Critical Writings Research Articles

A Study on a College Writing Course Model Utilizing Public Service Advertisements

This study proposes a column-writing course model that utilizes public service advertisements (PSAs) and aims to elucidate the educational effectiveness and significance of the course through a survey conducted among learners. The study participants consisted of 99 learners enrolled in the course “Media Society and Critical Writing,” which is part of the mandatory liberal arts curriculum, <Critical Thinking and Expression>, at Soongsil University. The course model is designed with the goal of analyzing various social issues presented in PSAs, collaboratively exploring solutions with peers, and ultimately completing a column. The design reflects Bransford et al. (1998) “IDEAL Problem Solving” method, the Engaged Learning<sup>+</sup> approach implemented at Soongsil University, and the core competencies outlined by the World Economic Forum (2023). This paper aims to enhance learners' creative and analytical thinking, facilitate the establishment of social and self-awareness among students through their communication with others, and assist in articulating these insights in a column format. Additionally, a key design goal of this course model is to enable learners to concretely articulate the process of understanding and empathizing with the difficulties of others, which they may not have personally experienced, through the analysis of PSAs. The survey conducted among the learners revealed that this course model significantly contributed to improving their abilities in media text analysis, communication, and writing.

Utilizing a Brain- Based Learning Strategy to Develop Secondary Stage Students' EFL Critical Writing and Self – Regulation.

Utilizing a Brain- Based Learning Strategy to Develop Secondary Stage Students' EFL Critical Writing and Self – Regulation.

Leo Strauss on Plato’s Euthyphro: the 1948 Notebook, with Lectures and Critical Writings, edited by Hannes Kerber and Svetozar Y. Minkov

Leo Strauss on Plato’s Euthyphro: the 1948 Notebook, with Lectures and Critical Writings, edited by Hannes Kerber and Svetozar Y. Minkov

A Polish Patriot in Paris: Albert Sowiński, Essayist, Anthologist and Lexicographer

If there was one musician in mid-nineteenth-century Paris who diligently promoted Polish accomplishments, it was Albert Sowinski (Wojciech Sowiński). From his arrival in France in 1828 until his death in 1880, he championed the Polish cause as a performer, composer and scholar. Sowinski was a prolific writer, but with the exception of his Les musiciens polonais et slaves, anciens et modernes, Dictionnaire (1857), his studies of Polish repertoire rarely receive more than passing attention in modern scholarship. In this essay, I investigate Sowinski’s developing paradigms of Polish nationalism and Polish identity across the entirety of his major writings about and collections of Polish music: Chants polonais nationaux et populaires (1830), Chants de la révolution du 29 novembre 1830 (1830), Mélodies polonaises album lyrique (1833), ‘Chants populaires de l’Ukraine’ (1842), ‘De l’état actuel de la musique en Pologne’ (1842), Dictionnaire (1857) and Chants religieux de la Pologne, Op. 93 (1859). The four works from the 1830s, which focused on Polish folk music and revolutionary songs, were closely tied to Sowinski’s work with Léonard Chodzko (Leonard Chodźko) and his circle in Paris. Especially in the Chants polonais, Sowinski followed Chodzko and Joachim Lelewel in emphasising the exceptional geographic, linguistic and even ethnic diversity of the old Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, viewing this diversity as the basis for a glorious musical and political future. By contrast, in his critical writings of the 1840s, Sowinski interpreted Ukraine’s folk traditions as speaking largely to regional experience; he cast Warsaw and its musical institutions as the basis for a modern Polish musical identity. By the time of his Dictionnaire and Chants religieux de la Pologne, Sowinski de-emphasised Poland’s musical exceptionality in favour of delineating its long tradition of exchange with Western Europe, facilitated particularly through courts and the Roman Catholic Church.

Students’ Learning Needs in Critical Writing: What Do the Teachers Say?

Students’ Learning Needs in Critical Writing: What Do the Teachers Say?

Analysis of Minimal Marking Technique on Student’s Writing Given by Teachers at MAN Kota Baru, Padang Panjang

This research was based on a phenomenon that the students’ writing ability was still low. It was assumed that there were two main factors influencing the students’ writing. One of them was about facilitating the students with appropriate written feedbacks. In line with that, this research was a kind of descriptive study, which was aimed at finding a deep description of the implementation of minimal marking technique given by teachers at MAN Koto Baru Padang Panjang. Participants of the research were all English teachers there. Furthermore, the data were collected by using two instruments, documents and interview. There were two findings of the research. First, almost all of the written feedback items given through the minimal marking technique were provided to help students working on their grammatical mistakes or forms of the writing, it was proven by the percentage that 99.66% of the written feedback items were focused on forms whereas only 0.34% of the written feedback items were focused on contents. Second, the written feedback technique applied by the English teachers was minimal marking technique. It is used since it is effective for teachers, particularly, in the process of giving the feedback which is time-saving. In addition, it also helps the students to be a critical writer because this technique lets the students working on the mistakes they have made.

Rhyme's Contrapuntal History in Early Dryden

Abstract: While John Milton was disavowing "the jingling sound of like endings," John Dryden was cementing a vogue for writing rhymed couplets that would dominate the English literary landscape for the next 150 years. Seeking rhyme's lost links to pleasure and sometimes to transgression, this essay looks closely at Dryden's early considerations of couplet rhyme in his Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668) and related critical writings contemporaneous with Paradise Lost (1667), as well as in a few examples of his early couplet practice in his plays and prologues from this period. My claim is that Dryden's schooling in dramatic couplets at the start of his career shaped his broader thinking about rhyme, opening him to rhyme's residual orality and the dissident energy always nascent in rhyme's sounds. His couplets and criticism from the mid 1660s thus alert us to how rhyme's field of play, perhaps especially in closed forms like the seventeenth-century couplet, tends to be mischievously subversive of any single authority.

Chalk and Cheese? A comparative study of Bessie Head (1937–1986) and Lewis Nkosi (1936–2010)

This article brings together two giants of Southern African literature and criticism for the purposes of comparison, particularly of their experience of the Drum and Golden City Post era, and the immediate aftermath. Bessie Head and Lewis Nkosi, both journalists, first crossed paths in the Johannesburg of what Nkosi called ‘The Fabulous Decade’ of the 1950s; both, in the early 1960s, went into exile – Nkosi to America to take up a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University; and Head to Serowe in Botswana to become a teacher. Both left, after having passports refused, on one-way exit permits which meant they couldn’t return, for the duration of apartheid rule at least. There were, of course, significant differences as well: though both had difficult childhoods, Head’s struggles as a disowned illegitimate foster child were harder than Nkosi’s who at least had some family to support him in his early years; Head’s battle with mental health was not shared by Nkosi, though her dependence on alcohol was. In terms of their long-term reputations, Head was the more acclaimed novelist, while Nkosi’s acclaim was for his critical writings. This article is a preliminary step towards comparatively discussing these two exiled writers whose paths crossed briefly in turbulent personal and political times in South Africa.

An Analysis of Student’s Recount Text: An SFL Approach

This paper reports on the results of a study aiming to investigate the student’s ability to write recount text of a university student in Bandung. The study was conducted using the theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), especially functional grammar, in terms of the Transitivity, Mood and Modality system. The study used a case study on text analysis. A text, which is a recount text written by a higher achiever university student, was analysed using the Transitivity, Mood and Modality system. In terms of the Transitivity system, the result indicates the writer’s adequate syntactic compression and rich lexico-grammatical patterns. Moreover, in terms of the Mood and Modality system, the text shows the writer’s ability to infuse, temper, negotiate, and constrain the experiential meanings in the Mood that is in focus. Hence, the writer is categorized as a mature and critical writer, and the text is appropriate to be used as a model text. Research on text analysis using SFL of different genres of text and how the teaching of writing should be conducted to help improve students’ writing ability is recommended.

James Bond and Modesty Blaise: Comparing Ian Fleming's and Peter O'Donnell's Literary Creations

The creation of Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise strip cartoon (1963–2001) and book series (1965–1996) took place during – and under the undeniable influence of – the "Bondmania" that swept the world in the 1960s. Still, as a strong, independent, and sexually liberated female hero, Modesty Blaise was in many ways quite new to the early 1960s. Regardless of this, however, she was regarded as a “feminine answer to James Bond”, and this view continues to echo in the writings of many contemporary critics and academics. Comparing Ian Fleming’s original Bond stories and O’Donnell’s books, this article will discuss and question the validity of seeing Modesty Blaise and her world as "derivatives" of Bond. The article pays special attention to the similarities and differences in the skillsets, life histories, and personalities of James Bond, Modesty Blaise, and her trusted companion in arms, Willie Garvin. It also explores the nature of the operations that Bond and Blaise and Garvin undertake; the former as an agent of the British Secret Service, the latter two as independently wealthy "freelancers" or "vigilantes". A closely related issue is the way in which the chiefs of British Intelligence, Fleming’s M and O’Donnell’s Sir Gerald Tarrant, are portrayed in and figure into the narratives. Although Fleming’s influence is clearly present in the first Modesty Blaise stories, the article will argue that the Modesty Blaise and James Bond series have many more dissimilarities than similarities and that the former merits increased academic attention in its own right.

Nacionalistični »enfant terrible«

The relentlessly critical writer Fran Levstik, one of the central figures in Slovenian literature and politics in the decades following the March Revolution of 1848, was also one of the intellectuals of his time who suffered most from censorship. His first volume of poetry, Poems (1854), was harshly suppressed for alleged blasphemy, and his militant nationalist articles in the 1860s led to many publishers receiving lawsuits, heavy fines, and even prison sentences. While Levstik’s literary works were never subject to official censorship during his lifetime this eventually happened after his death with the play Tugomer, originally written by Josip Jurčič, but transformed by Levstik into an opus magnum of Slovenian nationalism.

Poetry and Martyrdom Introduced Zubairi in Baradouni and Maqaleh's Critical Writings

Poetry and Martyrdom Introduced Zubairi in Baradouni and Maqaleh's Critical Writings

By What Jurisdiction? Law, Settler Colonialism, and the Geographical Assumptions of IR Theory

Abstract In this article, I consider critical writings on territory in International Relations, focusing on recent work on U.S. practices of extraterritorial jurisdiction. I suggest that, while such work has importantly traced the multiple ways in which U.S. authority often exceeds the supposed territorial boundaries of the United States, it has nonetheless failed to reckon with the contested and uneven nature of U.S. authority within such supposed boundaries. In particular, IR scholarship has failed to engage with the ways in which U.S. authority has been, and continued to be, contested by Indigenous people and nations. This failure is the product of an assumption that lies at the heart of the discipline—the assumption that Indigenous people are internal to colonizing or settler states. I suggest that the internalization of Indigenous people and Indigenous political organization that is at play in much IR scholarship is not simply a product of a generalized “state-centrism” or a product of histories of settler colonialism, writ large. Rather, at the heart of the territorial assignations and allotments of IR scholarship are assumptions about legal authority or jurisdiction—about who has jurisdiction to define and assign land, about who does not, and what law means at all. Critiquing these assumptions and their political implications, I show the importance of asking: “by what jurisdiction”? That is, what is the legal authority that we implicitly accept and assert when we designate territory in particular ways? The question insists that there are multiple laws (including multiple international laws) at play in global politics and opens up space for critical and postcolonial IR scholars to better take responsibility for their (often implicit) choices between multiple laws.

Incriminated writers and their wives: Gendered memory of a national campaign in Mao’s China

The primary source of this study is 76 video interviews concerning a political campaign by the Chinese Communist Party: the Anti-Hu Feng Counter-revolutionary Clique Movement (1955–1956). This campaign and the long incrimination of its central figures—Hu Feng (1902–1985), his wife Mei Zhi (1914–2004), and other associates—have had an impact on Chinese intellectuals for nearly seven decades and generated hundreds of (auto)biographies, memoirs, critical writings, and scholarly studies since the 1980s. Victimized writers managed to publish again, but the stories of their wives remained obscured and marginalized for years. This article presents three research findings: first, the wives provide different but equally essential testimonies as do the writers; second, methods used by feminist historians can benefit oral history collection from all, but from women and the marginalized in particular; and third, gendered memory helps to bridge the gap between those who have and have not personally experienced specific historical events.

Alfred Andersch, the Cinéma des Auteurs, and the Poetics of Screenwriting

This essay presents a little-known chapter in the film history of the Federal Republic of Germany. Alfred Andersch, founding member of Gruppe 47 and influential broadcast editor, was one of the few authors who was intensively involved with film. The essay reconstructs Andersch’s attempt to associate film and literature and thereby develop an alternative concept to the European cinéma des auteurs. To this end, the essay discusses not only Andersch’s critical writings but also a number of documents from his estate. Andersch’s film theory is evaluated in light of the contemporary literary debate on the medium. His screenplays for the adaptations of his novels Die Rote and Die Entwaffnung are used to examine the conclusions Andersch drew regarding film aesthetics in his own poetics of screenwriting. In sum, the essay reconstructs Andersch’s attempt at a literary response to the crisis of West German film around 1960.

Dalle prime attestazioni al persistere di alcuni (pre)giudizi su una lingua e una modernità incomprese

Some of the first reviews of and critical writings on Grazia Deledda’s works can help us realise how long prejudices about Deledda and her writing have persisted. The prejudiced dismissal of her ‘bad’ Italian generated the cliché notion that her works notably improved in translation. This was perhaps one reason why Deledda seems to have longer enjoyed greater critical acclaim and more popularity with readers abroad than in Italy. Only recently have some young Italian (and non-Sardinian) scholars begun to study Deledda, while in Sardinia there has been new, robust research on her, illuminating all her precocious modernity. This modern approach was little understood in the 20th century and above all was denounced by the gossipy, envious, and misogynistic literary world, which Deledda herself depicted in some of her novels and short stories. While Pirandello’s novel Suo marito tends to be cited as possibly responsible for spreading negative judgments about Deledda, those who have not read her Nostalgie (1905) will not grasp how much this book may have suggested or reinforced Pirandello’s own ironic and negative representation of that same mediocre and limited literary world in his novel. More generally, to appreciate Deledda, one must read all her works, rather than only those set in Sardinia.

Das Schöne in der kritisch-philosophischen Poetik Ingeborg Bachmanns

The paper aims to reconstruct Bachmann’s most important poetological principles on the basis of her critical writings and the Frankfurt lectures. In doing so, the concept of beauty, which is constitutive for her understanding of literature and language, comes into focus. An interpretation of this concept from the perspective of existential philosophy makes it possible to combine questions of literary theory related to contemporary poetics on the one hand, and philosophical questions related to personal authenticity (and hence identity) and to the justification of the author’s existence on the other, and thus to advance to Bachmann’s poetological credo.

Analysis of Individual Behavior Through a Psychoanalytical Approach: A Literature Review

This literature review explores the analysis of individual behavior using a psychoanalytical approach, focusing on critical writings that elaborate on the concepts proposed by Sigmund Freud and related thinkers. Through synthesis and analysis of various articles, this research aims to provide an in-depth understanding of how the psychoanalytical approach is employed to delve into the complexity of individual behavior. The findings of this literature review reveal the evolution of psychoanalytical concepts from Freudian theory to contemporary contributions in psychology. There is a detailed exploration of how the id, Ego, and superego play crucial roles in shaping individual behavior. Additionally, the study highlights the use of the psychoanalytical approach in addressing aspects such as internal conflicts, defense mechanisms, and the impact of past experiences. In the context of the literature review, it is evident that the analysis of individual behavior through the psychoanalytical approach provides profound insights into psychological aspects and significantly contributes to understanding the variations in human behavior. This review presents a comprehensive overview of the development of psychoanalytical theory and how this approach continues to be relevant in understanding individual behavior. The practical implications of this review are also discussed, emphasizing its relevance in clinical settings, education, and personal development

The Dialogic, Unfinalizable, and Heteroglossic in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954): A Bakhtinian Reading

As a persistently profound source of inspiring ideas, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) continues to attract researchers with novel concepts and notions to be addressed. Whenever researchers seem to have exhausted the text in critical writings and used up its possible subjects, the novel’s supply of ever fresher and more original ideas seems to keep flowing. Therefore, the current research study intends to examine certain concepts such as dialogism, unfinalizability and heteroglossia in Lord of the Flies from a Bakhtinian perspective, which is a new approach to the novel. No research study before this one has—to the best knowledge of the researcher—addressed Lord of the Flies or these concepts from such an angle. As the title suggests, the present study explores the concepts mentioned earlier by examining the diversity, difference, and variety of characters in the novel, their views and ideas on numerous issues such as leadership, survival, rescue, fire, hunting, masking and the like. It employs Bakhtin’s views and theorizations as a theoretical reference outline for its main argument. The analysis of the paper will address the diversity, variety and multiplicity of different views, plural opinions, and assorted narrative voices as demonstrated by the novel’s characters to show their dialogic, unfinalizable and heteroglossic nature.

Writing “INFINITYLOOPS”

Transmigration refers to movements made across, between, through, or beyond spatial, spiritual, and bodily boundaries—motions to which queer and trans studies scholars have long imputed important political and social valences. This essay tracks the many transmigrations of the silkworm Bombyx mori, the source of commercial silk, through an archive of literary and critical writings by W. G. Sebald, Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Jen Bervin. The author pays special attention to the trans-migration silkworms make through their own bodies, or metamorphosis, thus opening the way to a less anthropocentric account of transmigratory processes. This essay shows how silkworms and silk cross and recross the constructed lines dividing East and West, matter and language, natural and synthetic. In doing so, silkworms enter a broader collective of trans-migrating bodies in which certain bodies are granted free movement at the expense of other, often racialized, queer, or animal bodies. The author argues that the embodied, quotidian metamorphosis of the silkworm exemplifies an alternative mode of trans-migration that refuses transcendence and instead ties us, by silken threads, to the vicissitudes of the present moment.