Sep'21
The IUP Journal of English Studies
Focus
The term gender involves how one identifies oneself. People may identify with genders that are different from their natal sex. Though most cultures use a gender binary, i.e., boy/girl,
man/woman, with socially constructed roles, behaviors, and expressions, gender has come to be seen as a broad spectrum of identities, including agender, androgyne, bigender, cisgender, genderfluid, nonbinary, and polygender. Gender identity is not static; it comprises a continuum of variations.
Transgender is an umbrella term that includes anyone whose experience or behavior is markedly different from the norms of gender associated with his/her anatomy at birth (those referred to as hijras or third gender in the Indian subcontinent could be intersex or transgender people). A transsexual is someone who has had surgery or hormone therapy to align his/her body with
his/her gender identity. A transman was born female and became a man, and a transwoman was born male and became a woman. A transvestite, also called a crossdresser, enjoys wearing clothing normally reserved for the opposite sex.
The fact that people use the same word, sex, to refer to natal sex, (erroneously) to gender, and to carnal acts could be the reason why there is much misinformation and mistrust around the notion of transgender. In a highly institutionalized society where men are masculine and women are feminine, a transgender person, an obvious deviation from the deeply ingrained binary, is seen as a threat to the social order. But as Andrew Solomon points out in his monumental work Far from the Tree, trans people ?are not manifesting sexuality; they are manifesting gender. The issue is not whom they wish to be with, but whom they wish to be. As Aiden Key, a trans activist, put it, ?My gender is who I am; my sexuality is who I bounce it off of.?? In other words, the transgender identity is not something a person does, it is something the person is. However, unfortunately for the transgender people, the larger society is ignorant of such essential distinctions and complexities of transgender identity. Hence the transphobia.
A classroom is a microcosm of the world with its diversities and prejudices. Assessing how the students, when exposed to texts about transgender people in the context of language teaching, embrace or question the entrenched assumptions about gender that inform social practices and thus sensitizing them to gender issues can help align academic theorization about trans people with actual social practice. Saumya Sharma seeks to precisely do this with her study that employs Critical Discourse Analysis to appraise the student community?s responses to a transgender person?s narrative.
?When a book leaves its author?s desk,? writes Salman Rushdie in his memoir Joseph Anton, ?it changes. . . . It has become a book that can be read, that no longer belongs to its maker. It has acquired, in a sense, free will. . . . The book has gone out into the world and the world has remade it.? In the case of his controversial novel The Satanic Verses, the book?s ?metamorphosis, its transformation by its engagement with the world beyond the author?s desk, would be unusually extreme.? It all started with an innocuous review of the book by Madhu Jain of India Today, which, unfortunately for Rushdie, hit the newsstand ?nine days before the book?s publication, at a time when not a single copy [of the book] had arrived in India.? The India Today review?which highlighted ?what came to be seen as the book?s ?controversial? aspects,? with the headline ?An Unequivocal Attack on Religious Fundamentalism,? and the concluding sentence, ?The Satanic Verses is bound to trigger an avalanche of protests?was, in Rushdie?s words, ?the match that lit the fire.? The review caught the attention of Syed Shahabuddin, an Indian parliamentarian and Islamic conservative, and the rest, as they say, is history. Satveer Singh proffers a cultural analysis of what has come to be known as the ?Rushdie Affair,? using Victor Turner?s concepts of ?social drama? and ?cultural performance.?
Manasvini Rai studies, using the concepts of ?intersectionality? and ?the other? and the theoretical positions of critics such as bell hooks, the overlapping areas of (dis)advantage, namely, race (white-black), gender (man-woman), class (elite-working class), and nation (developed-developing); the injustice perpetrated by the privileged against ?the other?; and the
self-actualization strategies for intersectional groups, with reference to Zadie Smith?s novella
The Embassy of Cambodia.
Sanghamitra Sadhu explores the constructs of authorial self and narrative self and the phenomenon of self-narration with reference to Doris Lessing?s fiction, which evokes a paradigm of the dialogic self and the interrelationship between writing about the self and writing about the other.
Deboshree Bhattacharjee examines Rabindranath Tagore?s plays from a semiotic perspective, showing how Tagore, with his sensitive and radical depiction of strong and free-spirited female characters in his plays, redefines the conventional signs of femininity to promote an alternate and progressive image of woman.
Bhupendra Nandlal Kesur and Mukesh Pundalik Patil highlight the sociocultural elements in the play The Lion and the Jewel by Wole Soyinka, a significant part of whose oeuvre can be read as a source of memory of his native Yoruba cosmology and rituals.
In translation, the meaning of a text is transferred from one language to another. Since a text exists in a context, a translator is expected to first decontextualize the source text and recontextualize it for the target text. And both contexts are influenced by their respective linguistic, situational, and ideological factors. Narasimha Rao Kedari discusses how translation is shaped by language use and ideologies, which can perpetuate or subvert power relationships and particular discourses.
Mohamed Fathy Khalifa analyzes stress in English using segmental evidence comprising vowel reduction (reduction of stressless vowels to schwa), stop allophony (use of allophones of voiceless stops), glottalization (weakening of /t/ when it does not precede a stressed vowel), and aspiration (the short puff of air that follows voiceless stops and the affricate ).
Pranjana Kalita Nath presents the findings of her study on the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies of the students of a postgraduate program in Linguistics and ELT. The findings include evidence on the reading strategies used by the students, the levels of usage, the most and the least used strategies, and the ones used by high and low scorers. Based on the findings, the author suggests appropriate pedagogical interventions for improving the academic reading strategies of students.
Fahad S Alsahli, in her study to understand how anxiety, perception, and confidence levels affect the Saudi EFL learners? classroom presentation, finds that the major reasons for Saudi EFL learners? anxiety in the classroom are L1 interference, learners? perceptions of Fl/L2, unsystematic classroom presentations, and lack of self-confidence, and avers that these must be addressed to improve the students? creative confidence.
Consulting Editor
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| Article | Price (₹) | ||
| Students? Responses to a Transgender Person?s Narrative: A Discourse Analysis |
100
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| Social Drama as a Political Process: A Cultural Analysis of the ?Rushdie Affair? |
100
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| (Dis)advantage and the Self-Determining ?Other?: Intersectional Politics in Zadie Smith?s The Embassy of Cambodia |
100
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| Writing as Being: Phenomenology of Self-Narration in Doris Lessing?s Fiction |
100
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| Redefining the Signs of Femininity: A Study of Selected Plays of Rabindranath Tagore |
100
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| Wole Soyinka?s The Lion and the Jewel as a Sociocultural Document |
100
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| Translation as Discourse |
100
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| Segmental Evidence for Stress in English |
100
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| Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies of Aspiring English Language Professionals in an ESL Context: Pedagogical Implications |
100
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| Investigating Anxiety, Perception, and Confidence Levels of EFL Learners Through Classroom Observation: Evidence from a Preparatory Year Program at a Saudi University |
100
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Students' Responses to a Transgender Person's Narrative: A Discourse Analysis
In recent years, notions of gender fluidity and gender inclusion have replaced the conventional understanding of the dichotomy of gender due to an upsurge in studies on transgender people that seek to expand our conceptualizations about them. India's Supreme Court has given the third gender status to the transgender community in the country, advocating their inclusion in colleges and universities. However, little literature exists on how the mainstream students perceive and understand the transgender people. This paper seeks to bridge this gap by presenting a critical analysis of the responses of students to a text about a transgender person. Drawing on Fairclough's approach, it highlights how the students process notions about transgender people, sexual identities, and their roles. Most studies in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) neglect the role of text consumption, treating readers as passive and gullible. This paper argues against such notions by examining how transgender persons are discursively constructed through the students' responses and how the respondents analyze, support, challenge, and question the conditions of the transgender people, normative ideologies about gendering, and social practices at large.
Social Drama as a Political Process: A Cultural Analysis of the "Rushdie Affair"
This paper combines perspectives drawn from sociology, anthropology, and literary studies to present a cultural analysis of the controversy caused by the publication of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses in 1988. With reference to the works of Victor Turner, the paper analyzes the full phase developmental pattern of the "social drama" that was engendered by the book's publication. The social drama approach is extremely versatile and can be used as an interpretive frame for the analysis of a broad range of social conflicts. A characteristic attribute of social dramas is that they possess liminal properties and represent a threshold of ambiguity between stable processes of social life. The paper analyzes the patterns of verbal and symbolic behavior produced in the course of the controversy and details some of the ways in which it was responsible for altering the base of community relations at an international level.
(Dis)advantage and the Self-Determining "Other": Intersectional Politics in Zadie Smith's The Embassy of Cambodia
The Embassy of Cambodia (2013), a notable novella by Zadie Smith, investigates the intersections of (dis)advantage surrounding its main protagonist-an African immigrant woman Fatou, employed as a domestic help in North-West London. The present paper applies theoretical concepts such as "intersectionality" and "the other," across the overlapping realms of race, socioeconomic class, gender, and nationality to the identity of the character Fatou, revealing the interrelated patterns of persecution and rebellion. Theoretical positions are drawn from works by American black feminist bell hooks, Kimberle Crenshaw, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Linda E Carty, and other theorists. These are correlated with the fictional depictions by Smith of injustices toward black women. Connections are established between the exploitation of working-class black women in the First World and African slave history. hooks's critical works also outline strategies of self-actualization for black women, pertinent for intersectional characters such as Fatou. Individuals and nations at different ends of the spectrum of (dis)advantage are examined in terms of the hierarchies they form. Textual exegesis reveals the individual dynamics of subversion and resistance employed by "the other," that results in not merely survival, but greater personal self-determination.
Writing as Being: Phenomenology of Self-Narration in Doris Lessing's Fiction
The paper deliberates on the question of metaphysics of being and writing, the dynamics of textuality and psychic functions, and phenomenology of writing the self and its narrativization in Doris Lessing's fiction. It explores how the narrative self in Lessing's fiction opens up a new horizon, enabling us to come to terms with the complexity of the authorial self along with the possibility of attaining a fully realized notion of self in a world beset with many upheavals. Situating Lessing's fiction in a framework in which writing is defined through self-making and vice versa, the paper reads how writing about the self tangentially evokes writing about the other, and the concept of writing about the self stands on the margins of the individual and the collective. The paper aims to unravel Lessing's narrative, spanning over diverse locations and themes that evoke the paradigm of a dialogic self in which the dialogue between the self and the group, essentialism, and social bodies continues.
Redefining the Signs of Femininity: A Study of Selected Plays of Rabindranath Tagore
Femininity is defined as the quality of acting in a typically feminine way. However, this typical feminine way is not universally identical and varies from society to society. In traditional Indian society, femininity was associated with qualities of tolerance and obedience, but in the modern context, qualities like strength, intelligence, and revolutionary spirit define femininity. These notions of femininity are represented in theatre through different signs of gender formation like costume, motor behavior, body language, and nature of speech. The Indian book of dramaturgy, the Natya Sastra, also classifies specific styles of acting for male and female characters that can be read as the conventional signs of femininity and masculinity. However, Rabindranath Tagore emerges as a pioneer in redefining these conventional signs of femininity to create a progressive and alternate image of woman through his dramas. He is considered the "pathfinder of modern Indian drama" for being instrumental in introducing women performers respectfully on the public stage. His dramas are replete with images of strong female personalities who possess the ability to fight against injustice and thereby introduce new signs of femininity. This paper reads Tagore's drama/theatre from a semiotic point of view to reveal the mechanism behind the representation of such strong female characters. The female characters are addressed as signs to see whether, and how, they push their limits in representing an alternative aspect of womanhood and femininity.
Wole Soyinka's The Lion and the Jewel as a Sociocultural Document
The characters, subject, setting, and dialogues of Wole Soyinka's play The Lion and the Jewel (1963) represent the varied social and cultural aspects of Nigeria. The play portrays the cultural and social life of Nigerians very accurately. The locale of the play is Ilujinle, a typical Nigerian village. The play is divided into three parts-Morning, Noon, and Night-and the action takes place on a single day, a Sunday. This paper explores the play as a sociocultural document.
Translation as Discourse
The significant developments in discourse studies, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and semiotics, together with the new insights in the fields of conversation analysis have affected our understanding of the way communication works. Translation evolves as a useful test case for examining the role played by language in social life. Translators create a new act of communication out of the existing source text. In doing so, they act as mediators of different languages, cultures, and social conditions, while trying to negotiate the meaning between the source text (ST) and the target text (TT). This paper focuses on this complex process at work by transgressing the disciplinary boundaries of translation to study the relationship between social context and the language activity in which translation takes place. Taking note of the oldest translation practices and the medieval and the translation genre of the present times, an attempt has been made to answer the question as to what a text represents when it is translated, keeping in view a multilingual and multicultural site like India.
Segmental Evidence for Stress in English
Segmental phonological rules are commonly used as diagnostics for stress, and stress can affect segmental and syllable structure (Hammond 1999; Hayes 1995). This shows that some segmental alternations are conditioned by the presence or absence of stress. This paper explains two pieces of segmental evidence for stress in English-vowel reduction and stop allophony: glottaling and aspiration. It is divided into two sections. The first section deals with vowel reduction, which shows the relationship between vowel quality and stress. The second section is concerned with stop allophony, which is the use of allophones of voiceless stops as segmental evidence for stress. The findings are as follows: first, there is a tendency for full vowels to be associated with stressed syllables; however, this pattern does not always exist since unstressed syllables do not always have reduced vowels. Second, glottaling is a segmental evidence for stress in English, since the /t/ is replaced by a glottal stop // when it is unstressed and is not replaced when it is stressed. Therefore, the weakening of /t/ to // is a sign of stresslessness and vice versa. Third, aspiration in English provides a strong clue about the position of stress: English voiceless plosives and the affricate // are aspirated word-initially as in "pray," "train," "coat," and "chair," but this aspiration fails to happen when these sounds are preceded by /s/ as in "spray," "strain," "scot," and "mischief." Finally, English plosives and the affricate // are also aspirated when they are in stressed syllables as in re'pair, a'ttend, a'ccomplish, and a'chieve.
Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies of Aspiring English Language Professionals in an ESL Context: Pedagogical Implications
This study explores the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies of students enrolled in a Linguistics and English Language Teaching program in an Indian university with the aim to identify the possible areas for pedagogical interventions in a course on Academic Reading. Data were collected through the questionnaire developed by Mokhtari and Shorey (2002) for measuring metacognitive awareness of reading strategies, followed by semi-structured interviews. The data revealed that the students had used problem-solving strategies more than the global and support strategies. The follow-up interviews also revealed that the students with higher level of perceived awareness of reading strategies had used a greater variety of reading strategies than those with lower level of awareness. The study indicates that the pedagogical interventions for improving the use of academic reading strategies of the students need to include, among others, explicit instructions regarding the use of various strategies, opportunities for constant reflection on strategies used for effective reading, and opportunities for peer discussion while negotiating a text.
Investigating Anxiety, Perception, and Confidence Levels of EFL Learners Through Classroom Observation: Evidence from a Preparatory Year Program at a Saudi University
This study investigates the levels of anxiety, perception, and confidence of Saudi EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students during classroom observation in the English language department of a preparatory year program in a Saudi university. Anxiety, perception, and confidence levels of students are common psychological phenomena that are examined to understand the constraints that learners face in learning a foreign language. The participants in this study were the students at the preparatory level of a Saudi University in Riyadh province. The study adopts a case-based approach to examine whether there exists a congruence between classroom observation and learners' knowledge about their actions and behavior. One of the reasons for choosing this setting is that classroom observation in preparatory year programs has been used only for assessing teachers' pedagogy but not for examining anxiety, perception, and confidence levels of EFL students. Data was collected through classroom observations and post-observation questionnaire. The findings of the study categorically prove that learners' anxiety and their perception and confidence levels during the learning process are variables that must be taken into account to eliminate the negative factors that demotivate Saudi EFL learners in their educational activities.