English Language and Literature

The extraordinary women, who are strong enough to stand against conventions, have always been represented as evil and wicked in the literary canon. These female characters are labelled as wicked and portrayed from a one-dimensional perspective as purely evil. Various postmodern rewritings of these grand narratives aim to give these female characters voice and retell their stories from a female point of view trying to undo the patriarchal cultural myth that represents these extraordinary women as wicked. In these new versions, the perspective is reversed and the constructed socio-cultural conventions that underlie the representation of these characters as evil is laid bare. Therefore, the formerly evil women are granted a multidimensional representation, and they are, in a way, justified by being portrayed as victims of an oppressive society rather than monstrous characters. John Fowles, too, rewrites the Victorian codes of womanhood through the characterisation of Sarah in The French Lieutenant ’s Woman. However, unlike many other contemporary rewriting, in his novel the female character is composed as willingly exposing herself as wicked. Rather than portraying the ‘ wicked’ women as victims of a male-dominated society, he prefers to grant wickedness to Sarah as a power position that would grant her freedom from the conventional codes of the Victorian society. In this chapter, it is intended to show how Fowles changes the rewriting strategies that aim to give voice to the marginal women in literature and by doing so how he creates a new version of a feminist rewriting.

The modern mechanization of nature and its reification as a commodity by the Project of Modernity is the main cause of the alarming ecological situation today. With respect to the probable ecological disasters that humanity may possibly face, the ecological threat has become the central discussion among the scientific as well as the literary circles. Among other literary critics and novelists, Margeret Atwood, one of the most acknowledged feminist novelists, also treats this issue in her trilogy, the last book of which has come out very recently. In Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013) she creates a dystopic narrative that depicts the collapse of civilization, warning her readers as to what might happen if the indifference towards the abuse of nature nature goes on. However, one cannot also help noticing that there is also a utopic aspect to this dystopia which is also depicted as the first step to the healing of the world.

Literary genres as sites of discursive practice, from a Foucauldian point of view, become part of the power mechanisms that operate within a society. In this sense, they function as the producers and the reproducers of the regimes of truth, and cease to be mere structures or tools used to communicate meaning or, simply, the aesthetic aspect of the text. They, rather, contribute to the production of meaning and become a part of the meaning. However, Foucault is not nihilistic or pessimistic about the power-discourse relationship and suggests that “[d]iscourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart” (Foucault, 1998, p. 100). Within this frame of mind, the discursive patterns of power within a textual body are traceable and possible to reveal. Accordingly, the aim of this work is to reveal the discursive power mechanisms within the Gothic genre focusing specifically on the portrayal of the lesbian vampire in several vampire movies as examples of contemporary Gothic.

The genre of Menippean satire is very problematic in terms of the existence of fixed definition. Numerous attempts to propose a final definition have ended up having a blindspot. The most important reason for this is that most critics have focused on what Menippean satire is. However, due to the genre's liability to change, adapt and digress, in the attempts to propose a definition based on what it is, there has always been a left out. So the focus should rather be what it does. In this context, what Menippean satire aims to do is simply to highlight the incongruities of humanity through a cynical perspective and to represent these incongruities in a carnival-like universe. Briefly, it is cynical in theme and carnivalesque in form. This study aims to exemplify and examine the genre in the light of this new focus in one of its contemporary representatives, namely, John Fowles. His perspective towards the world, the way he uses literary tools and techniques, and the references he makes to other Menippean satirists enables one to consider him as a literary figure in the line of the Menippean tradition. He is a unique practitioner of the Menippean genre who not only employs the core characteristics of the tradition but also contributes to the evolution of the genre by using certain Menippean devices in his own unique way in The Magus. MODERN İNGİLİZ EDEBİYATINDA MENIPPUSÇU STRATEJİLER: JOHN FOWLES VE THE MAGUS ÖZ Özelliklerini tümüyle içeren bir tanımın varlığı konusunda Menippusçu hiciv problemli bir tür olagelmiştir. Şimdiye kadar türün tanımlanabilmesi konusunde çeşitli çalışmalar yapılmıştır. Bu tanımların hiçbiri tamamıyla yanlış kabul edilemese de her tanımın kör noktaları olmuştur. Bunun en önemli sebebi, bu tanımların türün ne olduğu sorusu üzerinden yapılmaya çalışılmasıdır. Ancak türün değişken yapısı dolayısıyla, bu sorudan yola çıkarak üretilmiş tanımlar yeterince kapsayıcı olamamışlardır. Bu çalışmanın amacı türün ne olduğundan çok, ne yaptığı sorusunu dikkate alarak bu tanımlama problemini çözmektir. Bu bağlamda Menippusçu hiciv türünün amacının insanlığa dair çelişkileri şüpheci bir perspektif ve karnivalesk bir yazım tekniğiyle su yüzüne çıkarmak olduğu söylenebilir. Kısacası, tür, tematik anlamda şüpheci, yapısal anlamda karnivalesktir. Bu çalışmada, tür bu yeni bakış açısıyla yeniden değerlendirilmiş ve türün çağdaş temsilcilerinden John Fowles'un The Magus adlı

Ülkemizde okurların daha çok Kendine Ait Bir Oda ve Mrs. Dalloway ile tanıdığı
Virginia Woolf, 1915 yılında yazdığı Dışa Yolculuk adlı romanıyla başladığı yazın
yolculuğuna, 1928 yılında ilk kez yayımlanan Orlando ile birçok yönden çok farklı
bir boyut kazandırmıştır. Dönemin edebi ve düşünsel standartlarının çok ötesinde
olduğu söylenebilecek olan bu roman, sınıflandırması, tanımlanması ve
anlamlandırılması çok da kolay olmayan bir metindir ve yirminci yüzyılın son
çeyreğine egemen olan ve marjinal bakış açılarına ses vermeyi amaçlayan düşünce
akımlarının da etkisiyle bir anlamda yeniden keşfedilmiş, farklı eleştirmenler
tarafından çok farklı şekillerde okunmuş ve yorumlanmıştır. Metne yönelik farklı
okumalar ve tanımlamalar değerlendirildiğinde, metnin biyografi yazımının
normlarını yıkan, erkek merkezli tarih anlayışına bir alternatif sunan yönleri ön
plana çıkmaktadır. Ancak, Orlando’yu eşsiz kılan ve onun mercek altına alınması
gereken yönü, Woolf’un özellikle vurguladığı, cinsiyet kutuplaşmasına ve
kutuplaşmış cinsiyet rollerinin kısıtlayıcı ve boğucu etkilerine bir çözüm olarak
önerdiği androjenlik kavramıdır.

Throughout the twentieth century women theoreticians and writers have examined the relationship between gender and space and how power mechanisms operate through this relationship. One of the outstanding examples of these writers is Susan Glaspell. Glaspell focuses on how private space enables women, who are deprived of language, to claim a language of their own in her short story, ‘A Jury of Her Peers’. In the story private space turns out to be a text that enables women to communicate. However, this text is not woven totally of words but of certain signs of female experience. The most prominent sign is the quilt made by Minnie Foster, the murder suspect in the story. The traces that Minnie leaves -consciously or unconsciously- in her household and on the patterns of the quilt enable a dialogue among the women characters and provide the necessary clues for the two women characters to solve the mystery of the murder of her husband. Minnie and the other women communicate throughout the story, though Minnie is not present but only mentioned in the story. The medium of this communication is the oblique language of women that men cannot decode. Thus this language is not one that is constructed of words and that serves the operation of the patriarchal order but a kind of female language.

Trauma is defined as a type of psychic damage which occurs as a result of a traumatic event or process which wrecks psychic mechanisms, disrupting the perception, understanding, and feelings of the traumatized victim. This traumatic event is forced from memory but it repeats itself in the form of some symptoms such as psychic numbing, flashbacks, hallucinations, and nightmares — which are symbolic repetitions of the event, and the victim reexperiences it again and again. To heal from the trauma, one should create a symbolic form —mostly narrative— to be able to work through it and narrate his/her experiences and reexperiences. The aim of this paper is to comment on one of these trauma narratives, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” which is a multilayered story that narrates a traumatized middle-class woman’s acting out the symptoms of trauma caused by the social imposition of reductive models of femininity on her.

Mythopoeia, in the simplests sense, is the creation of myhical narratives by fiction writers, some of the best examples of which are written in the form of deification of the Roman rulers or royalty. The first example of this, is the myth of Remus which was canonized by several writers such as Ovid, Ivy and Plutarc. In this mythical story Romulus deceitfully arranges for the seizing and the raping of the Sabine women in order to solve the problem of shortage of women and then ascends to heaven with a flash of light to become a god, starting the long tradition of the deification or apotheosis of the Roman rulers. Especially after Ceasar, almost all of the Roman emperors were deified as narrated by Suetonius in The Lives of the Ceasars.

is above all a novella which carries the Gothic atmosphere to an urban setting, namely London, bringing a new dimension to the Gothic genre. However, the representations of London as a Gothic setting is not simply dark and gloomy in the novella, but the reader can encounter developed and promising face of the city, as well, depending on the character that is at the center of the action. This duality in the representation of the city parallels the dual characterization of Dr. Jekyl/Mr. Hyde and thus the veiled duplicity or schizophrenia of the Victorian society. In this sense, in this Gothic novella, the city is being used to function as a macrocosm of the characters in the novella functioning as a foil character that highlights certain characteristics of different personas that embody various aspects of Victorian socio-political milieu.

[email protected] "You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it … fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on the shelf -your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in flight from the real reality. That is a basic definition of Homo sapiens."

The Pillowman dramatizes the interrogation and torture of a horror ction writer, Katurian, whose stories have been re-enacted in ‘real’ life without his knowledge. The audience gradually nds out that the murders are the crimes of Michal, Katurian’s mentally retarded brother, who had been physically tortured by his parents in childhood, until Katurian murdered them. Upon Michal’s confession, Katurian has to kill his brother to save him from the suffering and torture to come. Subsequently, it becomes clear that the two interrogators also suffer from the violent childhoods they re-enact with the violence they inict on their suspects. It appears that all kinds of violence in the play are somehow justied, and treated in such a complex way that it becomes hard to draw boundaries between victims and perpetrators. The depiction of violence can, however, also be examined in dimensions that trigger and shape each other: the violence of the totalitarian state directed against the individual and the artist; domestic violence; the ctional violence found in Katurian’s stories. Read through Slavoy Žižek’s theory of violence, which also highlights the interconnected nature of its several kinds, The Pillowman can be observed to create a panoramic view of its subject. Mahinur Ak ehir-Uygur is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Manisa Celal Bayar University in Manisa, Turkey. Her areas of interest are satirical literature, contemporary ction, and women’s literature.