زهراء عادل عبد الصاحب الحسيني

This paper provides the Marxist critical analysis of Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville with its dramatizing of the themes of alienation, labor exploitation, and capitalist power being experienced by the character of Bartleby and the bureaucratic setting he works in. The work applies the theory of alienated labor developed by Karl Marx, and adopts the perspectives of Althusser, Lukacs and Marcuse to analyze how passive resistance of Bartleby, who replied incessantly, “I would prefer not to,” demonstrates the psychological and material implications of the capitalist ideology. The monotonous clerical work, the strict order of classes, and the incapability of the narrator to see the humanity within Bartleby described in the story predict the dehumanizing nature of the capitalist order. This paper has attempted to make a case by close textual analysis to argue that Bartleby is a kind of alienated worker who isolates him/herself in a system that cannot provide emotional, social, and existential satisfaction. His retreat ends up revealing the ethical sterility of the capitalistic system and the lack of possibility of authentic human interaction in the same. The study has added to the Melville studies in both placing Bartleby into a wider context of critique of capitalism in the nineteenth century and showing how Melville prefigures contemporary interpretations of labor, resistance, and ideological control.

The study will explore intersections of identity and resistance in Beloved, a seminal novel of the African American fiction by Toni Morrison, that re-thoughts the historical trauma of slavery by exploring it through a psychological and cultural lens. The paper addresses the way in which Morrison transforms the memory of oppression into a breathing narrative of self-reclamation, concentrating on gender, community and collective memory roles in shaping post-slavery consciousness. The study relies on a descriptive-analytical approach to the topic by using a theoretical framework reliant on postcolonial theories of; Homi Bhabba and Frantz Fanon, Black feminist criticism of bell hooks and Audre Lorde, and theories of trauma of Cathy Caruth and Marianne Hirsch to discuss how Morrison characters resist historical silence through storytelling, language, and strength of motherhood. Finally, the last series of events reveals that identity in Beloved is never definite but in constant negotiation by memory and survival forces, and resistance is a process of retrieval, both individual and communal. The novel therefore transcends context to be a moral tale of freedom, humanity and remembrance in the wider context of postcolonial and feminist literary views.

This paper explores power, voice and representation as dynamics in Beloved by Toni Morrison with reference to narrative discourse critically. This study examines the ways that Morrison uses narrative techniques, including changing viewpoint, polyphony, fragmentation, and temporal displacement, to rewrite the history of the dominant US to re- figure the voices of the oppressed by slavery. The study relies on the narrative theory (Genette, Bakhtin), the Black feminist thought (hooks, Lorde), the postcolonial criticism (Bhabha, Fanon) to analyze ways in which storytelling becomes the place of negotiation between the authority and the marginality. These findings show that the narrative discourse of Morrison does not just disrupt the conventional power structure but also recreate the process of representation by foregrounding the lived experiences and culture of the memory and emotional truth of the enslaved people. Beloved, by its unique style, turns narrative into resistance, giving silenced subjects the way to enter history again with agency and voice.

The Dead is the last story of Dubliners by James Joyce, which is generally considered to be one of the most relevant works of the modernist short story. The story has received a lot of critical interest, especially concerning the issue of spiritual paralysis and epiphany that describe the Irish society depicted by Joyce. This review critically evaluates key scholarly interpretations of The Dead with a particular emphasis on the manner in which critics have interpreted the association between psychological paralysis of Gabriel Conroy and his ultimate revelation. The paper will examine the role of the elements of paralysis and epiphany as key themes to the modernist narrative style that Joyce employs through an evaluation of powerful readings of the story. The symbolic and cultural significance of the revelation made by Gabriel at the conclusion of the story is also addressed in the article as it relates to the Irish identity, memory and lack of emotion. Using such a critical perspective review, the paper shows that the awakening of Gabriel as described by Joyce remains a topic that can be interpreted differently by scholars of literature. In the end, The Dead turns out to be an ambiguous modernist work where the clash between stasis and revelation determines not only the level of self-awareness of the main character but also the overall thematic meaning of the work.

The myth of the vampire has continued to frighten and fascinate people all over the world. The idea of an undead night-stalker that feeds on human blood has been around for centuries and endures to this day. Numerous countries and cultures across the globe have personal deviations of a similar mythical entity. No matter the variation, all the vampire tales have a key commonality ‒ the lust for human blood. The cornerstone upon which all the vampire characters now turn was established in 1897 byBram Stoker in his novel Dracula which, since its publication, has never been out of print and its title character, Count Dracula, has become an icon of terror that inspired many subsequent novels and stories of the vampire fiction genre. However, only a handful of these novels were considered of literary merit. That handful includes the works of Anne Rice (1941‒) in which she develops a new way of portraying the vampire in fiction. The figure of vampire has changed from the evil and menacing figure of Dracula to a kinder and more sympathetic vampire who questions the meaning of its existence.