https://www.jelcsjournal.com/ Journal of English Literature and Cultural Studies en daily 1 Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0330 Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0330 https://www.jelcsjournal.com/article_218566.html This study aims to examine the psychological effects of digital technology on individuals by analyzing the characters of Jake and Daisy in This Beautiful Life. It also focuses on how the postmodern trend of imbibing the ethos and spirit of late capitalist consumer culture and the commodification of subjectivity put extreme pressure on individuals, leading to their disintegration and degeneration. The study uses the theoretical ideas and insights of leading postmodern theorists, such as Arthur Kroke and David Kroke, to analyze the harmful effects of the postmodern trend of simulating double identity in excess. It explores the causes of the psychic deviations and disintegration of Jake and Daisy within the postmodern context. This research is a qualitative analysis of the novel by using a postmodern theoretical framework to analyze the characters of Jake and Daisy and their actions and choices in the novel. The study finds that the harsh psychological effects of digital technology are evident in the characters of Jake and Daisy. Meanwhile, Daisy's mundane and monotonous life leads her to construct fantasies in her mind, leading her to embark on a sporadic spree of murdering her close friends. The study concludes that the postmodern trend of imbibing the ethos and spirit of late capitalist consumer culture and the commodification of subjectivity have a detrimental effect on individuals' psychological well-being. The lack of postmodern trend to erase the boundary between the normal and the abnormal exacerbates the situation, leading individuals to become cruel and violent. https://www.jelcsjournal.com/article_220027.html With ecological changes taking place at a very fast pace and affecting all forms of life on earth, Pakistani writers have also begun to address how human activities, especially humans’ exercise of power for grabbing resources and territories on earth, has done irreparable damage to our environment. This paper reflects on the environmental crisis that the selected novels hint at. The theoretical stance of this research is informed by four major aspects postulated by Lawrence Buell in his theory of Toxic Discourse, a major development in ecocriticism. Making use of textual analysis as a research method, the study attempts to examine Kamila Shamsie's Kartography and Uzma Aslam Khan's Trespassing. The analysis of the selected novels brings to light different forms of hegemonic oppression that are responsible for causing environmental imbalance. Social discrimination gives rise to us versus them binary which is the major cause for conflicts giving rise to endangered ecologies and ailing humanity. https://www.jelcsjournal.com/article_220028.html This paper examines the roles of ‘Edmund,’ ‘Malvolio,’ and ‘Shylock,’ as blocking agents in three of Shakespeare's plays: “King Lear,” “Twelfth Night,’ and “The Merchant of Venice.” A blocking agent is a character who disrupts the resolution of conflicts and creates obstacles for other characters. Edmund’s ambition and manipulative actions in “King Lear,” lead to familial and political chaos. Malvolio’s vanity and desire for social advancement in “Twelfth Night” clash with the play’s joyful and romantic atmosphere, resulting in his eventual humiliation. In “The Merchant of Venice,” Shylock’s insistence on legal justice, without showing mercy, creates a central conflict, highlighting the tension between justice and compassion. Each of these characters serves not only as an antagonist but also as a vehicle for exploring deeper themes such as ambition, social order, and the complexities of justice. Through their roles, Shakespeare illustrates the conflict between individual desires and societal values, enriching the narrative and deepening the thematic complexity of each play. https://www.jelcsjournal.com/article_220034.html A Eurocentric, white, heterosexual male bias in the discourse of trauma studies has often ignored the everyday trauma of the varied gender, class, ethnic, racial, and postcolonial identities. Hence, it is no wonder that the critique of war literature through a lens of trauma studies often leaves out the trauma of the Homefront, especially that of women. This paper investigates an alternative trauma space for women in war literature by closely analyzing Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, largely considered as a traumatic tale of a wounded World War I soldier Christopher Bradley. In the process, the paper reevaluates the character of Margaret, Chris’s love interest, to situate her in the trauma framework towards attaining a trauma discourse that is more inclusive, gender-neutral, and free of definitive class bias. Drawing references on the pluralistic model of trauma studies and evaluating scholarship that, finally, foregrounds the role of Margaret, it aims at furthering the discussion in an attempt to exclusively listen to her ordeal and, eventually, respond to her unique traumatic situations. https://www.jelcsjournal.com/article_220035.html Human beings have been greatly observed as the principal narrators of nature for centuries. As a result, the role of matter has almost always been widely ignored as a potential storyteller. Where man has always been considered the narrator of universal phenomena, matter’s capacity for narration and semiotic interconnections has always been disregarded. However, when authors provide matter the platform to participate actively in their plots, they subvert these notions of matter’s stillness. We argue that by integrating the town of Malgudi into his stories as a foundational plot device, R. K. Narayan foregrounds the narrative agency of Malgudi, and this semiotic power establishes Malgudi as a hyperobject. In his stories, the town of Malguddi is not only taken as the setting, but it acts as an active participant within the stories. Its entire presence can be observed by closely examining the streets, buildings, and characters that exist within the setting. For our support, we have chosen two main concepts: Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann’s concept of “Storied Matter” and Timothy Morton’s conceptualization of “Hyperobjects. ” We utilize these concepts to establish the town of Malgudi as a storied hyperobject, and by doing so we highlight the amount of significance matter has in shaping narratives. https://www.jelcsjournal.com/article_227693.html Spatial theories focus on the physical contents of images and art in any human mind, each description of self is an estimated encouragement of the social self that happened in evolution. The same is influenced by the culture and family set up in the initial stages of life until a person receives world knowledge. The knowledge gained then plays a more prevalent role than in the past self, yet the group consciousness stays the same. The study extends mental health studies, especially when the group’s authenticities are generated toward individual knowledge. It is evidenced through the depiction of colours, specifically with the interior and historic sensibility through furniture. In the selected writings of Susan Schaeffer, the work Falling speaks of colours to express relationships, success, failures, history, ethnicity, the boredom of life, and the crisis of living. In Anya, it speaks of the long family lineage one holds with the crisis of individual life and becoming a newer self. Schaffer in both texts represent the characters in crisis by asking personal questions about the historical evolution of the Jewish community. To emphasize the post-war crisis and especially the change of relationship in the social view is visible by attempting to add certain colours and furniture to represent lineage and past that withhold the individuals. The two main characters connected to this element are Elizabeth from Falling and Anya from Anya https://www.jelcsjournal.com/article_227699.html This analysis explores gender performativity in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590-1596) and Abolqasem Ferdowsi's Shahnameh (c. 1010), two major epic poems distinguished by temporal, cultural, and geographical differences, yet interconnected through their intricate representations of gender. This paper conducts a comparative feminist analysis utilizing Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity to examine how these epics establish, enforce, and occasionally disrupt gender norms within their cultural contexts. Analysis demonstrates both texts operate within patriarchal systems but have significant examples of gender fluidity and rebellion against standard interpretations. A comparison of Western and Persian literary traditions is made to explain the mechanics of performances of gender in both works through deliberate cross-dressing, martial power as a form of gender transgression, as well as the provisional support of feminine sovereignty. The findings illustrate that both works, despite their ostensible differences, utilize analogous confinement tactics to address gender subversion while unintentionally revealing the manufactured essence of gender. This cross-cultural feminist perspective challenges Western feminist frameworks and offers fresh insights into the performative aspects of gender within various literary and cultural contexts. https://www.jelcsjournal.com/article_247302.html Some mysteries are meant to be solved, while others are meant to be rewritten. The Enola Holmes films, directed by Harry Bradbeer, are not just adaptations of Nancy Springer’s novels—they are reinventions, shaped by a distinct directorial vision. This essay analyzes the film adaptation of Enola Holmes by director Harry Bradbeer in the context of Auteur theory. According to Auteur theory, the director is the "creator" of a film, imprinting it with his artistic vision. This research analyzes how Bradbeer, as an auteur, recasts the source material, inserting his distinctive flourishes: light-hearted fourth-wall breaks, contemporary feminist undertones, and a more acute emphasis on social justice. Drawn from Nancy Springer's novel series, the film reimagines the exploits of Sherlock Holmes' younger sister in a unique directorial vision. Auteur theory, which foregrounds the director's creative control, provides the basis for understanding Bradbeer's stylistic and narrative decisions. By contrasting the thematic and narrative turns of the novels with their screen adaptations, this paper explores the ways in which the director's decisions enhance Enola's autonomy, subvert conventional gender norms, and introduce new narratives—especially in Enola Holmes 2, where the film breaks from the book to highlight real-world labor rights movements. This research, from an Auteur Theory perspective, unravels the directorial signatures that Bradbeer impresses upon such adaptations to determine how one director's personal creative control over an adaptation will completely transform the story's own identity. https://www.jelcsjournal.com/article_247303.html Abstract: Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus is often criticized for its spectacle of physical brutality, yet this very focus on subjective violence can obscure the deeper, more insidious forms of coercion that structure the play’s world. This study mobilizes Slavoj Žižek’s tripartite model of violence from Violence: Six Sideways Reflections—subjective, systemic, and symbolic—to argue that the true horror of the play lies not in its bloodshed, but in the invisible ideological machinery of Rome. Moving beyond prior scholarship, which has vividly catalogued the play's graphic acts, this paper demonstrates how systemic violence (embedded in law and political institutions) and symbolic violence (inherent in language and ritual) operate to produce the conditions for the play's notorious atrocities. Ultimately, a Žižekian reading reveals that the collapse of the Roman order is not a descent into chaos, but the logical culmination of the objective violence upon which its civilization was founded.Keywords: Subjective Violence, Systemic Violence, Symbolic Violence, Ideology, Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, Slavoj Žižek https://www.jelcsjournal.com/article_247471.html Comparison of human and machine translation – especially in terms of the preservation of contextual meaning – has already attracted the attention of many researchers. Accordingly, the present study intended to compare human (Daryabandari) and machine (Google Translate) translations of The Remains of the Day into Persian to describe translation error types in conveying contextual meaning. In all, 120 errors were extracted using MQM model from each translation. The study identified four main categories of errors: lexical (35%), semantic (30%), syntactic (23%), and pragmatic (12%). These findings highlighted the limitations of current MT systems in handling the nuances of language, cultural references, and literary style present in sophisticated narratives. The presence of syntactic errors (23%) further demonstrated the difficulty machines face in correctly interpreting and reconstructing grammatical structures across languages. Pragmatic errors, while less frequent (12%), underscored the machine’s inability to grasp and appropriately translate cultural nuances and context-dependent meanings. Further, the Chi-square test result (χ² = 81.4, df= 3, P= .000) revealed a statistically significant difference between the translation type and error categories. This implied that human and machine translations exhibited different error patterns. The findings of this study suggested that translators and translation students should incorporate both traditional human translation techniques and machine translation technologies into their curricula.