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...
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...
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...
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...
Christians’ perception of the concepts of death and judgment: A multimodal discourse analytical study of selected editions of Christian Women Mirror Magazine
December 2013
In this paper, there were critical analyses of some selected editions of Christian Women Mirror magazine using the theoretical framework of Multimodal Discourse Analysis. The study is an exposé of Christians’ perception of the two concepts of death and judgement. We have carried out a Multimodal Discourse Analytical study of selected editions of Christian Women Mirror magazine that discuss the...
Language, communication on wheels and national development: The inscriptions on tricycle (Keke) example
December 2013
Commercial transportation is strategic in national economy. It facilitates the mobility of material and human resources. In Nigeria, a significant number of commercial vehicles have inscriptions on different parts; an indicator that the labour force engaged in this sub sector has messages for the public. This study therefore examines language use, forms, popular themes and objectives of the writings,...
Need that throbs at the heart: Solidarity in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah
December 2013
Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah has often been called a ’political novel’ and directly linked to the experience of military rule in Nigeria, even though that country is not mentioned in the story. It leaves open the question what might be Achebe’s purpose in such an undertaking. Would he be trying to tell the people what they already know about their experience under military rule, or to...
Authors' perceptions of author’s gender: A myth or a truth?
December 2013
Gender plays a crucial role in the lives of human beings. From the moment of birth, the two genders are taught to follow different codes of behaviour that are compatible with the societal roles stipulated for each gender. Many linguists and sociolinguistics believe that because male and female have different life experiences, the way the two genders speak and write will differ. The question of identifying...
Enhancing the effectiveness of English Language teaching for engineers in India
December 2013
India is today witnessing a major boost in the “demand for English language”. With its firepower of engineers, chartered accountants, doctors, MBAs, lawyers, research analysts, India is well positioned to address the global Knowledge Process Outsourcing / Business Process Outsourcing need. With a ready access to a large intellectual pool and domain expertise in specialized areas, India has been in the...
Identity, culture, and sexuality in Githa Hariharan’s ‘The Thousand Faces of Night’
December 2013
Human beings have a complex network of power relations and there are various models of submission and domination in this power struggle. Dualistic thinking based on the binary oppositions such as ‘culture/nature’, ‘head/ heart’, ‘form/ matter’ is related to the opposition between man and woman. Inequality between women and men can appear in many different forms- it has many faces and...
Faiz and Neruda: The East meets the West
December 2013
The paper attempts to study the similarity between the thought and poetry of two greater ever poets, one belonging to the east and other to the west: Faiz Ahmad Faiz, a Pakistan Urdu poet and Pablo Neruda, a Chilean poet. They not only became famous in their respective motherlands but their works won global recognition. Just as the poetry of Pablo Neruda was massively popular with ordinary Chilean...
An appraisal of students’ errors in English compositions: Implications for the Open and Distance Learning classroom
December 2013
This paper reports the findings of an investigation of lexical errors in the Open and Distance Learning students’ essays at the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN). The study made use of tagged sample essays to find out the frequency and types of lexical errors in different registers of guided writing administered to randomly selected 300 and 400 level students undergoing the B.A English programme in the...
The concept of racial superiority in Malgonkar’s Combat of Shadows
December 2013
This research paper is a study of the pride and prejudice of the ruling Britishers against the Indians and the glimpses of Indian politicians who are detrimental to the progress and prosperity of India due to their opportunistic nationalism. It projects the story of the British men who stayed in India for a long time left no stone unturned for vulgarizing the Indians through different means. The story of...
Isolation in Eudora Welty’s "A Curtain of Green"
November 2013
Eudora Welty was a product of the South America’s rich oral tradition. She was a brilliant and gifted story teller. Her most celebrated medium was the short story, and her main subject was the family, though she personally never married. The present paper presents Welty’s association with her native state in South America, which reflected in her all writings – a brief summary of the short...
Social realism in the novels of Kamala Markandaya with special reference to Nectar in a Sieve, Possession and a Handful of Rice
November 2013
The term ‘Realism’ in art or literature refers to the presentation of things accurately in real life. Authors use their own style in presenting things that happen accurately in art and add moral values to their presentation. Many writers such as Bhabini Bhattachariya, R.K.Narayan and Ruth Prawar Jhabvala have presented realism in their fictions. Like Kamala Markandaya, the other writers...
Anita Desai’s ‘In Custody’ in a maze of existentialism
November 2013
Existentialism garnered by a sense of alienation is the forte of Anita Desai. This paper titled ‘Anita Desai’s “In Custody” in a Maze of Existentialism’ shows the tumultuous pathos that fitted the subaltern existential struggles engulfing the life of Deven in In Custody. The crux of the problem is the existential absurdity, a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face...
A celebration of humanity: The ethical and the ethereal aspects of Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Seaâ€
November 2013
Two dimensions: the religious (which is given a subordinate position to the latter) and the humanistic are taken into consideration and intertwined in such a way so as to make the possible ends meet as in embracing a horizon and at the same time there has been drawn a fine line of exactitude and distinction as in ratio-cination. Key words: Religious, humanistic, intertwined, horizon,...
The strategies of autobiography to answer the interview question, ‘Tell Me About You?’
November 2013
The personal justification questions like ‘tell me about you’, ‘what motivates you?’, ‘what have you done recently to develop yourself?’, ‘what kind of salary are you after?’ are some of the questions asked in interview to confirm the candidate’s suitability for the particular post. This question may be asked in the beginning of the interview in which the...
Iqbal and Nietzsche: Perfect man versus Superman
November 2013
This paper tries to bring nothing but the fact that Nietzsche’s Superman (ubermench) was in no way Iqbal’s Perfect Man, for Iqbal himself acknowledges it a number of times that he was influenced by Nietzsche’s philosophy, which according to him was very near to Islam. He says even at that and though he being an atheist, he felt his heart is a believer, even if his mind is an...
A meta-critical study of Akachi Ezeigbo’s perspectives on children’s literature in Nigeria: Narratology as scientific instrument, morality and didactics in analysis
October 2013
This paper conceptualizes the motif of morality as didactics in delineating the study of children’s literature in Nigeria. The work catapults the various tenets which govern the essence of literature and its social engineering devices. Children fictions and imaginary works have been employed by writers to propel the need to ‘do good’ and ‘shun bad devices’. From the time of Plato...
A postmodernist study of Ijengen: The ritual drama of transition at Ode-Irele
October 2013
Indigenous societies survived through myths and folktales these were responsible for the cohesion that existed prior to the advent of colonialism and hybridization of western culture. Consequently, modern African writers could hardly do without these. African writers have a backup in their quest for creative ingredients and oral performances serve as veritable springboard for these materials. Wole...
W. B. Yeats’ Second Coming and its manifestation in the recent anti-peace movement in Bangladesh
October 2013
W.B Yeats’ poetry is rich in myth, symbols and imagery. His symbolic poems represent a variety of things. Yeats believed that ‘art and politics were intrinsically linked’ and used his writing to express his attitudes toward Irish politics as well as to educate his readers about Irish cultural history. His poems increasingly resembled political manifestos of the contemporary period. His...
Harnessing multilingualism in Nigeria for development: The challenges and strategies
October 2013
The arbitrary and haphazard territorial boundaries imposed by the colonial masters in the last two centuries or so did not take cognizance of the people’s diversities before differentiating Nigeria and other sub-Saharan African states. As a result, the geo-political enclave now known as a country encompasses people with varying linguo-cultural identities. This has continued to have far reaching effects...
The possibilities and limitations of literary translation: A review of J. Payne’s and Henri Clarke’s Translations of Ghazalyat of Hafez
October 2013
Literary translation has always been the matter of discussion among translation scholars. Some translation scholars state that that this special type of translation could be attempted somehow, provided that the literary translator, in addition to having linguistic knowledge of both source and target language and being familiar with the target culture, enjoys some literary creativity like that of the original...
Arabic narrative and secularism/secularization
October 2013
Secularism and secularization as concepts come to the arena of academic writing very early. This paper explores how secularism/secularization movement in Europe has changed the vision of the man and the masses towards life and religion. However, the focus here is on Arabic narrative and Islamic community and how a host of Arab writers are profoundly influenced with such western ideologies despite discrepancy...
Aesthetics in William Shakespeare's Sonnets
October 2013
This study focuses on aesthetics in William Shakespeare's sonnets. It shows the dominant aesthetic aspects of the sonnets. It uses theories of intertextuality and semiotics in terms of aesthetics. Study of theories of Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) and Roland Barthes (1915-1980) regarding semiotics in Shakespeare's sonnets shows metaphors of the sonnets as aesthetic signs. This study presents how...
Hybridity and trepidation of multiculturalism in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Of Love and Other Demons and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
October 2013
Limiting this analysis to the challenging issue of identity, this work intends to account for how hybridity implies a great sense of trepidation, “cultural anxiety”, othering and shadowy multiculturalism. Running against the contention that hybridity opens up horizons and fertile grounds of cultural negotiation, the author argues that hybridity does not resolve identitary questionings and enigmas...
Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Komol in Saratchandra’s Shesh Proshno: A comparative study from feminist perspective
October 2013
Andro-centric literature hardly focused on woman repression. Very few male writers could see woman sufferings in social phenomenon with woman eyes and thereby present their distresses in literary works. Saratchandra Chattaphadhyay and Henrik Ibsen are among the few celebrated writers who claimed overwhelming applause for presenting woman question in their works with a view to restructuring social construct...
The general views of Bamasaba of Eastern Uganda about their oral narratives and cultural songs
October 2013
In this study, the researcher investigated the functions, themes and the performance of the Bamasaba oral narratives and cultural songs. The researcher did that because he wanted to establish how these two genres of Literature relate to each other. The intention of the researcher was to show why the two need to be given equal treatment by the Bamasaba. In this study, the researcher investigated how...
Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Komol in Saratchandra’s Shesh Proshno: A comparative study from feminist perspective
September 2013
Andro-centric literature hardly focused on woman repression. Very few male writers could see woman sufferings in social phenomenon with woman eyes and thereby present their distresses in literary works. Saratchandra Chattaphadhyay and Henrik Ibsen are among the few celebrated writers who claimed overwhelming applause for presenting woman question in their works with a view to restructuring social construct...
A Reality Beyond Truth: A Lacanian Reading of Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck
September 2013
The Wild Duck, written by Henrik Ibsen in 1884, is singled out by many critics as his greatest dramatic work. The play presents a diverse array of characters, fascinating plot and a high emotional tendency. In fact, Ibsen in writing The Wild Duck, for the first time, undertook to launch on a dramatic work, which besides rendering typical of his principal themes aimed at approaching his characterization...
Art and life: A propagandist reading of Festus Iyayi’s Violence
September 2013
Literature is an imaginative work of art conveyed through the medium of language. It is a medium of reflecting the contemporary issues of the society—be it class struggle, leadership problems, matters of security or issues on national development. In fact, literature serves as a mirror of society or a channel through which the social, political, cultural and economic issues that ravage a given society...
The relationship between bamasaaba oral narratives and cultural songs
September 2013
In this study, the researcher investigated how storytelling and singing of the songs of culture among BaMasaaba of Uganda affect each other, and why oral narratives disappear in that community, while the cultural songs prosper. An additional aim of the study is to find out how the obstacles in promoting oral narratives can be addressed.According to the findings of the study, culture is an important element in...
An expose of how the themes of violence, victimisation and brutality preoccupy the short stories in the collection: We Killed Mangy Dog and Other Mozambique Stories
September 2013
The study made an expose of the themes of violence, victimisation and brutality as they pervade the short story collection. Working essentially in the Marxist literary theory, Fanonian critical realism and Marxist criminological theories as the springboard for the expose, it has made ground in highlighting colonial brutality towards the colonised and its inevitable violent dehumanising effects to the...
Protest: A Biblical perspective of Bate Besong’s Beasts of No Nation
September 2013
This work ‘Protest: A Biblical Perspective of Bate Besong’s Beasts of No Nation’ seeks to show how the writer presents his case of protest in a derailed society using biblical passages. The study knits together context, use and subject matter to bring out those elements that appeal for protest against oppression. The work also shows that the author turns...
Translation techniques of figures of speech: A case study of George Orwell's "1984 and Animal Farm"
September 2013
Translating figures of speech deals with finding secondary meaning in the source language (SL), and finding cultural meaning and appropriate equivalence in the target language (TL). Figures of speech and multi-word expressions are some of the most challenging translation difficulties. In this article, translation techniques of figures of speech in George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm and their Persian...
Adrienne Rich’s “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Lawâ€: A study
August 2013
Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929-2012) comes before the readers as the most promising poet and essayist in contemporary American literature. She is a multi-talented writer, polemist, literary theorist and an exponent of a poetry of witness and dissent, a poetry that voices the discontent of those generally silenced and ignored. She is a political poet whose ideology is rooted in early American experience. Her prophecy of the...
Historical and cultural relevance of the Adventures of Amir Hamza
August 2013
The Adventures of Amir Hamza is an important work of popular Islamic literary tradition. It is a collection of tales which tells the life story of Amir Hamza. It contributes to the tradition of oral celebration of cultural and religious heroes. The Adventures of Amir Hamza is an English translation of DÄstÄn-e-AmÄ«r Hamza SahibqirÄn (Urdu). The translation has brought this important piece of Islamic literature into...
Can Henny Speak? The inadequacy of epistolary narrative in Vikram Seth’s Two Lives
August 2013
The dialectic of ‘self’ and ‘other’ contains within it the rhetoric of expression. ‘Self’ is given ascendency over the ‘other’ because ‘self’ is able to speak while the ‘other’ is either considered unfit for speaking or forcefully muted or silenced. In the attempt to reclaim these lost voices of the ‘other’, a handful of intelligentsia...
Soyinka as satirist: A study of The Trials of Brother Jero
August 2013
Literary artists use language and the power of words to communicate messages to their audiences or readers. Satire provides these artists one such medium for language use. This paper discusses the African literary giant and Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, as a satirist. Specifically, it examines Soyinka’s use of the tools of satire which are irony, exaggeration and invective in The Trials of Brother Jero, in which...
Educational implications of the deficit/deprivation hypothesis in L2 situations: A case of Zimbabwe
August 2013
The paper discussed Basil Bernstein’s language deprivation theory which presupposes that working class children have limited language competences as a result of their social and economic background. First, it established the anomaly in the use of some key terms in the theory such as deficit/deprivation, ‘elaborated’ and ‘restricted’ codes which are prejudicial and not truly reflective of...
Thomas Hardy’s way of introducing Michael Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character
August 2013
In the novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Hardy presents Michael Henchard as ‘a man of character’ while throughout the novel Henchard commits a number of blunders. Hardy puts two characters in front of us– Michael Henchard and Donald Farfrae. By using this technique of showing the actions of his characters, Hardy proves that even an uneducated man may be a man of character. He draws a line between...
Representations of Kenyan history in oral literature: 1948-2002
July 2013
This paper discusses the representation of Kenyan history in oral literature between 1948 and 2002. The paper relied on library and ethnographic data. The ethnographic data included audio recordings of renditions of well known Mau Mau folksongs, popular and topical songs and a narrative. The play, Ngahika Ndeenda, by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Ngugi Wa Mirii was treated as an oral drama. The texts were...
Exhausting the poet: a study of Chenjerai Hove’s poetry across historical periods
July 2013
This paper explores Chenjerai Hove’s poetry stretching over different historical periods. First, the colonial era poetry is analysed that operates at the critical realist level, which registers discontent with different levels of segregation, especially in Red Hills of Home and some poems in And now the Poets Speak. It then moves on to the analysis of conflict in the Rhodesian socially stratified...
Mother or monster: A postcolonial study of two pathological women in postcolonial literature
July 2013
The loveliness and selflessness of the relation between a mother and a child do not need any explanation to be proved as it is universally known and established. Motherhood is a universal concept, but in Ngugi’s Petals of Blood and in Morrison’sBeloved this concept has been damaged. Both of these novels have shown motherhood with monstrosity. Monstrosity is a concept like beauty...
Pronunciation challenges of open and distance learning students in the B.A English programme at the National Open University of Nigeria
July 2013
This paper analyzes some pronunciation challenges of English learners newly admitted into the B.A English programme at the National Open University of Nigeria, Lagos. It was discovered that factors leading to these problems are interference of the students’ mother tongue, their ages, attitudes and their insufficient knowledge of sounds and the sound system of English. From this study, we could reiterate...
The motherhood in Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt’s selected poems
July 2013
Sarah Piatt wrote immense poems on all position, in spite of other themes which would also bring name and fame to her; themes such as civil war, slavery, political subversion, north and south identification and socialist concepts and religious themes etc. Domestic nature, civil war, slavery system, political issues, the impact of reading news, being between belief and faith in basic sense of Godliness in...
Some factors influencing the academic performance of junior high school pupils in English Language: The case of Assin North Municipality, Ghana
July 2013
Academic achievements, like any attainable goal in life, do not come by chance. Men, money and materials (resources) must be combined in an ideal manner to ensure its success. A total number of thirty (30) pupils; eighteen (18) boys and twelve (12) girls, with an average age of 12 years, sampled from the Junior High School two class of Amoakrom, Nyame-bekyere and Ningo basic schools, and eight (8) teachers...
Folktale as material resources for movie production in selected Nollywood movies
July 2013
The study examines the role of folktale employed in the making of Hausa movies (Nollywood). The research analyses the plots of some selected Hausa movies with a view to examine the significance of folktale in movie production. The study was carried out through field work (interview). A textual analysis of aspects of folktales in the selected movies was also carried out. The study discovers that folktale in...
Enhancing students’ writing skills through the genre approach
July 2013
In Ethiopia, the role English language plays in education and industries is indubitable although the language is considered largely as a foreign language. Paradoxically, studies indicate that the English language proficiency of Ethiopian students is plummeting. This article reports on a study conducted to examine the extent to which EFL students who majored in English at Bahir Dar University improved their...
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