1,720,957 research outputs found
THE WASH: A Traditional Ethnic Play in The Mainstream Arena
No full textThe Wash is considered the third part of Philip Kan Gotanda’s family trilogy alongside with A Song for a Nisei Fisherman and Fish Head Soup. This series represents his sincere attempt to discover and truly depict the Japanese American family, as well as to delve deeper and deeper into it. The idea of the play is mainly driven from two real-life stories. The first is about a friend whose elderly nisei mother has left her father and begins a new relationship, but this story did not spread in the Japanese American community. The second is about a writer whose ex-husband still comes to cut her garden even after the divorce. And both stories represent the old traditions in this community, which Gotanda himself tries to expose and criticize at the same time. Gotanda uses this play to push the restrictions of his ethnic community to be familiar in the mainstream arena
Heathcliff’s multiple references in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
Get PDFWuthering Heights is considered one of the most controversial novels in the history of English literature due to its debatable themes and other messages. However, the novel is examined intensively and receives many critical commentaries. The earliest reviewers show less interest in this novel and its themes. Moreover, they harshly criticize the aggressive depiction of the relations and the unfavorable portrayal of the female characters. On the other hand, other critics greatly praise the uniqueness and originality of the writing style and intelligent analysis of Victorian society. Between the two opposing views, the reader may understand that Emily Bronte wants to build this controversial status to shed light on the unspoken issues in British society during the Victorian era. One of the most attractive points in this novel is the skillful portrayal of the main character, Heathcliff. Bronte manipulates these characters cunningly to represent all of the drawbacks of society. She uses this character to criticize the nature of relationships, the social situation, the political aspect, and the economic status of British society at that time. Due to the multiple facets of this character, the reader may find it difficult to understand his behaviors, attitudes, and emotions. Bronte makes the reader fluctuate between loving and sympathizing with this character to hating and disagreeing with most of his deeds. These doubtable reactions towards this character may remain till the end of the novel. Undoubtedly, the reader may enjoy reading this novel and understand the nature of this complicated web of relationships and elicit unspoken messages
Colonialism and a history of oppression in Africa: Scenes from selected African novels
Get PDFExamining the African suffering during the colonialism period and describing the different miseries of the African people have been the core theme of almost all African and Western writers during the colonial age and post-colonial time. Undoubtedly, all of these writings fluctuate considerably between exaggeration and degrading the human sacrifices of those countries during this period. Then, the African writers started taking the responsibility of narrating their history and describing their suffering to correct many false ideas and assumptions, many false conceptions which were established in the minds of consecutive generations. Chinua Achebe is one of the prominent authors and thinkers who has received international recognition due to his creative style of telling the African story and has impacted African literature in different ways. Through his books, he exposed many of the negative colonial impacts on the African communities and how they did their best to invade these countries politically, economically, and culturally. Achebe tried to uncover their claims, like linking Christianity and commerce together, and the only way to African progress should be through the European gates. In his novel Things Fall Apart, he tried to expose the side effects of the colonizers’ intentions to redesign the African communities up to Western standards. He assured that all colonial actions resulted in the colonizers’ good interests and were against African people. On the other hand, Ngugi Thiogn’o is interested in examining the post-colonial impacts on the African nations and how the Western colonizers succeeded in producing loyal followers adopting their beliefs and concepts. Those followers replaced the foreign occupation with another type of occupation where the people’s acceptance should be evaluated by their adaptability to the Western criteria in all life aspects. In his novel, Pedals of Blood, Thiog’o narrated the impacts of using foreign languages to diffuse the indigenous culture and lose the African identity. Throughout the novel, he examined the political elite’s corruption in African countries during the post-colonial period and how they continued colonial suppression of their nations
The Asian Americans’ Identity Crisis as Reflected in Day Standing on Its Head
No full textPhilip Kan Gotanda\u27s heritage is professionally woven into nearly all of his work. The combination of family memories and theatrical inventions makes him the faithful chronicler of the Asian American experience. The past visibly invades the present in most of his works and characters, while he interweaves a distinctly theatrical magic charm around them, producing a crystal clear picture of Asian American life. His plays feature arguments between men and women with differing visions of how Asian Americans should fight to be a part of America. One can say that it would be more challenging to assign Day Standing on Its Head as a merely Asian American play because Gotanda exposes socio-cultural issues that can fit all the mainstream audience. Although the characters in this play confront problems rooted in the particularities of Japanese American history and culture, their conflicts reveal psychological and emotional realities that resonate beyond the Japanese American community. Along with all of Gotanda\u27s works, he never sacrifices his ethnic authenticity to gain the acceptance and visibility of the mainstream audience. On the other hand, he claims the right to present the "real" face of the Asian American problems, issues, and conflicts, just to record their real life without any decoration. Gotanda argues that his style in discussing these issues can help in strengthening relations with the mainstream
Dubliners: Different Short Stories with One Place and a Pervading Theme
No full textThe city\u27s image acquired special prominence in many literary works related to modernist literature. In these works, the writers used the city details simultaneously to serve as symbols and references to the themes and issues that can appear in the works. This fact is especially actual in the case of James Joyce\u27s Dublin - the permanent setting of most works by this great Irish modernist. It is worth noting that Joyce took the steps forward to discuss his city with the bright and dark sides. Dubliners, the collection of short stories, belonged to this type of modernist literature focused on the city. James Joyce wrote this collection in the early period of his writing career, and its title highlighted the significance of Dublin – as a city and its people. In each story of the collection, the capital of Ireland was not a mere setting but a unifying factor to portray a complete and comprehensive image of the collection. In every story, Joyce presented a single issue or a merged collection of obstacles found in Dublin and affected the people. In general, Joyce represented the capital city as the center of paralysis, affecting its citizens despite their age. This paper examined the prominence and symbolic meaning of the city in the text. Joyce demonstrated detailed descriptions while mapping his city. For instance, the writer presented the characters while meandering around Dublin\u27s different types of streets. These incidents offered symbolic importance that the people of Dublin moved in circular routs in vain attempts to break the different layers of circles imposed over them at that time. Implicitly, this reference demonstrated the inability of the people of Dublin (the Dubliners) to escape the physical, cultural, political, and religious paralysis. Joyce\u27s portrayal of paralysis in his collection mirrored the entire country of Ireland\u27s broader social and political context during that time. Ireland was undergoing significant changes, yet it seemed imprisoned in inertia and stagnation. The characters and their stories served as microcosms to reflect the broader and extensive social condition, highlighting the challenges faced by the Irish people in breaking free from the paralysis that held them back without tangible outcomes
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
- …
