Ghyath Manhel Hadi Alkinani

A classic example of romantic literature, Wuthering Heights is also an example of the way Victorian literature moves beyond Romanticism to embrace the modern age. The iconic romantic hero (Heathcliff) who must suffer othering, discrimination, and rejection to eventually die a romantic death, also paves how for the modern world and its ethos of embracing difference and otherness. The “other” in Victorian England was this constant threat to the status quo, the latent revolution that the Victorians have feared and anticipated. However, Hegelian (and other) conceptualizations of the meaning of the “other” as a prerequisite signifier of the self challenges this conventional image of the “other” as a mere outside object. In this paper, we read Heathcliff as a metaphoric defense mechanism against the fast pace of modernity. Combining textual analysis with a contextual regard for the spirit of the age in which the novel was written, the paper proves that Heathcliff’s ordeal is the scapegoating of the romantic hero who helps the society to mature and accept otherness and modernity.

The novel as a literary genre emerged with the rise of the middle class and their political ideology of nationalism. The emergence of a postcolonial national identity in modern Iraq accompanied the spread of the novel genre as a key cultural medium that helped to formulate the national identity of the new state. Much has been written about the Iraqi novel especially when it starts to gain much popularity after the 2003 American invasion of the country. However, it has been usually studied in the context of literary criticism via its different schools and approaches. This paper studies the Iraqi novel at the turn of the century as a cultural phenomenon that not only represents but also formulates the national identity of the contemporary Iraqi state. To avoid generalizations, the paper focusses on two significant novels by Iraqi writer Ali Bader: Papa Sartre (2001) and the Tobacco Keeper (2008). The paper follows combines textual analysis of the two novels with cultural reading of their larger context following Richard Johnson's (1986) approach of studying cultural phenomena via the three phases of their production context and formulating conditions, their status as texts to be culturally consumed and analyzed, and finally the responses or outcomes that emerge from consuming these cultural texts. This three-phase approach provides rewarding insights into the selected literary texts as they function and interact within their cultural space, redefining and remaking the fragmented and problematic identity formations that they are written in and that they engage with.

The present article aims to show how this modernist novel resisted and actively undermined the overwhelming critical discourse of Freudian psychoanalysis that has dominated the critical and theoretical world of literary studies at the time. Although much has been said and written about the antipathy of Vladimir Nabokov to Sigmund Freud, very little has been written on what the novel has actively done in respect to reversing the epistemological power discourse that dominates the relationship of literary works to critical “theory.” The contribution of this paper is reading Lolita as an example of “applied literature,”i.e., a literature that anticipates, challenges, revises and undermines the critical theory that is supposed to read/analyze it. Theoretically, the paper benefits from contributions of scholars such as Shoshana Felman and Piere Bayard. The paper is sectioned into an introduction, a “classic” psychoanalytical reading of Lolita, a section that reviews and assesses the problems with such a reading, and a conclusion that sums up the findings of the study

https://dent.uokufa.edu.iq/archives/20082

Hashintha Jayasinghe and Ghyath Manhel Alkinani, both Comparative Literature & Cultural Studies (CLCS) students in the Department of World Languages, have received the 2018-2019 CLCS Program Dissertation Fellowship Award. The award is used to support doctoral students in the final stage of their program. Each year, the CLCS program seeks nominations for two $5,000 dissertation writing fellowships for CLCS students who are ABD (all but dissertation) by the fellowship application deadline and who would commit to finish the dissertation during the 2018-2019 academic year. Jayasinghe’s dissertation titled "Archive and Repertoire of the Asala Perahera Performance in Sri Lanka" focuses on the archive and the repertoire of the Perahera performance in Sri Lanka. The archival records consider the history of the performance, the meanings associated with the Esala Perahera, and certain changes that have taken place, whereas, the repertoire looks at the non-archival transmission of history and memory that is preserved through the live performance of the Esala Perahera. hashinatha Overall, the project re-examines the formation of identities, narratives, and histories transmitted through cultural performance. Jayasinghe has done extensive research on this performance during her summer vacations in 2016 and 2017. She is the first to study this performance through a postcolonial and performance studies theoretical lens. Alkinani studied English (BA 2006) and English literature (MA 2010) at the University of Baghdad, Iraq. He has served as a teaching assistant at the University of Kufa, Iraq and won a doctoral scholarship from Higher Committee For Education Development. Alkinani’s dissertation project engages Iraqi and American literary representations of the Iraq War, with a focus on the discourse of trauma. His research interests include cultural studies, comparative literature, contemporary fiction and poetry.