Characters Of Representations Research Articles

The Presence of Male Victims of the Congolese Genocide in Lynn Nottage’s Ruined

Set in a small mining village in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Congo) during the second civil war (1998–2003), Lynn Nottage’s Ruined (2008) depicts Mama Nadi’s bar in a warzone in eastern Congo, which she runs as a brothel with rape victims, such as Josephine and Salima, and a ruined girl, Sophie. These rape victims ironically work as prostitutes in the bar for soldiers (government militia) and rebels, both of whom rape civilians. The bar is relatively safe compared to the outside where these women, shunned and unprotected by their families and communities, become targets of deadly sexual violence and sex slavery. Focusing on raped women, many critics also examine how Nottage criticizes the exploitative nature of global capitalism and its devastating effect on eastern Congo. Although relatively neglected, Nottage depicts the impact of genocide by attrition in Congo and global capitalism on Congolese men who appear as miners, rape victims’ family members, and child soldiers. Focusing on her representation of male characters, I reveal how she challenges the popular representation of wars in Congo as a “rape pandemic” and negative stereotypes of Congolese men as irrational, violent, rapists and perpetrators. I will instead examine how Ruined represents the exploitative nature of global capitalism by blurring the binary between women (victims) and men (perpetrators).

Can We Not Just Talk About Men? The Bechdel Test, Narrative Salience and Female Voices in Two Selected Malay Films

Western feminist film scholars’ claim that female characters are often defined in relation to their male counterparts resonates well in contemporary film and gender studies. This claim highlights the representational biases towards male privilege and primacy as visible signifiers; the ramification of this biasness is the invisibility of female subjectivity that renders them voiceless. Therefore, inquiries into female subjectivity in films outside of Hollywood context are crucial. This paper aims at identifying and comparing the representation of female characters in two Malaysian films of two genres - romance and horror - to highlight the consonance between female voice with feminine consciousness and empowerment. This study administers the Bechdel Test on two films selected using criterion sampling - 3 Temujanji and Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam - and suggests a novel approach by adding the analysis of the film using the concept of narrative salience. The analyses using both methods revealed contradictory results. 3 Temujanji, although failed most of the test, is revealed through narrative salience as assiduous towards feminine consciousness and empowerment. Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam, which passed the test, ironically and ideologically contained female voices within the patriarchal value system. The finding contributes towards the theorisation that women's voices in Malaysian films can be considered as an integral part of the acoustic register of films that enhances film analysis technique. Scriptwriters and filmmakers can utilise the test as a reference in which women can define themselves 'not in relation to men', while creating female characters who progressively think beyond patriarchy and androcentrism. Keywords: Women empowerment, Malay films, acoustic register, narrative salience, Hollywood.

Appearance of the Kashiwara–Saito singularity in the representation theory of p-adic GL(16)

In 1993 David Vogan proposed a basis for the vector space of stable distributions on $p$-adic groups using the microlocal geometry of moduli spaces of Langlands parameters. In the case of general linear groups, distribution characters of irreducible admissible representations, taken up to equivalence, form a basis for the vector space of stable distributions. In this paper we show that these two bases, one putative, cannot be equal. Specifically, we use the Kashiwara-Saito singularity to find a non-Arthur type irreducible admissible representation of $p$-adic $\mathop{GL}_{16}$ whose ABV-packet, as defined in earlier work, contains exactly one other representation; remarkably, this other admissible representation is of Arthur type. In the course of this study we strengthen the main result concerning the Kashiwara-Saito singularity. The irreducible admissible representations in this paper illustrate a fact we found surprising: for general linear groups, while all A-packets are singletons, some ABV-packets are not.

Body Positivity in The Main Female Character in Sierra Burgess is A Loser (2018) Film

This research aims to explore the characterization of Sierra as the main female character reflecting body positivity presented in the Sierra Burgess Is a Loser (2018) film directed by Ian Samuels. This research uses the descriptive qualitative method supported by the character and characterization theory by Joseph M. Boggs and Dennis W. Petrie and representation theory by Stuart Hall. This research also uses the concept of body positivity by Tracy and Wood Barcalow to support the analysis. In the Sierra Burgess Is a Loser film, Sierra represents intelligence, independence, and confidence as a teenage girl who reflects body positivity. She struggles to achieve her freedom as a plus body size woman. Becasue of her plus body size, Sierra experiences injustice and bullying as a fat girl in her school. Sierra reflects body positivity as she fights to gain her confidence and face her fear through the struggles of being a fat girl. Moreover, it shows that Sierra Burgess Is a Loser (2018) film tries to support the body positivity movement as the film portrays Sierra as an intelligent woman who breaks the stereotype of unrealistic body image and manages to embrace other women to have a body positivity image.

Povampirenje kao zaraza – prvi vojni izveštaji o vampirima i njihovo literarno transponovanje u savremenoj srpskoj prozi

This paper analyses three works of fiction (two novels and one short story) inspired by the first Austrian military reports on vampires. These reports suggest how the discourse about the Other (primitive, barbaric, half-cultivated, etc.), personified in the Serbs, evolved in the Age of Enlightenment. Additionally, the reports have been a source of creative inspiration for a number of literary (re)interpretations of the vampire phenomenon: from postmodern literary entities (mediating an open dialog of the novel, written by M. Novaković, with the entire tradition of the Serbian horror fantasy), through existential studies of the meaning of humanity in the context of the “demonic gift” (the novel by M. Milosavljević), and biological metaphors of disease, to the latest representation of this demonic character as a dark subculture hero existing in the liminal areas of “civilized” space (G. Skrobonja).

Sin and Punishment in The Scarlet Letter: A Feminist Perspective

In this article, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, which is set in the Puritan society of Boston in the middle of the seventeenth century, is subjected to a close and in-depth analysis. Within the realm of feminist studies, one of the most important topics to discuss is the way in which female characters are portrayed in works of fiction. The female protagonist of the novel is Hester Prynne whose sin and receiving punishment and, therefore, her self-development without being reliant on her male counterparts for livelihood, with ups and downs in the patriarchal society and being ostracized are taken into account for this study. The objective of this study is to demonstrate that the narrative does not adhere to the antiquated norms of patriarchal heritage in its depiction of women; rather, it is a protest against the constraints that society places on women at the time it was written. A qualitative content analysis method is adopted to investigate the representation of female characters in this narrative. The portrayal of Hester Prynne and Pearl is explored through the lens of feminist stance for the possibility that it challenges conventional practices. It clarifies the author’s stance in the patriarchal setting. Thus, this study conducts a rigorous analysis of the traditional patriarchal and stereotypical portrayals of the woman in literature and suggests reconsideration of the long-held patriarchal practices of representing women in fiction. IUBAT Review—A Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 5 (1): 35-43

Deep adaptation of CNN in Chinese named entity recognition

AbstractNamed entity recognition (NER) is an important task in the field of natural language processing, but it is more challenging in Chinese because of the lack of natural delimiters. The traditional character‐based Chinese NER model directly uses long short‐term memory (LSTM), gated recurrent units, and other sequence models to extract sentence‐level information from character sequences, resulting in the lack of word‐level information in the model. Therefore, a Chinese NER model called ChineseBERT‐CNNs‐BiLSTM‐CRF was proposed, which uses the ChineseBERT pretrained model as the embedding layer so that the vector representation of each Chinese character contained pinyin, glyph, and conventional character information. In addition, a CNN‐based neural network structure called CNNs was presented to extract word‐level information from character sequences and alleviate the problem of entity boundary recognition. BiLSTM was used to extract global features (i.e., sentence‐level information) and predict the corresponding labels of character sequences. Further, conditional random field (CRF) was employed to impose certain rules on the prediction of BiLSTM to enhance the recognition effect of the model. The experimental results revealed that the F1 values of the model on MSRA, people's Daily, and Weibo datasets reached 95.76, 96.61, and 70.00%, respectively, highlighting the effectiveness of the model.

Peripheries of Narration and Spatial Poetics in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone

This study explores narratological aspects and tools that are employed in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone within the framework of a postcolonial narratology. Postcolonial narratology directs its attention to the representation of the peripheral and the marginalized within the scope of narratorial investigation. There will be some considerations regarding the representation of focal and voiceless characters, the function of the implied author, authorial audience as well as multiple narrators or representing voices. The deployment of multitopicality in The Moonstone brings forth the issue of marginalization predicated on colonizer/colonized relationships. Spatial poetics in the novel functions in a way in which despite the myriad of settings that constitute the story, narrative discourse privileges some places while putting the others into the peripheries. The concept of space in the narrative proves to be active, fluid and purposeful rather than being passive, static or innocent as in the status of a background setting. Alongside temporal-spatial aspects, narratological presentation of the characters also plays a fundamental role in relation to power dynamics and the issue of representation. In the same vein, it is manifest that not only the description of space and characters but also the placement of multiple narrators and authorial audience concurrently contribute to the treatment of imperial ideologies. As part of the implied author’s scheme, the narrators’ act of narration is flawed and ideologically loaded rather than consistent or neutral. All these narratological clues in the novel attest to the idea that narration is always a discursive act.

La banalizzazione dello sguardo: Tempo di uccidere dal romanzo al film

In 1989 was released the cinematographic adaptation of Ennio Flaiano’s novel (1947) Tempo di uccidere (Time to kill) directed by Giuliano Montaldo. This contribution analyses the narratological features of the two versions, showing how in the medial switch the critical sight on Italian colonialism of the novel is turned to a shallow tale where is instead enforced the traditional view of white male superiority, due to the loss of the inner focus, the misread representation of characters, and the underestimation of episodes which served in the book to undermine colonizer’s self-sight and disclose the identity crisis of the following chapters.

The big picture: Representation of LGBTQ characters and themes in picture books available in the United States 1972-2018

The number of LGBTQ picture books—literary works for children containing lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer characters and themes—has increased considerably since 2000. While different segments of this category of books have been examined, there has been a limited examination of the entire genre. Using 234 English-language LGBTQ picture books available in the United States between 1972 and 2018, I conducted a content analysis of the main themes and central characters as well as investigate how the main themes changed over time and the extent to which they reflected the larger historical contexts in which they were created. I find that very few LGBTQ characters are cast as main protagonists and some (i.e., bisexuals) are completely absent. Similarly, I find an increase in diversity of themes over the decades yet with most centering on marriage, parenting, and domesticity. Together, LGBTQ picture books convey a limited view of the LGBTQ lives.

Fateful transformations in the Shakespearean theatrical character

التراجيديات ومفردتها تراجيديا قد نشأت وحسب- رأي أرسطو([i]) نشأة ارتجالية ترجع في أصلها إلى مرتجلات قادة جوقات الاناشيد الديثرامبية، وإن المحاولات التراجيدية الأولى كانت بدائية وبسيطة. غير أن تتابع الكتاب والشعراء وتحسيناتهم المتتالية كانت عوامل فعالة أفضت إلى تطور التراجيديا وإنها أي التراجيديا مستوفية لشروط الفن والصنعة، وإن حسن السيطرة على بناء حباكتها- يعد أبرز شعراء الدراما من الناحية المأساوية ([i]) أرسطو- كتاب فن الشعر- ص94- ترجمة: ابراهيم حماده- الناشر هلا للنشر والتوزيع- مصر.

Penerapan Pendidikan Karakter Terhadap Perilaku Merokok di SMA N 1 Batang Onang

This research is motivated by the presence of students smoking in the school environment which is a violation of school regulations. Character education is one way to reduce students' smoking behavior at school. This study looks at how the application of character education to smoking behavior at SMA N 1 Batang Onang. This study uses a qualitative case study type. The informant selection technique was purposive sampling, which was based on the researcher's criteria. Data collection was carried out by interviewing the principal, deputy head of curriculum, deputy student affairs, counseling teacher, 5 subject teachers, 16 students, and 3 parents as well as the surrounding community at SMA N 1 Batang Onang, then observing activities at school such as classrooms, cafeteria, in the parking lot, and outside the school and the latest data is in the form of documentation in the form of photos, lesson plan documents and so on. In this study using data analysis Miles and Huberman namely data reduction, data presentation, and data verification. The theory used in research on the application of character education to smoking behavior at SMA N 1 Batang Onang is Thomas Lickona's character theory. The results of this study are character education at SMA N 1 Batang Onang, application of character education at SMA N 1 Batang Onang, smoking behavior at SMA N 1 Batang Onang.

The concept of fiction in Soroka’s «Crumbs»

In the article, we analyze the concept of fiction in the short story collection «Crumbs» (2019) by the Ukrainian writer Petro Soroka. In this book, the author directly speaks out about his vision of literature; in some tales, he makes digressions, comments on his writing practice and narration, and outlines his understanding of fiction. All these things create a balance between the author’s intentions and concrete texts. In a broad context, the book is a valuable source for researching short stories in modern Ukrainian literature, the nature of fiction in general, and the understanding of fictionality these days. Soroka considered «Crumbs» the pinnacle of his writing. But the book remains unnoticed. The relevance of the article is grounded on this.
 The aim of the article is to outline and identify the conception of fiction proposed in «Crumbs». For that, we solve two main tasks – analyzing the author’s reflections and tracing the realized and unrealized intentions in concrete works.
 The central thesis of Soroka is that literature should mirror life. He uses theological reasoning to explain the mirror reflection in fiction (because God creates human fates, he is the best artist, so the goal of literature is not to make-believe but to reflect what God intended). We interpret this thesis and conclude that the author eliminates the main components of fictionality – the make-believe and the filling with meaning. He finds some fictionality in the representation of characters, the depiction of the current time, and the mastery of retelling. But we state that all these fictional components have lost their status because, these days, they are the constituents of nonfictional genres or texts in nonfictional spheres. The only thing that remains when it comes to fiction is the genre. The author names his writings «short stories». So the fictionality of «Crumbs» is a consensus between author and reader about the genre of the book. It arises in a receptive context. Soroka’s short stories are like artifacts that occur because of rethinking subjects in an uncharacteristic, changed context. In this sense, they are contemporary art phenomena.
 These conclusions about «Crumbs» may become a basis for researching the other writings by Petro Soroka and the short stories of other Ukrainian writers.

From Freedom Dreams to Boomer Nostalgia

During the 1980s, media images of white boomer nostalgia were often accompanied by 1960s Motown songs due to the popularity of the hit film The Big Chill as well as advertising and licensing strategies inspired by it. In previous decades, however, Motown was used to dramatize onscreen representations of Black male film characters’ emotional experiences of aspiration and resilience. This article explores how 1960s Motown songs came to be employed in two motion pictures—Nothing But a Man and Cooley High—to represent particular notions of everyday Black life, and then provides an industrial backdrop for why such cinematic uses of Motown came to effectively be replaced by invocations of white nostalgia. By analyzing the uses of Motown music within film narratives and the industrial conditions through which such licensing took place, this study goes beyond the formal analysis of film music in order to demonstrate how the act of licensing popular songs for film participates in the making of songs’ social, cultural, and political meanings. In so doing, this article shows how the material conditions of licensing music for film shape what and whose experiences of popular music are able to be represented onscreen.

Everything’s Gonna Be Kinda Queer: Autistic Gender & Sexuality in <i>Everything’s Gonna Be Okay</i>

This paper analyzes the representations of autistic characters in the television show Everything’s Gonna Be Okay in relation to gender and sexuality. In contrast to previous screen representations, the four autistic characters provide a variety of gender expressions and sexual orientations, challenging the stereotypes that perpetuate the idea of autism being limited to heterosexual men. Issues explored include attitudes toward autistic sexual consent and agency, sexual experimentation, and the impacts of communication norms on romantic relationships.

Bonnets, braids, and big afros: the politics of Black characters’ hair

ABSTRACT The representations of a Black woman character’s hair say something about her. The hair of a Black character is never neutral and nuances of hair are noticed by Black woman audience members. In my research interviewing 103 Black women about the representations of Black women in the shows/films they consumed, 12% of the participants discussed the politics of Black women’s hair as a marker of authentic representation. This article analyzes contemporary representations of hair in shows primarily directed/produced by Black women, arguing that representations of Black women’s hair can be empowering to Black women audience members. Hair styles, rituals, and the bonding over hair in shows and films are important. Even if these on-screen hair moments seem fleeting and unimportant, they are significant in that they affirm and celebrate the beauty, the connection, the love between and among Black women and their experiences. This article weaves interview excerpts into an analysis of Black women characters in contemporary film/series, making the argument that when Black women are behind the camera, Black girl’s/women’s hair represents power and pride through natural/Afrocentric styles and these representations matter to the audience.

Erotizing Nabokov’s Lolita in Arabic: How Translation Strategies Shift Themes and Characterization of Literary Works

Abstract Given the conservative nature of Arab societies, Vladimir Nabokov’s English novel Lolita (1955) poses considerable challenges to Arab translators because of its pornographic nature and controversial themes: pedophilia, incest, and young teenage sex. This study mainly examines the translation of Lolita by Mola with occasional references to Jubaili’s translation of the novel. It also investigates the translation strategies employed by the two translators. The findings showed that Jubaili followed the literal approach of translation with no significant deviation from the novel’s themes and characterization. On the other hand, Mola dysphemized the expressions and eroticized the events, which were more euphemistic in the original. Mola’s utilization of some translation strategies such as omission, addition, and substitution affected the representation of the main characters, namely, Humbert (stepfather) and Lolita (stepdaughter), by shifting their roles as victim and victimizer, making Humbert’s actions less culpable, and removing any traces of Lolita’s innocence. In so doing, Mola reinforces sexual norms for young American women and diminishes the pedophile/incest angle. This study is significant, particularly within the context of translators’ training and for those interested in literary translation.

Powers of commutators

Any element of a finite group that generates the same cyclic subgroup as some commutator, is itself a commutator. The paper presents a completely elementary proof of this fact, whereas previous proofs depend on character theory.

Does the English Textbook for Young Learners in Indonesia Promote Gender Equality?

Education is a critical area in promoting gender equality to the young generation of this country. The curriculum that promotes gender equality could be represented in a textbook as a teaching material resource commonly used in Indonesia. This study is a critical discourse analysis that examines the gender representation in the English textbook for the third grade of primary school in order to discover whether or not the textbook promotes gender equality. The data were collected from “Grow With English” English book 3 published by Erlangga Publisher. The data in the forms of pictures, words, phrases, and sentences were then analyzed qualitatively by using Fairclough’s three dimensional frameworks and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics. The findings revealed that: the examined textbook represents genders equally in terms of the quantity in which females and males are portrayed equally in pictorial representation and names of characters. In terms of social roles of job positions, male and female are also portrayed occupying various professional occupations such as doctors, fire fighters, police officers, and so on. However, the portrayals of male and female in domestic roles and activities are still stereotypical in which females are portrayed doing more domestic activities and less active, while males are portrayed doing more active outdoor activities. These results may have the implication that the English teachers for young learners could improvise by providing more understanding about gender equality while using the textbook.

An Analysis of Black Widow (2021): Marvel’s Most Feminist Film Features Powerful Sisters and an Attenuated Male Gaze

ABSTRACT The representation of superheroines in comic books and comic book movies tend to subscribe to the patriarchal logic of the male gaze, with male subjects looking at women as hypersexualized objects and corporeal spectacles. Black Widow is the most fiercely feminist offering in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to date, featuring young women resisting a powerful, rich, old, white male villain and fighting against his evil design to control the world. There are multiple refreshing developments in this “Phase Four” film from Marvel Studios. Drawing on feminist textual readings of superheroines’ depictions in comics and cinema, this article (1) engages a shift away from the male gaze and its impact on the representation of strong female characters without the trappings of hypersexualization, and (2) suggests what films like Black Widow can offer regarding notions of what relationships constitute “family” in our society.