1,720,957 research outputs found
Villains, victims and victors: A character analysis of Amma Darko’s women
Get PDFStudies on Amma Darko‟s presentation of women suggest a retaliatory and sexist characterization because of the condescending circumstances her female characters find themselves. This critique, however, distorts the novelty she brings to the table with regards to the politics of female emancipation. Thus, drawing on postcolonial feminism, this paper explores the dynamism in character presentation in Darko’s first four novelsin order to show how she rethinks female subjectivities. Such a reading is important in the ways in which it provides a better appreciation of Darko’s vision through character and characterisation and postcolonial feminisms
The Making of the New Man in Contemporary African Fiction: A Reading of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
Get PDFCritical works on Coetzee’s Disgrace shows that the novel constructs a distressing picture of the conditions in post-apartheid South Africa –tabling his attempts at blurring national enthusiasm, creating racial stereotypes and consequently damaging the hopes of the new South Africa. However, a re-reading of the novel reveals that the survival of post-apartheid South Africa reside in the potential of a willing unity of racial bodies and a careful re-definition of masculinity vis-à-vis spatial re-configurations. Drawing on the concept of futurity and Frantz Fanon’s idea of the new man, this paper argues that the correlation between forms of community and forms of masculinity provide basis for re-configuring social cohesion in post-apartheid South Africa
Reconstituting the Self: of Names, Discourses and Agency in Amma Darko's Beyond the Horizon
No full textInternational audienceWhat "Mara" signifies and how this is constitutive of the quest for a conscious but problematic postcolonial transnational subjectivity has rarely reverberated in the burgeoning critical commentary on Amma Darko's Beyond the Horizon. This paper explores how 'Mara' functions in Beyond the Horizon as a name and concept that summons a specific biblical discourse that foregrounds female migratory subjectivity, vulnerability, dispossession and redemption, and a Fanti concept of a beleaguered and ethical subjectivity that emerges from complicity, radical decision and agency. The paper demonstrates that these discourses are pertinent in determining how Mara reconstitutes her subjectivity at the margins of Empire. The paper contributes to our understanding of how literary names designate and conceptualise experience, function as archetypal and intertextual coda that gesture, to borrow Judith Butler's words for our purposes, to "a world beyond themselves [and] their boundaries," and therefore have rhetorical and thematic force. How Mara negotiates the problematics of capture is therefore crucial to Darko's narrative of awakening
Becoming conscious of the self: Spatial dynamics, character pairs and the feminist vision in Amma Darko’s beyond the horizon
Get PDFThe relationship between spatial dynamics, character pairs and how this is constitutive of the feminist vision in Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon has rarely been explored, despite the growing critical reception. The paper explores how Darko’s women become awakened by the redemptive roles of their fellow women through the narrative’s climatic journeys. Drawing on theories of spatiality and African feminisms, this paper argues that Darko’s attempt at associating specific characters within particular geographical contexts helps us to rethink controversial and conventional discourses on the African woman – sisterhood solidarity, education, financial freedom and bodily integrity as routes to the total emancipation of the African woman. Thus, the study suggests a shift from the rather clichéd argument that the text is male-targeted
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
- …
