...society and forced to look on as a detached third party without the ability to merge as an integrated and accepted participant. While the outsider identity may be thrust upon the individual, the individual himself/herself may hinder his/her assimilation and therefore be the cause of his/her own isolation. In both Margaret Atwood’s poem collection Journals of Susanna Moodie and Maria Campbell’s narrative poem, “Jacob,” protagonists Susanna Moodie and Jacob struggle as outsiders in their respective Canadian environments. Both protagonists are outsiders as Moodie is an outsider to the wildlife environment of the Bush and Jacob is an outsider to his Indigenous community; however, Moodie’s outsider status is a result of her personal fear of the unfamiliar, while external societal forces create Jacob’s outsider identity. Both outsider identities, while differing in causation, illustrate the negative impact Western ideology has on the new settler and Indigenous populations as the former’s preconditioned Western beliefs turn Canada’s natural environment into an adversary and the latter is pressed to abandon its unique cultural traditions. Through strategic word choice, both Susanna Moodie and Jacob are established as outsiders in their respective natural and social environments; however Moodie’s personal barriers cause her outsider identity, while Jacob’s outsider status is forced upon him by societal factors, providing a commentary on the destructive impact of Western ideologies. Atwood...
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...girl remembering her previous life in Pakistan. The poet Moniza Alvi depicts the dilemma of the young Asian girl who is growing up in England but family and relatives are strongly rooted in Pakistani culture and traditions. She feels lost, she’s confused about her identity and she feels ‘half-English.’ This indicates that she is not truly identifying with English cultures. The poem is written as a first person narrative to enable us to share her story, the reader can identify more easily with one person. Imagery is used throughout the poem, ‘Glistening like an orange split open.’ This enables the reader to visualise, hence become more involved and the poem becomes more alive. The conflict between her two cultures felt by this young girl is juxtaposed throughout the poem this reinforces the differences between the two nationalities. ‘My salwar kameez didn’t impress the school friend.’ Her friends did not like beautiful, top quality, traditional Pakistani clothes. The poet also makes a political comment by mentioning the ‘Fractured land’ she is referring to the conflict in Kashmir. ‘Hurricane Hits England.’ The poem is set in England and the main persona is a middle-aged Caribbean lady. The poem deals with her inner turmoil of trying to belong to two different cultures. It starts off in the third person, ‘It took a hurricane to bring her closer.’ But by the second verse it is written in first...
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...Fiction, Between Inner Life and Collective Memory. A Methodological Reflection. François-Xavier Lavenne, Virginie Renard, François Tollet1 Introduction In the writing of their fictional works, novelists often have to reflect on the functioning of memory, for memory lies at the heart both of inner life and of human experience in general. It is indeed in the works of writers such as Marcel Proust or Jorge Luis Borges that the best exemplifications of the subjective experience of memory are to be found. However, from a strictly mnemonic point of view, literature provides more than a means of reflecting on memory: it is also the site of the rebirth and construction of individual and collective memories, which can then serve as a foundation for the writing of fictional works. Creative writing has a meiotic function and is as such a powerful tool capable of rescuing memories from oblivion and bringing them back to life, thus reconciling the past with the present. The present article seeks to bring to bear new perspectives on the relationship between a novelist’s personal memories, collective memory, and the fictional narratives partially inspired by these two types of memory. In the first section we briefly examine the distinction traditionally made between individual memory and collective memory, which we then try to reconcile so as to arrive at an approach to the mnemonic phenomenon that best fits the needs of literary scholars. In the second section we challenge the conventional...
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...Through narrative therapy a counselor can help clients gain access to preferred story lines about their lives and identities taking the place of previous negative and self-defeating narratives that destroy the self. Presented in this paper, is an overview of the Narrative therapy and the Social Construction Model and several facets of this approach including poststrucuralism, deconstructionism, self-narratives, cultural narratives, therapeutic conversations, ceremonies, letters and leagues. A personal integration of faith in this family counseling approach is presented and discussed also in this paper. NARUMI AMADOR’S FAMILY CONSELING APPROACH Introduction Narrative therapy is found under the Social Construction Model. Using the Narrative approach, the therapist will not be the central figure in the therapeutic process, instead he will be influential to the client, helping him/her internalize and create new stories within themselves to draw new and healthier assumptions about who they are. This process enables clients to distract from focusing on the negative narratives which defined their past, redefining their lives into future positive stories. Narrative therapists define the problem as the problem instead of defining the client as the problem. The therapy process begins redefining the problem, externalizing it and getting it out in the open. The narrative therapist uses the questioning technique and creates alternative narratives to connect...
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...Societal expectations for acceptance. The way individuals choose to carry themselves in everyday life is affected by societal expectations. These societal expectations are sort of an unofficial guideline by which individuals live their lives. Whether it’s gender roles or just wanting to be accepted by others, people feel the need to “live” according to these guidelines. As time progresses so do the “guidelines” and if the individuals cannot keep up with these norms, they can be left behind or deemed as an outcast. Gender roles seem to be the most common. From the day a child is born societal norms are placed on them. For example a young boy’s room will be probably be blue and filled with sports items, while a young girls room will be pink and be filled with dolls and a play kitchen set. These small details, along with expectations, begin to shape their role in society. “Barbie Q” by Sandra Cisneros is a perfect example of societal expectations. In this short story Cisneros introduces two young girls who are playing with their Barbie dolls. The girls go into great detail when describing their dolls and the outfits the dolls are wearing. One can conclude that the girls are poor when the main character tells the reader that they only have one outfit for their dolls. They even had to make a dress from a sock because they could not afford other outfits. This is further illustrated when the girls begin describing how they will play with the dolls. Everyday...
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...POSTMODERN APPROACHES Solution-Focused and Narrative Therapies Key Terms: Alternative story- a story that develops in counseling in contradiction to the dominant story that is embedded in a problem. Co-authoring- a co-joint process where client and counselor share responsibility for developing alternative stories. Deconstruction- exploring meaning by taking apart/unpacking the taken-for-granted categories and assumptions underlying social practices that are guised as truths. Dominant story- understanding a situation that is accepted within a culture that appears to represent reality. Dominant stories are developed through conversations in social and cultural contexts and these stories shape how people construct and constitute what people see, feel, and do. Exception questions- SF counselors inquire about times when the problem(s) have not been problematic. Shows that problems are not ever existing and always overpowering. Externalizing conversation- a way of speaking about a problem as if it is a distant entity, separate of the person. Based on the premise that people who view themselves as the problem limit themselves to the extent they cannot effectively deal with the problem. Formula first session task- observation homework given that must be completed between first and second session. They must observe what is happening in their lives that they want to continue to happening. Mapping-the-influence questions- a series of questions asked about a problem...
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...Club. Introduction. Fight club is an interesting film to be reflected through psychoanalytic and masculinity theories. In this essay I will attempt to present the number of elements of narrative that can be explained by these theories. I intend to use citations from Marc A. Price's essay The Fight for Self: The Language of the Unconscious in Fight club regarding psychoanalytical concepts such as ego, super-ego and the id as well as Lynn M. Ta's dissertation Hurt So Good: Fight Club, Masculine Violence, and the Crisis of Capitalism (regarding masulinity in the film), as these works were the main sources of my research. Then I'll try to come to the conclusion on which of two theories have more strength at being applied to films (primarily Fight Club). Application of theories and analysis. The connection that we shall draw between psychoanalytic theory and the film Fight Club is simple and is this; the narrator is a representation of the ego, for Tyler Durden we can substitute the id. In the Freudian psychic model the ego is the civilized part of consciousness. The ego is that part of the psychic apparatus that is modified so that a being can interact safely with other beings and thus remain accepted within the social group. It is important for identity formation that the individual is accepted by the group (that is wider society) therefore, a controlled id is of paramount importance, as we will see later. For Freud the ego/id relationship is “...like...
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...Welfare Welfare Queen - Bought forward by Ronald Reagan - One of the goals of welfare is to help people leave abusive relationships Criminalizing Poverty - Welfare policies increasingly mandate the intensification of surveillance and the criminalization of welfare recipients. Welfare as fraud “Welfare fraud has become welfare as fraud. Thus poverty, welfare and cr Criminalization of Welfare: -Mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients -Anonymous snitch lines for reporting suspected welfare abuse - “Zero tolerance” for fraud in the form of permanent ineligibility -Biometric fingerprinting. -Welfare is one of the few ways that the state provides some financial support for the work traditionally done by women - Without welfare, mothers who work inside the home are deprived of equal citizenship, for they alone are not paid for their labor - Often poor women have been left out of feminist movement -Equality movements concerned solely with independence for women through paid employment are problematic -the point of welfare is to supper mothers finically for caregiving- but this has gradually been eroded Deserving and undeserving poor -Difference was made between the deserving and the undeserving poor -Basis for classification changes, but the imperative to discover who is worth of aid persist. -Michael Katz; a study made to classify the “impotent” from the “able” bodied poor. These attempts at classification have endured as those...
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...Struggle from Gender Identity to Political Balance Long before Song Liling made her debut as M. Butterfly on stage, there was a woman called Cho-cho-san, playing Madama Butterfly with the fullest of her life. M. Butterfly’s counterpart Madama Butterfly presents readers Cho-cho-san, a pitiful and submissive Oriental Butterfly. Cho-cho-san’s character traits fit in almost every single aspect of the ideal of Oriental women, for instance, Cho-cho-san is a geisha, an exotic representation of Japanese women in the eyes of westerners, Cho-cho-san eventually dies of seppuku, which is the Japanese ritual suicide by disembowelment, and her ultimate sacrifice of her everything from her religion to her very life. The attributes of Cho-cho-san are not exclusive to this character only but imposed on all Asian women. The western presupposition of some certain fixed and bounded Asian attributes defines the identity of Asian women and thus, creates an image of the sacrificial and submissive Oriental women. Moreover, the historical backgrounds of Hwang’s Butterfly and Puccini’s Butterfly are, in fact, the extension of gender tension to international power struggle. Cho-cho-san’s love story happens in the Meiji Period in which Japan first opened its door to foreigners; while Gallimard and Song Liling begins having an affair in the 1960s, in the midst of Cold War. Hwang’s M. Butterfly parodies Puccini’s Madama Butterfly by reversing the conventional narrative on the gender identities and the power...
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...Whenever a discussion on identity is introduced, the most-cited poem in Korea is “The Flower” by Chunsu Kim. He sings of being himself as becoming a colorful and fragrant flower. To be the flower that will rightly represent his identity, he needs someone to call his name. In this poem, identity is not seen as something that is solid and concrete but as something that is situated and constructed by others, a glimpse of poststructuralist view on identity. Recently, language learning has been seen as participation and negotiation of self (see Higgins, forthcoming; Kinginger, 2004; Lam, 2000; Morita, 2004; Ohara, 2001; Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000; and Solé, 2007 among others). The trend is resonated in the growing interest in language learner identity and the studies in narratives. In this paper, a case of heritage language learner will be investigated upon the theoretical frame of poststructuralism. Narrative inquiry will be used to analyze how she negotiates her learner identity. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: First, by looking at the struggle a language learner makes to acquire her heritage language, I reclaim the centrality of identity in defining heritage language learners. Second, to widen the horizons of narrative studies to the cyber space as it provides an ample source of easily accessible data and it has become one of the commonplace media of daily communication. Heritage Language Learners and Identity To refer to the Heritage Language Learners (HLLs), various...
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...experience of the inner life”. –How have similar ideas about the importance of the inner life been represented in different contexts in Mrs Dalloway and The Hours? “The external situation shapes the experience of the inner life”. –How have similar ideas about the importance of the inner life been represented in different contexts in Mrs Dalloway and The Hours? An individual’s experience of both internal and external life is shaped by our surroundings, the physical environment and our human relationships. Mrs Dalloway, a novel by Virginia Woolf explores the life of a women in one day, the audience is able to see what she is doing, what she feels and what is going on in her head all at the same time. Similarly a film directed by Stephen Daldry titled the Hours explores three narrative streams looking at both the external events and internal thoughts of three separate women. These texts use the context of Virginia Woolf’s own life and the time periods in which they focus on including the 1920’s, 1949 and 2001 to express various thematic concerns. They delve into the multifaceted nature of individuals, women’s experience, a sense of mortality felt by the protagonists and ones sensitivity to nature and people. In searching for one’s identity and true self we often question the nature of our experiences and the relationships we have with those around us. It is a constant battle between putting on a social mask to manage perception, or alternatively expressing our inner self and risking...
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...Mohsin Hamid’s ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’, is a framed narrative that explores the inflective journey and internal struggle for a sense of inner contentment. The author tackles these incredibly complex themes through the confronting story of a young Lahore man. Adapting himself towards a patriotic American society and diluting his personal contentment through the suppression of his own Heritage. Hence Hamid’s intentions behind the allegorical name of ‘Changez’ for ‘Change’. Hamid makes it quite clear early on in the text, that Changez is quite an unreliable narrator. Changez claims to the ambiguous American that he immediately felt at home in New York, however this is completely untrue as he also establishes his alienation from those around him, conveying the early stages of perversion to Changez’ sense of contentment. “The world around me was like a movie, and I was watching it, rather than living in it. It didn’t strike me at first, but it came from feeling out of place.” Studying abroad at Princeton University, Pakistani protagonist Changez is already faced with socialist and cultural disparity the moment he arrives at Princeton. Aiding the detachment he possesses from other students economic status, he adopts three on campus jobs, to maintain the mask of a Princeton persona. “At Princeton, I conducted myself in public like a young prince, generous and care free. But I Also quietly acquired three on campus job, in infrequently visited locations, so such a persona could...
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...do readers respond to the metafictional work? Can this response change when a different media is being used? These questions must be evaluated first in order for the metafictional to be comprehended in the second reaction. After the reader has had time to pose certain questions it will help them understand the work of leiterature. Using reader’s reactions to Beckett’s “A Text for Nothing, Number 4,” “The Magic Poker” by Robert Coover and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando , we can evaluate the responses to these works and acceptance of the evident fictional world. In the first round of reading Samuel Beckett’s “A Text for Nothing, Number 4,” the reader might start off with more questions than answers. In the beginning the narrator asks himself personal questions of preference that we often find ourselves asking. “Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, If I could be..” are questions the reader relates to having asked themselves the same thing at some point in life. These questions give a base for the reader to feel that they will connect and...
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...careful in her choice of images and places in order for her works, starting with At Land to look original and abstract. She wanted to isolate her work from the idea of obvious symbolism and therefore, make the spectator more deeply involved in the process of decoding the scenes. As Millsapps states, “Deren knew the difference between images and symbols, and discusses this in her thesis: ‘…For the Symbolist, the image is a point of departure for mysterious distances, whereas the Imagist departure is limited to the vision behind the word or image” (25). Maya Deren’s second film - At Land, is an example of art work which is concerned with the exposure of the interior experiences of an individual and the idea of his continuous identities. The loose narrative structure of the film emphasizes the aesthetic relationship between time, moving body and space, and also, underlines the abstract...
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...Ondaatje’s novel as a “mystery of identity” (449). Similarly, Aritha van Herk identifies “fear, unpredictability, secrecy, [and] loss” (44) as the central features of the novel and its female protagonist. Anil’s Ghost, van Herk argues, presents its readers with a “motiveless world” of terror in which “no identity is reliable, no theory waterproof” (45). Ondaatje’s novel tells the story of Anil Tessera, a Sri Lankan expatriate and forensic anthropologist working for a UN-affiliated human rights organization. Haunted by a strong sense of personal and cultural dislocation, Anil takes up an assignment in Sri Lanka, where she teams up with a local archeologist, Sarath Diyasena, to uncover evidence of the Sri Lankan government’s violations of human rights during the country’s period of acute civil war. Yet, by the end of the novel, Anil has lost the evidence that could have indicted the government and is forced to leave the country, carrying with her a feeling of guilt for her unwitting complicity in Sarath’s death. On one hand, Anil certainly embodies an ethical (albeit rather schematic) critique of the failure of global justice. On the other, her character stages diaspora, in Vijay Mishra terms, as the “normative” and “ exemplary … condition of late modernity” (“Diasporic” 441) — a condition usually associated with the figure of the nomad rather than the diasporic subject — and thus raises questions about the novel’s regulatory politics of diasporic identity. In contrast, Anita Rau Badani’s...
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