehgal Srishti

The real feminists in Indian English writing: Kamala Das and Imtiyaz Dharkar

December 2013

Kamala Das belongs to the first generation of modern English poets who evolved a new poetics for themselves and made a new start both in theme and technique around the 1960s. The first phase of Indo-Anglican poetry ended in the 1950s. To the poets of this period the spirit of modernism was almost alien. Their main preoccupation was the spirit of nationalism and the war of independence, partition of country. It was only...

Author(s): Kanak Lata Tiwari  

The influence of ideological state apparatuses in identity formation: Althusserian reading of Amiri Baraka’s “In Memory of Radio”

December 2013

The present research with the help of Louis Althusser’s definition of “Ideology” and “Ideological State Apparatuses” (ISAs) attempts to study Amiri Baraka’s well-known poem “In Memory of Radio”. Althusser is important in modern literary theory and criticism because of his redefinition of the Marxist term ideology. According to him, ideology is “a representation of...

Author(s): Seyyed Shahabeddin Sadati

Some reflections on Simone Weil’s Mystical Response to Beckett’s Absurdism

December 2013

Nihilism as appropriated in existentialist-absurdist thought appears as a stubborn problem and consequent absurdism of such writers as Beckett follows which is a very unsatisfactory position from a philosophical or metaphysical viewpoint. Mysticism as articulated in such writers as Simone Weil offers an alternative approach to tackle the problem of nihilism and critique existentialist thought and its appropriation for...

Author(s): Mohammad Maroof Shah

Pronunciation problems: Acoustic analysis of the English vowels produced by Sudanese learners of English

December 2013

The purpose of this study is to provide experimental evidence for certain linguistic causes of production errors of English spoken with Sudanese Arabic accent. The subjects of the study were expected to have problems with the production of English vowels in both individual words and real communication. Participants were ten Sudanese University learners of English who primarily speak Arabic. English vowel data are the...

Author(s): Ezzeldin Mahmoud Tajeldin Ali

Temperamental incompatibility in Anita Desai’s novel Cry the Peacock

December 2013

The aim of this article is to reveal the temperamental incompatibility in Anita Desai’s “Cry the Peacock” with reference to temperamental and emotional incompatibility between Maya and Gautama. Anita Desai presents the theme of marital dissonance resulting from lack of love, and incompatibility, emotional instability in this novel. This is the main reason for this novel. One of the greatest threats to...

Author(s): Rumita Sharma

Unsung, ignored or underrated? A look at Solomon Skuza’s songs in the context of contemporary Zimbabwe’s socio-political and economic environment

December 2013

All good art transcends the limitations of time. In other words, good art is timeless and not mediated by the shifty circumstances of the period in which it is produced. This research sets out to analyze the timelessness, visionary and futuristic nature of Solomon Skuza’s selected songs. The research is spurred by the realization that long after his death, an analysis of his music album “Love and...

Author(s): Thamsanqa Moyo

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