Modern Discourse Research Articles

Literary Modernism and Literary Modernity in the Middle East

ABSTRACT This article puts Alexander Jabbari’s The Making of Persianate Modernity in conversation with Levi Thompson’s Reorienting Modernism in Arabic and Persian Poetry to explore the relationship between literary modernism and literary modernity in non-Western literary contexts. It highlights the authors’ parallel theoretical engagements of Michel Foucault’s “attitude of modernity” and modernists’ and modernizers’ reworkings of literary heritage through the sublation of premodern literary content and form into modern conceptions of literary history. Drawing on these parallels, the article reviews several points of convergence in contemporary Arabic literary historical analysis that limn Jabbari’s approach to the Persianate world, which crosses between Persian and Urdu, the naskh and nastaʿlīq scripts, and Iran and India. It seeks out connections in the work and thought of Jabbari’s interlocutors, such as Muḥammad-Taqī Bahār and N. M. Rashed; Iranian modernist poets Nīmā Yūshīj, Aḥmad Shāmlū, and Furūgh Farrukhzād; and the Arab “free verse” (shiʿr ḥurr) poets such as ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī and Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb. The article highlights how Jabbari’s book proves that literary historians in the Persianate world were subject to modernization discourse in making themselves modern and therefore covered up aspects of their premodern heritage that did not fit their modernizing projects.

Reclaiming Desire and Defying Conventions: An Analysis of Female Sexuality in Mrs Dalloway and the God of Small Things

The paper offers a detailed analysis of the complexities of female sexuality in Mrs Dalloway and The God of Small Things from a feminist perspective. It investigates how female protagonists overcome and defy societal norms and expectations concerning their sexual desires. The obstacles of conventional sexual norms align with the ‘repressive hypothesis’, coined by Michele Foucault in The History of Sexuality which posits that the modern discourse on sexuality is characterized by repression. This theory is used to depict how societal repression shapes and is shaped by the narratives of Clarissa and Ammu. The paper is qualitative and uses close textual analysis as an analytical tool. For the study, primary data were collected from textbooks, and secondary sources including various books, websites, articles, and journals were used to gather secondary data. The clear finding is that Clarissa has a sexual desire for Sally which is not accepted by post world war British society and Ammu, being a divorcee and upper-class woman, reclaims her sexual agency and attempts to fulfill her sexual desire by making a romantic relationship with Velutha which is prohibited in the post-colonial Indian society. Through the blending of sexual desires with more general societal issues like race, class, and cultural identities, both novels deconstructed conventional depictions of female sexuality. Thus, the study contributes to the ongoing conversation on the role of women’s sexual desires and their place in a postmodern world where autonomy, self-expression, and the deconstruction of conventional norms are of paramount importance.

Research on the Application of Information Visualization Design Based on the Three-level Theory of Emotions

As society progresses, environmental challenges have emerged as a central concern in modern discourse. The degradation of ecosystems has led to the endangerment and extinction of numerous plant species. Moreover, the overwhelming influx of information available to individuals often hampers their understanding of the significance of these endangered species. Conventional written narratives are frequently inadequate in fulfilling the audience’s informational needs. As a nascent medium for scientific communication, information visualization presents an innovative and effective approach for individuals to swiftly acquire and interpret data. This paper concentrates on the endangered aquatic flora within the South China Botanical Garden, grounded in a three-tiered emotional theory framework. Strategies are developed across instinctual, behavioral, and reflective dimensions. The outlined strategic goals aim to elevate design aesthetic literacy, broaden cognitive processing capability, and enhance the efficiency of information dissemination. By employing endangered aquatic plants as a focal point for design initiatives in the South China Botanical Garden and integrating it with the theoretical framework, the objective is to present information regarding these vulnerable species in a more direct, inventive, and concise manner. This methodology aspires to raise public awareness surrounding the conservation of endangered plant life.

The politics of the anti-politics machine of agricultural commercialization: Uganda and Tanzania in the Longue Durée

ABSTRACT Powered by global financial institutions, philanthrocapitalists and development agencies, agricultural commercialization is once again at the forefront of development discourse and policies, especially since the late 2000s. The cornerstone of this development approach is that by investing in raising agricultural productivity, supporting infrastructure, and introducing climate-smart agricultural systems, with private sector investments all along the food value chain, Africa will transform into a breadbasket for the world. In the last decade, Uganda and Tanzania have enthusiastically embraced agricultural modernization discourses, becoming test beds of new ‘frontier’ blueprints: ‘responsible’ agricultural commercialization projects, ‘inclusive’ business models and ‘sustainable’ contract farming schemes. This paper takes issue with the de-politicizing discourse of the value chain paradigm by exploring diachronically the genealogies of agricultural commercialization in Uganda and Tanzania from colonial times, across post-independence state-led modernizations, to the present neoliberal reforms. It argues that mainstream development narratives tagged to commercialization projects have worked as an ‘anti-politics machine’ making invisible to the public eye the widespread land dispossession, rural pauperization and social conflicts it entails.

Thinking with the Girls with Burning Hinder Parts: Process, Revision, and Uncertainty in Djuna Barnes's Ladies Almanack

Abstract: Whereas Djuna Barnes's use of early modern discourses in Ladies Almanack has generally been read as a critique of sexology and psychoanalysis, I argue that her use of this cross-temporal knowledge is a part of a cacophonous, contradictory, plastic, and process-oriented understanding of embodied gender, reproduction, and queer desire. She "thinks out loud" about how women can have sex in the wake of centuries of (male) authors trying to make sense of women's sexual desires. In so doing, Barnes defies twentieth-century assumptions of how knowledge happens and what knowledge should do, and instead privileges thinking over knowing.

THE CONCEPT OF “THE POLITICAL”: CONTENT, SCOPE, FUNCTIONS

Politics, state, government, bureaucracy, law, etc. as institutions, war, revolution, elections, lawmaking, etc. as processes, sociological polling, collection, storage, presentation and dissemination of information, digitalization, lobbying, corruption, etc. as technologies are hyponyms, that is, concepts expressing a private essence in relation to another, more general concept - hyperonym. Such a common concept for them is political. And a deep understanding of its meaning and content is the initial condition for their scientific research. Today, society has not developed a socially significant and generally accepted understanding of the political. In modern discourse, it has a fairly broad interpretation, characterized by multivariance and ambiguity. At the same time, its meaning and content are often deliberately and purposefully distorted and distorted. On this basis, they sometimes talk about politics as an extremely contradictory concept. The article presents an experience of operationalization of the concept of “political”. It offers the author’s definition of the political, reveals its originality, its relationship with politics and its role in understanding and describing the sphere of politics. An attempt is made to identify criteria of politicality, to reveal the content, scope and functions of the title concept.

Colonial Island Enclave and Discourses of Urban Modernization in Guangzhou, China

This article traces Guangzhou’s urban modernization in the late-Qing and early-Republican eras, with an emphasis on official and public discourses. Focus is placed on interactions between the colonial island enclave of Shamian, separated from the mainland by the Shaji Canal, and the Changdi waterfront that was built on the mainland as a Chinese reaction to the foreign island. Shamian and its Bund exhibited a Western urban modernity that prompted both admiration and anticolonial sentiment in the wider Chinese community. Guangzhou’s government reacted to developments on Shamian by constructing Changdi as a modern waterfront district on the north shore of the Pearl River, opposite Shamian. Discourses of urban modernization evolved and underwent cross-cultural exchange throughout. This article takes an island studies approach to analyze the spatial and discursive coproduction of the geographically restricted nearshore island as a colonial enclave and the vast Chinese mainland city striving for self-determination and urban modernization.

Macro-structures framing language policy in Morocco: Which discourse? Whose discourse?

Today, the power of discourse is incontestable. Within the field of language policy and planning (LPP), language policy (LP) has been conceptualized in various ways. One paradigm-shifting conceptualization is viewing LP as discourse. The discursive power of language policies is quite real as it can be contested in official state discourses about language and language-related issues. This paper employs corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis to examine the macro-discourses of crisis, quality, equity, equality, and change in Morocco’s language policy. The study scrutinizes these discourses and explores their “manipulative” use in official policy texts. It contends that these macro-discourses are strategically used to rationalize the spread and strengthening of foreign languages to the detriment of national ones. Specifically, the analysis shows that crisis discourse serves as a powerful strategy to legitimize change and create a sense of urgency that often sidelines crucial questions about the nature and beneficiaries of the proposed changes. Furthermore, the discourse of quality ties educational “quality” to the mastery of foreign languages. Likewise, renovation and modernization discourses are found to align systematically with the promotion of these languages. Also, the rhetoric of equity in language-in-education policy appears to justify biased decisions that favour foreign language instruction, risking the perpetuation and exacerbation of existing educational inequities. Consequently, this study implies that more attention should be paid to the intricate dynamics of language policy, especially its discursive power, which could potentially amplify disparities in education systems instead of eliminating them.

The discourses of green modernization and eco-civilizational progress in contemporary China: convergence, tension and mutual learning

“Chinese modernization”, articulated systematically by the working report to the 20th National Congress of Communist Party of China(CPC) in 2022, has been gradually become a worldwide-known popular concept, which emphasizes harmonious coexistence between humanity and nature as one of its “five unique features”. A significant change arisen from it is that, two green theoretical discourses of “eco-civilizational progress” and “green modernization” in contemporary China have historically converged. In the Chinese context, the two discourses can be to a large extent understood as characteristic forms of a more general green discourse. Both the goals or the objectives to be transformed and the dependent environment are common or shared. As self-contained discursive theories, though, there are also noticeable differences and even a certain degree of tension between them. An ideal situation would be that, on the one hand, both of them are consciously put under a broader framework of green discourse theory, from which they can mutually learn and promote from each other, and on the other hand, it is expected that that can better serve China’s practice of building a modern socialist country in all respects.

The Dark Lady’s survival in contemporary Black women’s writing

ABSTRACT This article discusses contemporary literary texts that feature the Dark Lady from Shakespeare’s sonnets as a Black woman from the past inhabiting the present: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), Bernadine Evaristo’s Soul Tourists (2005), and Caroline Randall Williams’s Lucy Negro, Redux (2019). The analysis draws on recent approaches to temporality that offer a critique of linear concepts of time and their function for discourses of progress and modernity as well as ‘race’. Through the figure of the Dark Lady, Smith, Evaristo, and Williams address Black history and project anachronic relations between the early modern era and the present moment, as well as between Shakespeare and the contemporary Black woman writer.

Between History and Phantasmagoria: Critical Nostalgic Lyricism in Alai's Poetry and Short Fiction

In his poetry and fiction, Alai creates a historiography of Eastern Tibet replete with the grandeur and magnificence of the past occasionally interposed with some oppressive cultural practices. It is a historiography motivated and energized by nostalgic lyricism, which helps locate and construct a symbolic Tibetan ethnicity. This article proposes that Alai's nostalgic lyricism critically reflects on the inversion of loss and the compensation of lack, thus articulating alternatives against the discontent of the present. In so doing, Alai formulates a minority position against the forces of deterministic historicism and discourse of linear modernity that have constantly placed the minority subject in modern China under threat of erasure.

Modernity of Women Subject in Eka Kurniawan’ Cantik Itu Luka (2002): A Study of Post-Colonial Feminist Literary Criticism

This study aims to dismantle the narrative of the female subject’s modernity which was built by the author as a representative of a social group or class. In order to achieve this objective, the researchers used qualitative approach, which prioritizes data quality to data size. The data in this study is the novel Cantik Itu Luka by Eka Kurniawan, and other information related to the research topic. Then, the data were analyzed using binary opposition deconstruction and postcolonial feminism theory. Data analysis focuses on the narrative structure of the text and its ideas regarding colonial discourse and the narrative construction of the modernity of female subjects, as well as the author's historical and sociological context in relation to the text. The results show that the construction of the female subject presented in the text Cantik Itu Luka (2002) is a woman who is resistant to the discourse of modernity. In the context of colonial discourse, the female subject is a woman who participates in the rebellion against patriarchal cultural oppression and globalization. The discourse of modernity built by Eka Kurniawan is that women are required to maintain their national identity amidst the commotion of global culture. The construction of the female subject in the text is an ideal formed by male critical intellectual groups to represent and advocate women who have difficulty getting space and position in the social order.

تصورات الفكر الحداثي عن التشريعات الإسلامية للأسرة: دراسة تحليلية مقارنة

This study aims to contribute to the ongoing debate on the perceptions of modernity-related thought concerning family affairs in Islamic legislation. Analyzing the discourse of modernity and the issues raised therein, the researcher attempts to answer the following questions: what effect-if any- does one’s stance on religious heritage have on the study of family-related issues? what are the flaws of the modernists with respect to the family? what are the alternative perceptions that Islam presents concerning family values and legislation? To answer these questions- and to achieve the objective of his study- the researcher has used a descriptive as well as a comparative approach. In conclusion, the study has found that the flaws of the modernist approach, which adopts western secular concepts and values on a universal scale, can be traced back to its rejection of any cultural particularities stemming from religious heritage. That is why it fails to acknowledge or explain the changes witnessed in daily life in Muslim societies. Understandably, an explanation of such changes cannot be reduced exclusively to a material worldview. Identifying some features of such shortcomings, the researcher has referred to the modernists’ rejection of value-based family cohesion, and how they see it as a source of violation to women's rights. Or worse still, they see it as a form of stereotyping the gender roles in line with religious rulings. On the positive side, the study outlined some features of an alternative methodology from within the Islamic worldview- to address the issues of parent education, family upbringing based on dialogue, equality among family members, and women’s freedoms, which modernists usually raise. The study ends by urging researchers to conduct further case studies on a specific country or family institutions. The focus of such works should be on evaluating the content of the modernist discourse in international agreements, and its impact on women and children, on the identity of the family, as well as its functions and characteristics from the perspective of cultural differences among nations.

Being Counted: Family Planning and Aboriginal Population, 1967–75

When the results of the 1966 census came out shortly after the 1967 referendum, they revealed something new: Australia’s Aboriginal population was growing, rapidly. This article examines white fears of an Aboriginal ‘population explosion’ and technocratic attempts to slow Aboriginal population growth during the twilight of assimilation policies and the beginnings of ‘self-determination’. It turns to two projects: one conducted by various government departments in remote communities and another through the Family Planning Association of South Australia and Council of Aboriginal Women. As government intervention in Aboriginal lives shifted from top-down institutional approaches to funding Aboriginal organisations themselves to implement government policies, Aboriginal motherhood nonetheless remained a focus for state interventions. These interventions deployed discourses of liberal individualism, development, cultural restoration, and modernity that ‘cloaked’ objectives of population control.

Force of the Postmodern: The Deconstructive Drive in Jack Amariglio’s Writings

This essay traces the genealogy of the concept of the postmodern in Jack Amariglio’s body of work. It recognizes the collaborative accent of Amariglio’s writing practice and renders visible a field of discourse that has materialized through the network of collaborations that Amariglio, through the concept of the postmodern, has thereby activated. According to Amariglio, the postmodern, as an epistemological rather than ontological concept, is a discursive byproduct of modernist discourses that emerge endogenously from within the latter but always in a relation of heterogeneity toward their native discourses. A key characteristic of Amariglio’s writing has been to highlight these extimate tendencies and trace their consequences on economics as a postmodern discourse. In the spirit of his deconstructive drive, this essay extends his thinking on the postmodern through a number of postmodern moments he has identified, especially in his work with David Ruccio, through the psychoanalytical concept of the uncanny.

A Brutally Honest Jackian Answer

The coeditors of this Festschrift sent three questions to a number of Jack Amariglio’s interlocutors to explore the circumstances in which their paths have crossed with Jack’s and how that encounter has influenced them. In this exchange, P.W. Zuidhof provides an oral history of Amariglio’s encounters and engagements with Arjo Klamer’s circle in the Netherlands and beyond and an assessment of the impact (if not on economics, on his own trajectory) of Amariglio’s work on the postmodern moments as an imminent critique of modern discourses.

Study on the Proximization in the International Publicity Discourse of Chinese-style Modernization

Study on the Proximization in the International Publicity Discourse of Chinese-style Modernization

Tapping the Conversation on the Meaning of Decarbonization: Discourses and Discursive Agency in EU Politics on Low-Carbon Fuels for Maritime Shipping

EU politics on decarbonizing shipping is an argumentative endeavor where different policy actors strive try to influence others to see problems and policy solutions according to their perspectives to gain monopoly on the framing and design of policies. This article critically analyzes, by means of argumentative discourse analysis, the politics and policy process related to the recent adoption of the FuelEU Maritime regulation, the world’s first legislation to set requirements for decarbonizing maritime shipping. Complementing previous research focusing on the roles and agency of policy entrepreneurs and beliefs of advocacy coalitions active in the policy process, this paper dives deeper into the politics of the new legislation. It aims to explore and explain the discursive framing and politics of meaning-making. By analyzing the political and social meaning-making of the concept “decarbonizing maritime shipping”, this paper helps us understand why the legislation was designed in the way it was. Different narratives, storylines and discourses defining different meanings of decarbonization are analyzed. So is the agency of policy actors trying to mutate the different meanings into a new meaning. Two discourses developed in dialectic conversation framed the policy proposals and subsequent debates in the policy process, focusing on (i) incremental change and technology neutrality to meet moderate emission reductions and maintain competitiveness, and (ii) transformative change and technology specificity to meet zero emissions and gain competitiveness and global leadership in the transition towards a hydrogen economy. Policy actors successfully used discursive agency strategies such as multiple functionality and vagueness to navigate between and resolve conflicts between the two discourses. Both discourses are associated with the overarching ecological modernization discourse and failed to include issue of climate justice and a just transition. The heritage of the ecological modernization discourse creates lock-ins for a broader decarbonization discourse, thus stalling a just transition.

Wrapping: an artistic device used in the integration of corporate reporting

PurposeThis study explores the integration of corporate reporting by Mitsubishi, a large Japanese company, using a culturally sensitive narrative that combines and reconciles Japanese and Western corporate values in one story.Design/methodology/approachWe use an analytical framework drawing on insights borrowed from narratology and the notion of wrapping – the traditional art of packaging as communication.FindingsWe find that Mitsubishi is a survivor company that uses different corporate reporting frameworks during its reporting journey to construct a bespoke narrative of its value creation and cultural values. It emplots narratives to convey a story presenting the impression that Mitsubishi is a Japanese corporation but is compatible with Western neo-liberal ideology, making bad news palatable to its stakeholders and instilling confidence in the future.Research limitations/implicationsWrapping is a culturally sensitive form of impression management used in the integration of corporate reporting. Therefore, rather than assuming that companies blatantly manipulate their image in corporate reports, we suggest that future research should focus on how narratives are constructed and made sense of, situating them in the context of local culture and traditions.Practical implicationsThe findings should interest scholars, report preparers, policymakers, and the IFRS, considering the recent release of the IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards designed to reduce the so-called alphabet soup of corporate reporting. By following Mitsubishi’s journey, we learn how and why the notion of integrated reporting was adopted and integrated with other reporting frameworks to create narratives that together convey a story of a global corporation compliant with Western neoliberal ideology. It highlights how Mitsubishi used integrated reporting to tell its story rather than as a rigid reporting framework, and the same fate may apply to the new IFRS Sustainability Reporting Standards that now include integrated reporting.Originality/valueThe study offers a new perspective on corporate reporting, showing how the local societal discourses of cultural heritage and modernity can shape the journey of the integration of corporate reporting over time.

Pathos in Natural Language Argumentation: Emotional Appeals and Reactions

In this paper, we present a model of pathos, delineate its operationalisation, and demonstrate its utility through an analysis of natural language argumentation. We understand pathos as an interactional persuasive process in which speakers are performing pathos appeals and the audience experiences emotional reactions. We analyse two strategies of such appeals in pre-election debates: pathotic Argument Schemes based on the taxonomy proposed by Walton et al. (Argumentation schemes, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008), and emotion-eliciting language based on psychological lexicons of emotive words (Wierzba in Behav Res Methods 54:2146–2161, 2021). In order to match the appeals with possible reactions, we collect real-time social media reactions to the debates and apply sentiment analysis (Alswaidan and Menai in Knowl Inf Syst 62:2937–2987, 2020) method to observe emotion expressed in language. The results point to the importance of pathos analysis in modern discourse: speakers in political debates refer to emotions in most of their arguments, and the audience in social media reacts to those appeals using emotion-expressing language. Our results show that pathos is a common strategy in natural language argumentation which can be analysed with the support of computational methods.