Category: LibrAsia2017

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Forced Departures and Fragmented Realities in Palestinian Memoirs

The Arabic word nakba means “catastrophe”. The Palestinians use this word to refer to the events that took place in Palestine before, during and after 1948. These events terminated both in the establishment of the state of Israel and the loss of Palestine. In the decades after 1948, the narratives of identity, exile and dispossession

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Prisms of History: Edward Said’s Humanism

The winding history of the Israeli-Arab dispute along with divergent historical, geopolitical and theological interpretations should be complicated for one to make definite moral judgment. However, the cross-cultural dynamics between the Israeli Jew and the Palestinian Arab and between the West and the East in general provide a historical and political context in which the

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Femininity and Masculinity in Twenty-First Century Thai Romantic Fictions

The main purpose of this study is to examine the modes of subjectivity and discourses of femininity and masculinity found in Thai romantic novels published in the 21th Century. First, I will discuss generic conventions in Thai romance. Additionally, I will seek to locate it within the socio-cultural contexts of Thai society, which influence the

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“Only When the Whole World Becomes One Family”: The Ideal Vision of a Eurasian

My paper benefits from Lisa Lowe’s idea of heterogeneity and multiplicity, Foucault’s notion of power, and Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. My ultimate aim is to challenge the binary axis of power by examining how Sui Sin Far, a pioneer of Asian American writer, enunciates to resist the mechanism of power which attempted to dominate and

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Resistance in Zitkala-Sa’s American Indian Stories

Loss of identity is one of the major problems of all time. People who believe that domination destroy their true colors find resistance against the dominant as a result to maintain their identity. Literature is one of ways that best present voices and actions of people. This paper aims to analyze resistance against the domination

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Humans and Animals in the Graphic Novel the Call of the Wild from the Perspective of Ecocriticism Reading

Nowadays, environmental crisis is one of the most important problems. Many people are affected by this crisis. Graphic novels can be used as a powerful tool to raise environmental awareness and urge people to protect the natural world. This paper aims to analyze the relationship between humans and animals in the graphic novel version of

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Annette Von Droste-Huelshoff and the Biedermeier Narrative

“Annette von Droste-Huelshoff and the Biedermeier Narrative” relates the aesthetics of the German Biedermeier period (1815-1848) to the life story of writer Annette von Droste-Huelshoff (1797-1848) and to her texts “Ledwina” (fragment/1820), “The Marl-Pit” (poem/1841), “The Jew’s Beech” (novella/1842) and “The Spiritual Year” (poetry/1851). Before all else, the Biedermeier cultivated the inner self through domesticity

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History in Fiction or Fiction in History: Enchi Fumiko’s Namamiko Monogatari as Historical Novel

While Hayden White asserts that historical discourses mirror literary writing, he also recognizes the value of narrativity in historical representations of reality. Many authors of historical discourses interpret and report their materials in narrative form, in the process of which the representation is governed by certain criteria of truth but also some degree of imagination.

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The Presentation of Rape in Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak

With the raising number of reported rape cases, rape becomes one of the crucial social problems in worldwide. Mostly, women and girls are the main target of this violent crime. The violation on women’s body is an issue which has been discussed in many ways. Children’s literature is one of the powerful tools used for

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Storytelling and Playing with History: The Ludic in French and Chinese Fiction

This paper explores how the device of storytelling can be used in fiction to construct a specifically ludic i.e. playful and gamelike literature. I compare two novels as a case-study: the 20C French writer Georges Perec’s La Vie, mode d’emploi (Life: a User’s Manual) and the 19C Chinese scholar Li Ruzhen’s fantasy novel Flowers in

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Ned Kelly: The Multiple Truths of Australia’s Most Famous Bushranger

In a line-up of all the Australian criminals, who sparked fear in the community and generated business for the law and justice systems in the colonial era, no individual stands taller than Edward ‘Ned’ Kelly of Victoria. Of all the bushrangers it is Kelly, and his Gang, who maintains a prominent place within Australian history

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Folktales, Myths and Legends on Sculptors of South India

History speaks on sculptures and silent on sculptors; whereas folktales take contradictory position towards this phenomenon. The folktales, Myths and legends on sculptors of south India narrate the dark shades of the life of sculptors. The present paper is intended to explore the tales from south India and hypothetically propose the four processes occurring in

‘It Was As Silly As All Women’s Stories’: Female’s Marginalisation and the Duality of Gender in the 20th Century West African Novel

When the simple act of talking is considered ‘silly’, or worst ‘madness’, here we should stop and look back at such a situation. This was my reaction when I first came across African novels. Novels, such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and Gabriel Okara’s The Voice (1964), both have a limited number of

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Ambiguous Japan: A Study on Four Lectures of Nobel Prize Winner Kenzaburo Oe

In 1994, Kenzaburō Ōe, second Japanese writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, entitled his Nobel Lecture “Japan, the ambiguous, and myself”, dialoguing with his predecessor, Yasunari Kawabata, whose Nobel Lecture was entitled “Japan, the beautiful, and myself”. Confessing his quest for “ways to be of some use in the cure and reconciliation of