Agency
2 articles filed under this keyword.
Role-Playing, Witty Language, and Woman’s Agency in Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer.
Kawa Othman Omer Ahmed
Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer has been widely considered by critics as one of the most significant comedies in England’s 18th Century. Its popularity is due to the dramatist’s cunning use of satire and humour as artistic means of entertainment. Noticeably, critics mostly have focused on the aesthetic values of the dramatist’s use of satire and humour. However, this research provides a new reading, particularly the significance of the heroine’s bodily and linguistic role-playing. Firstly, the research investigates the extent the heroine’s role-playing enables the male protagonist to undergo personality change from a reserved and anti-social into a more tolerant and open-minded personality. Secondly, the research investigates the extent the heroine’s witty rhetoric, together with her role-playing, exposes patriarchal misconceptions, biases, and prejudices about women and marriage by the authoritarian figures. Notably, the easiness through which the heroine changes identities and social roles, symbolically, throws into question the fixability and naturalness of social roles in the play. Symbolically, the heroine’s performative acts of role-playing , whether bodily or linguistically, confirms postmodern feminist’s theory, particularly Third -Wave Feminism , with regard to constructiveness and performativity of gender and identity. Methodologically, the research applies Close- reading approach; that is, New Criticism, as well as Feminist approach. Moreover, the research is significant because it investigates the co-relation between the heroine’s role-playing and her quest for selfhood.
Volume 11 · Issue 2 · April 2024From Dissonance to Harmony with Nature: A Material Ecocritical Reading of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony
Bahman Jabar Mohammed, Mohammed Dler Ameen, Kawan Othman Arif
Although much has been written about Silko's Ceremony, little attention has been paid to reading the novel from a material ecocritical perspective. This study employs material ecocritical theory to expound the representations of humans, flora and fauna in Silko’s Ceremony, and how these entities are agentic and capable of producing meanings, communicating with each other, and altering the course of events in the novel. Influenced by new materialisms and the work of two leading theorists, Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, who co-edited a book entitled, Material Ecocriticism (2014), this new wave of ecocriticism highlights the importance of reading matter in texts or/and reading a matter as a text. The study argues that, in Ceremony, all Tayo’s relationships with nature, including springs, landscapes, animals, and humans, in which he remembers his relationship with his belated uncle Josiah and his cousin Rocky, narrate an experience of a story that can be viewed as storied matter. The study concludes that everything in the world that is presented in the novel is interconnected, entangled, and enmeshed in a complex network of relations and one should respect and regard the environment because human destiny is intrinsically interrelated with the destiny of the world.