Critical Circle Research Articles

Perspectives on Practice: Counter-Storytelling with Front Desk: Critical Literature Circles in the Elementary Classroom

Grounded in counter-storytelling and AsianCrit, this essay describes the authors’ experience hosting a teacher workshop on facilitating critical literature circles with elementary students.

The Obstacles Encountered by Immigrants and their Cultural Assimilation in Bharathi Mukherjee’s Short Story “A Wife’s Story”

While replacing to a new country can be a wonderful experience, there are many challenges and adjustments required. Language barriers, cultural adjustment, job opportunities, education access, financial instability, and lack of family support are a few of these. Migration often causes conflict when cultures clash. However, migration has many positive cultural effects on both the migrants and the local population in the areas where they settle. Migration is a double-edged sword for migrants. Whether or not they choose to migrate, they are unlikely to wish to lose their culture. When immigrants to the US move out of ethnic communities and into more broadly defined “American” spaces, they could try to put their memories of their home countries behind them in favour of “becoming American.” In the past, they discovered that assimilation aided in their access to homes, employment, education, and other resources.“A Wife’s Story” was included in Bharati Mukherjee’s 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award-winning The Middleman and Other Stories. Since then, it has been included in several feminist and international literary anthologies featuring short fiction. Like many of Mukherjee’s writings, the story explores the nuanced and frequently contradictory experiences of South Asian immigrants adjusting to life in the United States. It also covers how other immigrant groups and Americans, some of whom have only been in the country for a generation or two, have reacted to these South Asians, who Mukherjee refers to as “the new pioneers.”The short story “A Wife’s Story” centres on the experiences of an immigrant Indian woman to the United States. The story is told from Panna’s point of view, which is the protagonist and faces difficulties promoting into a new culture and evolving as a person. Examining the intricacies of identity, marriage, and adaptation, this is a gripping account of the cultural and personal changes that an Indian woman in the US went through.

Is “Taiwan” a psychoanalytic creation?

ABSTRACT The rise of Taiwanese nationalism in the late 1980s and early 1990s that rapidly, radically, but “peacefully” replaced Chinese nationalism to become the hegemonic discourse in two decades is a political “miracle.” My paper argues that this compressed political transformation would not have been possible without the help of psychoanalytic discourse mediated by critical theory in the activist and critical intellectual circles. In the context of the (post-) Cold War era, there was a peculiar form of decolonization equated with de-Sinicization. At stake is a translational concept that itself becomes untranslatable: zhu-ti-xing, the Chinese word for subjectivity. By analyzing the conflicts within the Chinese-speaking activists and intellectuals in the United States and in Taiwan, I will demonstrate in this paper the ways in which the Lacanian idea of the subject as having a lack becomes a critical tool for the advocates for the independence of Taiwan to break through the existing discursive inertia and to effectively make Taiwan a nation without essence, a nation of zhu-ti-xing/subjectivity, and to facilitate the fitting of this new hegemony into the ideology of Pax Americana.

Making realism work, from second wave feminism to extinction rebellion: an interview with Caroline New

ABSTRACT Caroline New is an energetic activist who has interpolated critical realist ideas into the front-line of political activism. In this wide-ranging interview, she begins by reflecting on her life and how she became a realist and her account is illustrated with personal anecdotes recalling memories of well-known philosophers and activists from the time. She discusses how her position set her apart from other feminists and she examines the interacting threads of longstanding debates on the political left, as well as longstanding debates within critical realist circles, such as the relative importance of quantitative methods in social research and the scope for agency as a source of intentional change. Finally she brings some of her ideas to bear on contemporary issues. This engaging interview notably provides some of the social context in which critical realism developed, while also pointing towards its future potential.

Mapping Our Nursing Essence: A Tattooed Imprint of the Struggle Between Desire and Reality

A plural research design, critical hermeneutic circle, and body mapping informed the qualitative study to understand the aesthetic visible tensions that imprint on the novice nurse. Specifically, of interest was the intersection between what a nurse desires to do and what they are able to do in their practice as the underlying tension. The life-sized body maps provided a view of the inner world of six body maps with themes including duality, powerlessness, embodiment, lifeforce, and identity. Caring discourse to create shared meaning-making occurred as a community to acquire new insights into influences on one’s practice. Caring sciences theory and language informed the research design, facilitated the development of the community, and provided novel knowledge to expand the nursing profession.

Gender Power Dynamics: Male Marginalization in the Works of John Nkemngong Nkengasong

Contrary to the general tendency in critical literary circles which, since the rise of feminism and gender studies, has interrogated the female condition under the yoke of patriarchy, this paper examines the extent to which the female gender dominates and marginalizes the male gender (in patriarchal societies) thereby creating the necessity to (re)exam­ine feminine power and the way it operates socially and sexually. Using ideas from Chinweizu (1990) as theoretical positions for the analysis of selected works by the Cameroonian scholar, novelist, playwright and poet, John Nkemngong Nkengasong, this paper investigates the power dynamics amongst female and male gender from two perspectives: the manipulation of male instinct and the exploitation of male inadequacies. It shows that in the selected works of Nkengsaong the females control power that formally belong men to the extent that power becomes not just a mechanism for getting what they want but also for making males to feel insignificant, irrelevant, and helpless.

A Critical Hermeneutic Circle to Reimagine Professional Selfhood

Professional selfhood (PSH) is the embodiment of an individual’s social location influenced by being in and with the world. PSH informs our evolving professional journey as nurses. As our journeys are never singular, community formation to support this evolution is vital. Utilizing body mapping as an aesthetic methodology was enhanced through reflexivity situated in a critical hermeneutic circle. The phenomenon of interest in the original research study of six novice nurses was how the tension between what they desire to do and what they were able to do, lived in and on their bodies. This is our story, as a community of artists and researchers, who were inspired by a Critical Hermeneutic Circle the ongoing nurturance to enter this brave space to re-imagine our evolving PSH.

On Death of a Salesman from the Perspective of Cultural Genes Interpretation of "American Dream"

Arthur miller (1915-2005), as the most outstanding master of drama in the United States and known as the "conscience of American drama", accurately depicted the post-war real society in the United States and the changes in social values. In 1949, Miller wrote the Death of a salesman, which became the peak of his drama creation and won the Pulitzer prize and the New York theatre critics circle award. The play tells the story of the United States in the turbulent social background of the 1940s, the protagonist Willy Loman's dream and the collapse of the whole family. By means of the combination of realism and expressionism, the drama reproduces the changes of social values and the sadness of the little people. In previous studies, most scholars focused on the disillusionment of the "American dream" of the minor characters in the drama, and took the deterioration of the "American dream" and the change of values in American society as the starting point. However, it may be difficult to understand Arthur Miller's interpretation of the "American dream" in the play without tracing the root of the "American dream" and exploring the deep cultural genes of the United States. This paper aims to analyse Arthur Miller's contradictory writings on the American dream in Death of a salesman from the perspective of meme.

Circling around Remembrance: A Conversation with Dorthe Nors

Circling around RemembranceA Conversation with Dorthe Nors Kathryn Savage (bio) CELEBRATED Danish writer Dorthe Nors's first nonfiction book, A Line in the World, translated by Caroline Waight, is a stunning work that documents a year she spent traveling along the North Sea coast of Denmark, moving from Skagen to the Wadden Sea. "Wandering Houses," from Nors's collection of fourteen essays, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was published in the September 2022 issue of World Literature Today. Nors is the author of the story collections Wild Swims and Karate Chop, two novellas, and four novels, including Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize. In her most recent book, her spare and stunning prose depicts the harsh Jutland Peninsula with immediacy, as she moves between the past and the present to record a nuanced and layered place. This work is as much about the external world as it is an exploration of inner weather and personal memory, and the result is an expansive and intimate archive of movement and belonging. Kathryn Savage: In your essay "The Tracks around Bulbjerg," you write, "The landscape is an archive of memory." What did you mean by this line? Dorthe Nors: I wrote A Line in the World in one year. One of the first things I noticed when I traveled in this landscape, which I've known my entire life, was that episodic memory was stored in the places I went. You see, that's how we work: we remember things when we reenter places we used to live in or travel through. Visit your childhood school, for instance, and I'm certain that an episodic memory that you've not been in touch with for ages will emerge from "the archive." The famous Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen, who traveled a lot, said: "To travel is to live." I changed that phrase a bit in A Line in the World: "To travel is to remember." Savage: You write both fiction and nonfiction. Would you describe the relationship between form and content in your own work? Nors: I want to write in all kinds of forms. I couldn't imagine spending my entire life as a writer who only writes novels, for instance. I love language. I love the things it can pick up on, describe, dig into. I treat my language as if it was an instrument; a cellist didn't become good at playing the cello without rehearsing every day and challenging themselves. The same with language for me. I want my instrument to really develop and grow, as a linguistic art, so I change forms. And while it's true that A Line in the World is composed of fourteen essays, I prefer to call them chapters since the book turned out to feel like one continuous essay to me. Savage: I once heard you describe writing a short story like standing on a stage and singing without stopping, You must be there! Do you think the essay form asks something different from the writer? Nors: I think that there will be elements of the intensity and the "in situ" presence of the short story in both the novel and the essay, as writing forms. The difference between novels and short stories is of course the length and the way intensity varies in the novel. A Line in the World has both novel and short-story qualities, but the difficulty here was that facts and nonfictive information—about landscape, places, local history—had to be embedded in the prose. That was quite a challenge. Essays tend to be didactic and lean toward an urge to educate the reader, and I don't like didactic information, [End Page 10] preaching, etc., being mixed up in my literature. I worked hard to figure out how to solve that problem. You could say that A Line in the World is a fusion of three forms—novel, short story, and essay—without completely being any of them. Click for larger view View full resolution Savage: Across prose forms, how do you balance the ideas that drive your work with the scenes and people themselves? Nors...

Realization of a graph as the Reeb graph of a height function on an embedded surface

We show that for a given finite graph $G$ without loop edges and isolated vertices, there exists an embedding of a closed orientable surface in $\mathbb{R}^3$ such that the Reeb graph of the associated height function has the structure of $G$. In particular, this gives a positive answer to the corresponding question posed by Masumoto and Saeki in 2011. We also give a criterion for a given surface to admit such a realization of a given graph, and study the problem in the class of Morse functions and in the class of round Morse-Bott functions. In the case of realization up to homeomorphism, the height function can be chosen Morse-Bott; we estimate from below the number of its critical circles and the number of its isolated critical points in terms of the graph structure.

Ofeimun and the Nigerian Polis: Lithomancy as Agency

What establishes Odia Ofeimun‟s reputation for public intellectualism is his oft-polemic versification, appreciated in critical circles as the fulcrum for his commentaries on the Nigerian polity. Ofeimun‟s anthology chosen for the present study is I will ask questions with stones if they take my voice (2014 [2008]). The study seeks to underscore fresh vistas for the interpretation of his concerns about the Nigerian polis, powered particularly by the figurative agency of lithomancy. Ofeimun‟s lyricism is thus approached from the reconstruction of the anthology‟s title as an inquest by stone, and as divinatory parables on the abject Nigerian condition. Selected poems in the anthology that are intimate with such construal will be interpreted as divination monologues excreting the people‟s deprivations, as presented by poet and poet-persona. The objective here is to critique the import of Ofeimun‟s poetic praxis on the Nigerian national consciousness with the selected anthology. However, this will be pursued by rendering lithomancy as a distinctive enterprise of citizen activism, as a strategy of negotiating the abject, and as a trope that junctures off the typical reading of Ofeimun in the radical breath.

A ficção científica: o enunciador hiperperceptivo e a viagem do ponto de vista na referenciação

ABSTRACT Science fiction is a literary genre that has spread around the world due, among other reasons, to its popularity; narratives contain exotic characters and fantastic intrigue. It is considered by the circle of scholars and critics, however, a “minor” literature; for discourse linguists, its aesthetic attributes remain in the background. The theory of points of view (POV), for example, can contribute to a better assessment of the genre. This article aims to study this literary genre via enunciation. First, we talk about studies in narratology to delimit the place of science fiction (or sf) in the universe of narratives. Secondly, we talk about concepts and notations from POV theory within narratological studies to trigger a dialogical analysis of literary discourse. Thirdly, we analyze a fragment from Dune, by Frank Herbert, in its version into Brazilian Portuguese (2017). Finally, we propose that “superpowers” held by characters in this genre can be explained linguistically.

'Critical circle of fundoplication' - A key concept towards creating identical, replicable and consistent fundoplication wraps.

There is a significant learning curve associated with laparoscopic Nissen's fundoplication, during which, complications due to surgical errors are more likely to occur. Moreover, length of the wrap, its situation on the lower esophagus and the points of the fundus brought together to create the wrap are arbitrary and as per the surgeon's judgement and estimation. This leads to a lot of variation in the wraps created, not only from surgeon to surgeon, but also from case to case for each individual surgeon. We propose a new concept of 'Critical Circle of Fundoplication' and the new approach to construct the fundoplication based on this concept, by application of which, a mathematically precise fundoplication can be created which is consistent, accurate and optimum. A total of 132 patients were operated based on the concept of 'Critical Circle of Fundoplication' between 2015 and 2020, of which 116 patients completed one year of follow-up and are included in the paper. The demographic characteristics, intraoperative findings and postoperative are described in detail. An additional average time of 10.5 minutes (range: 8-26 minutes) was required in the precise measurements and markings that were required by this approach. By application of the concept of 'Critical Circle of Fundoplication', precise, consistent and optimum wraps can be created. By eliminating the errors of structural construction and placement of the wrap, overall results can be improved.

From Politics of Location to Its De-politicization in One Man’s Bible by Gao Xingjian

Abstract Drawing on the Deleuzian theory of de-territorialization of the subject from the center of power, this article picks up the controversy regarding Gao Xingjian’s misogyny with reference to his second novel One Man’s Bible and presents an alternative perspective on his gender treatment. With the help of textual analysis, it contends that far from being anti-feminist as is generally assumed in critical circles, Gao is gender neutral, and allows the same subjective agency to woman as man. Both male and female protagonists in the novel tend to hegemonize each other on the basis of their location in the geo-political or socio-cultural scale of power until each dislocates from his/her power base to undergo a qualitative transformation that changes their world view. It is their minority position which helps them surmount their tendency to hegemonize or minoritize the other and thus to become “minortarian.”

02. Distinguished and Unique Fiction Writer Aziz Ahmed's Intellectual History

Aziz Ahmed is an outstanding fiction writer who holds a unique place in Urdu fiction for his style and contribution. His creative works are adored and appreciated by a wide circle of readers and critics. He pens down the cultural historiography of South Asian Muslims and his grip of writing about the political and social life of this region and Europe is examplary one and holds great significance. This article critically examines, evaluates and analyses his works of Urdu fiction both novels and short stories along with his works related with literary criticism.

Determining the relationship between the slope and directional distribution of the UAV point cloud and the accuracy of various IDW interpolation

Inverse Distance Weighted (IDW) based interpolation method is also widely used in earth science studies. In the classical IDW method, the directional distribution of the reference points around the point to be estimated within the critical circle and the slope differences are not taken into consideration. On the other hand, in the IDW-based method developed by Shepard, the ratio of the distances of the reference points within the critical circle to the critical circle radius (r), the anisotropy and the slope differences are taken into consideration. In this study, the results of the classical IDW method and Shepard method were compared to increase the accuracy of interpolation produced from UAV data. A software has been developed to make these comparisons in more detail. The classical IDW and Shepard based interpolation methods used in this software takes into consideration the anisotropy, the slope differences and the ratio of the distances to the critical circle radius. In this study, UAV flights were performed in three different study areas with different topographic features and 3D point cloud data were obtained in order to make detailed analyzes. Using developed software, data from three different study areas have been tested and the results from different Shepard interpolation models have been discussed. The major contribution of this paper is in evaluation of various IDW options when applied to UAV point data. As a result, especially in geodetic studies form UAV data, it was observed that the results improved with 11% to 37% by using the Shepard method with the suitable power parameter value considering the directional distribution of the reference points in the critical circle and the slope differences.

Some Versions of Pastoral and Related Writings

Some Versions of Pastoral and Related Writings

Eugene Rivers and the responsibility of intellectuals

Eugene Rivers and the responsibility of intellectuals

Double-parameter Hopf bifurcation analysis of a high-speed rail vehicle with an alternative wheel/rail contact approximation

This investigation integrates an alternative fully-parameterized approximation of nonlinear wheel/rail interaction into a simplified vehicle model, and a two-parameter Hopf bifurcation analysis is conducted to reveal the influence of the wheel/rail contact geometry and secondary suspension parameters for high-speed rail vehicles. The bifurcation diagram is compared among the 6 DOFs bogie model, linear and nonlinear 7 DOFs vehicle model, nonlinear 17 DOFs vehicle model, and 3D full DOFs vehicle model. It shows that the nonlinear 7 DOFs vehicle model can meet the requirement of both carbody hunting and bogie hunting simulations. 6 DOFs bogie model can only be used in bogie hunting bifurcation analysis. Linear vehicle model would bring errors in either critical speed or limit circle magnitude. The divergences in the linear terms of rolling radius and contact angle polynomials are significant enough in field operation to cause a noticeable difference in Hopf bifurcation speed. Attention shall be paid to the shape of equivalent conicity and contact angle curve. The crucial parameters to the Hopf bifurcation include the series stiffness and damping coefficient of the yaw damper and the lateral damper damping. However, the requirement of suspension parameters for stability can conflict in carbody hunting and bogie hunting cases.

Citation and Narration as the Nexus of Kristeva’s Theory of Intertextuality

The theory of intertextuality as formulated by French scholar, Julia Kristeva, is much too misunderstood in critical circles. In many instances, the line of thinking is that intertextuality is simply a matter of influence – that is, the influence of one author on another or of one text (book) or more on another book or other books, et cetera. This study, therefore, purposes to understand Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality; and, what is more, to unearth the central meaning of the theory, and the role of culture in the discourses. As a consequence, the full range of the theory, enumerated under these headings: The Novel as an Utterance, the Symbol as Ideologeme, the Sign as Ideologeme, Text Production, Intertextuality: An Analysis of Utterances, are all duly taken into account in this reading. In the end, it is laid bare that indeed the meaning of intertextuality does not in the main reside in the general notion of influence associated with the theory, although influence is implicated in it in principle. Rather, it is uncovered that the thrust of intertextuality is really what Kristeva designates as citation and narration, citation being dialogue and therefore the speech act of the character and narration being writing and hence the speech act of the narrator in the text of the novel.