Recent Literary Works Research Articles

Britain’s Imperial Past and Contemporary Borders in Adichie’s Americanah and Zadie Smith’s ‘Fences’

Recent literary works draw attention to the multifaceted legacy of Britain’s imperial past, not only but including its impact on current UK border practices. The works of postcolonial and Black British authors illustrate especially strongly that the spatial epistemologies of empire are still prevalent in twenty-first century border debates. This article engages with Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s Americanah (2013) and Zadie Smith’s essay “Fences” (2016) as literary works that negotiate UK border practices both before and after Brexit. They draw attention to the intersections of empire, race, gender, and class in the recent resurgence of British bordering practices and emphasize the necessity to make visible both contemporary and historical borders in the UK in order to come to terms with the underlying colonial epistemologies of many border practices.

Credible Fears: The Asylum Narrative as Form in Lost Children Archive

Abstract: The first step toward winning asylum in the United States is the Credible Fear Interview (CFI), in which the applicant narrates their life in a way that conforms with legal expectations of “credibility.” This interview process appears in several recent literary works, most notably Valeria Luiselli’s nonfiction work, Tell Me How It Ends . However, the narrative situation of the CFI, this moment of high-stakes, transactional storytelling, also provides a way of interpreting recent migration literature and understanding how such works perform credibility for the reader. By analyzing the interplay of legal and literary narratives in Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive , this article positions the CFI as the primal scene of narration for recent migration fiction.

Evasion Generative Adversarial Network for Low Data Regimes

A myriad of recent literary works has leveraged generative adversarial networks (GANs) to generate unseen evasion samples. The purpose is to annex the generated data with the original train set for adversarial training to improve the detection performance of machine learning (ML) classifiers. The quality of generated adversarial samples relies on the adequacy of training data samples. However, in low data regimes like medical diagnostic imaging and cybersecurity, the anomaly samples are scarce in number. This paper proposes a novel GAN design called Evasion Generative Adversarial Network (EVAGAN) that is more suitable for low data regime problems that use oversampling for detection improvement of ML classifiers. EVAGAN not only can generate evasion samples, but its discriminator can act as an evasion-aware classifier. We have considered Auxiliary Classifier GAN (ACGAN) as a benchmark to evaluate the performance of EVAGAN on cybersecurity (ISCX-2014, CIC-2017 and CIC2018) botnet and computer vision (MNIST) datasets. We demonstrate that EVAGAN outperforms ACGAN for unbalanced datasets with respect to detection performance, training stability and time complexity. EVAGAN&#x0027;s generator quickly learns to generate the low sample class and hardens its discriminator simultaneously. In contrast to ML classifiers that require security hardening after being adversarially trained by GAN-generated data, EVAGAN renders it needless. The experimental analysis proves that EVAGAN is an efficient evasion hardened model for low data regimes for the selected cybersecurity and computer vision datasets. Code will be available at HTTPS://www.github.com/rhr407/EVAGAN. <i>ImpStatement</i> Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications can help improve the quality of human life. The use of AI is not only limited to medical anomaly detection and drug discovery but can be leveraged in computer networks to keep people safe from malicious activities on the Internet. However, the AI-based models can be biased towards the majority class of data on which they are trained due to data imbalance. Anomaly data samples are always scarce as compared to normal data samples. So this is an open research problem to solve. Our work is an effort to improve the AI-based methods in detection performance, stability and time complexity. Using the proposed technique, we can train our AI model using fewer anomaly samples, improving the cost-efficiency compared to state-of-the-art in anomaly detection.

BE AWARE OF WATER ZOMBIES: AN ECOCRITICAL STUDY ON SHUSTERMANS’ DRY

Natural damage, disaster, and catastrophe can happen due to human mistreatment toward the environment. Thus, there is an urgency to treat the environment better and to sustain the comfortable living of human life. Environmental issues in recent literary works are still tightly engaged due to people's high concern and attention toward the environment’s condition. The condition of the environment has been illustrated in a novel entitled Dry written by Neal and Jarrod Shusterman (2018). Through the ecocriticism literary perspective, this study sought to reveal the conditions of nature as the impact of human mistreatment in the aspect of six concepts brought by Greg Garrard (2004). Using his theory, this study explored the environmental damage and its implication as the result of human exploration of the environment from the aspect of pollution, wilderness, apocalypse, dwelling, animals, and the earth. This study employed content analysis to seek the intended objective. The findings declared that Dry successfully illustrated the existing environmental problems. The human-nature relation from the six concepts was described and exemplified very tightly that it is expected to wake the readers up to pay more concern and care toward the environment. At last, this study implied the need to analyze the human-nature relation through the specific concept of Garrard’s or other kinds of theory to sustain the environment with the ecocriticism perspective.

Criticism on the Border and the Decolonization of Knowledge

AbstractStructures of hierarchy and domination are never represented in transborder literature as singular effects of social conditions. Instead, they arise from multiple historical factors. Unlike writings that assume a racial binary, literature on the border does not posit one kind of domination and hierarchy as barriers to creating a just, democratic society. In recent literary works from the transborder regions, the yearning for justice within the layered social systems on the border is central, even while its attainment through social transformation remains an attenuated hope. This essay outlines a paradigm for studying the relations between global and local areas of study, such as those in the transborder regions of the Americas. Invoking models for literary critical work in a globally bordered form, it posits the need for a larger view based on how knowledge is generated and human resources used, while acknowledging the reservoir of knowledge that exists beyond Europe and the US in the Global South. The function of the rebordered criticism described here is to respond to issues raised by African philosopher Achille Mbembe, Latin American sociologist Enrique Dussel and other decolonial thinkers concerning different ways of conceiving the achievement of an antiracist and socially just future.In the face of [the] compromised hopefulness [for justice on the border], what kind of criticism could best [respond to and] … help enact projects of social change?

Instrumentals behind embryo and cancer: a platform for prospective future in cancer research

&lt;abstract&gt; &lt;p&gt;The cancer cells could be celled biomass without normal cellular regulation. They bypass most of the signaling pathways leading to programmed cell division. On the other hand, the embryos are highly regulated, giving rise to the whole organism based on the planned regulation. Understanding the bridge concepts between them might be an interventional art for discovering valuable cancer drugs. The present review highlighted the most similarities between them and recent literary works.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/abstract&gt;

A unified approach for novel estimates of inequalities via discrete fractional calculus techniques

In this article, we introduce the discrete fractional sum equations and inequalities. Some new generalized Grüss type discrete fractional sum inequalities are developed. We employ a nabla or backward difference; we employ the Riemann-Liouville definition of the fractional difference. Furthermore, the current research is a discrete variant of fundamental inequalities set up in the recent literary works and extends a few discrete version for ∇-fractional sum specifically on time scale ℏN, where 0<ℏ⩽1.

Addressing Rape Culture through Folktale Adaptation in Malaysian Young Adult Literature

Rape culture is a provocative topic in Malaysia; the public discourse on it is plagued by gender stereotyping, sexism, misogyny, and rape myths. Recent literary works aimed at Malaysian adolescent girls have interrogated rape culture more pointedly as a means of addressing gender-based violence through activism and education. In this article, I discuss two short stories, “The Girl on the Mountain” and “Gamble” as retellings of Malaysian legends and feminist responses to the normalization and perpetuation of rape culture in this society. Through the emphasis on female agency, consent, and gender equality, these two stories reflect the subversive power of Malaysian young adult literature in dismantling rape culture, while affirming the significance of the folktale as an empowering tool for community engagement and feminist activism.

Leybov, R., Lekmanov, О. and Stupakova, E. (2020). ‘Oh Lord! Forgive the Soviet Union!': Timur Kibirov's poem ‘Through the Tears of Farewell' [‘Skvoz proshchalnye slyozy']: An interpretation. Moscow: OGI. (In Russ.)

The polemical review of the com-ment to T. Kibirov's long poem Through the Tears of Farewell [Skvoz proshchal- nye slyozy] (1987) deals with the problem of accelerated and evident loss of relevance by many fairly recent literary works, whose relative value is in the accumulation of an excessive number of socio-cultural realia that are rapidly becoming obsolete. At the same time, any universal aesthetic statement is often absent from such works. The first part of the review is devoted to advocating the genre of the commentary as such in the current historical-literary situation. The second part is concerned with the main traits of Kibirov's poetics and the poem's aesthetic characteristics. The third part examines the general problem of commenting on literary works that have close ties with the period of their creation, but are lacking the necessary artistic potential in order to be integrated into the contemporary cultural context.

POETICS OF DISLOCATION: BULGARIAN LITERATURE IN SLOVAK CULTURE AFTER YEAR 1989 (WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO THE NOVEL 18% OF GRAY FROM ZACHARY KARABASHLIEV)

The aim of our paper is to point out the presence of such Bulgarian writers who have been translated into Slovak after 1989 and whose life and work touch on certain aspects of the “poetics of dislocation” and the issue of “migration” and thus open questions of existence abroad, emigration or exile. Such authors and their literary characters, for example, are precisely aware of where they come from as well as the "otherness" of the new space. The presentation and interpretation of these selected translated works should then be representative and unique to the scientific field in which the research was carried out in terms of translation and original production (but in this case only with particular reference to the novel 18% Gray by Zachary Karabashliev). The study therefore aims to become a reliable document on the character, personality and intended forms of the presence of Bulgarian literature in the Slovak cultural environment. By means of summarized research we bring to the expert public new detailed knowledge about the more recent literary works of Bulgarians and their current trends and at the same time we present to the Slovak cultural public a comprehensive output about the newer literary and cultural references of Bulgarian literary works and the importance of individual artistic book translations of Bulgarian literature in Slovakia. Inevitably with such an initial "diagnosis", the first step is to name the problem, as "naming the problem" is the first stage of overcoming it. Therefore, our primary task is to testify to the whole and only later to examine the problem in detail and eventually reach the necessary and desired results.

Representing the Twenty-First Century Migrant Experience: Adam and Fleutiaux’s Problematic Empathy

In recent years, a trend in French literature has emerged among non-migrant French authors. In her 2018 study, The Migrant Canon in Twenty-First-Century France, Sabo describes this trend as “the emergence of French authors who write about migration” (27). Similarly, Louviot argued that “the drama of migrants dying on Europe’s doorstep has inspired many […] French writers with no postcolonial or (im)migrant background” (6). This article—which focuses on two texts, À l’abri de rien by Olivier Adam (2007) and Destiny by Pierrette Fleutiaux (2016)—examines how non-migrant French authors have attempted to give a voice to illegal migrants in their recent literary works. Each work recounts the story of a French woman who attempts to help one or several migrants as they navigate horrid living conditions (in a Calais-like city in À l’abri de rien and in Paris in Destiny), suffer mental and physical breakdowns, and face French authorities. This study demonstrates that there is an inherent ambivalence at the heart of how these two non-migrant French authors have attempted to voice the plight of today’s illegal migrants in France. While Adam and Fleutiaux’s texts aim to foster empathy toward migrants, they also feature complex altruistic motives that are far from selfless. Adam and Fleutiaux strive to humanize migrants and their trajectories by creating an empathic discourse of care. However, migrant characters are also portrayed as passive objects of fascination becoming pawn-like figures in the lives of the two white female protagonists. The article questions these characters’ altruism by analyzing how their own mental states overpower their empathic drives, thus bringing to light the questionable reasons why these two women become consumed by the need to help migrants. Ultimately, these considerations help build a critique of the problematic empathy Adam and Fleutiaux have constructed and its ethical ramifications.

The Practical Past as a Field of Metahistorical Approach. Some Remarks on the Contemporary Situation of Historical Theory

Abstract The narrative theory of history that studies historical works from the viewpoint of their narrative, rhetorical devices, and ideological strategies highly emphasized the necessity of renewing historiography. In his early essays, the trend’s founding father, Hayden White, positioned history between art and science or fiction and reality and defined the role of historical theory as a kind of “critical historiography” that is both a criticism of actual historical works and a prescriptive theoretical approach with which the contemporary historical discipline can reform itself. This renewal basically meant a formal reorganization with which the historical works and the historical discipline itself could come closer to literature by using narrative methods and rhetorical devices of recent literary works and films. However, after the 1990s, White and his followers had to face some radical problems that compelled them to rethink the role of recent historiography and their theoretical positions as well. Firstly, the so-called “new” historiography did not actually come into existence, or at least not in a way they suggested. Secondly, new forms of “unofficial” history, from varieties of public history through conspiracy theories to contemporary historical fictions, forced to reconceptualize the task of historical theory and its approach to the social and ideological functions of “official” history. Analysing some recently published works of this trend (above all, Hayden White’s concept of “modernist event” and his distinction between two forms of the past, theoretical and practical), my essay tries to define the situation of historical theory among the forms of contemporary historical experience.

Application of discrete transforms with selective coefficients for blind image watermarking

AbstractWatermarking scheme is not helpful in conveying the original image continually so as identifying the owner's mark from the watermarked image. In the current situation, our chosen topic is significant in real‐time applications like fraud recognition, emergency clinic, and government divisions. In this study, an optimal multiblind watermarking model is proposed for the watermark detection process. Our proposed model is a combination of intelligent domain transforms like Discrete Shearlet Transform and Discrete Curvelet Transform (DCurT). The imperceptibility necessity of the plan is accomplished utilizing optimal coefficients that are performed by applying in DCurT with metaheuristic optimization model that is Grasshopper Algorithm. It is played by a chasing behavior of gathering of grasshoppers and cooperation process, here, Random Grasshopper Optimization is utilized for watermarking. The secret image is embedded with a lower band of optimal coefficients with DCurT, and here, the band is DCur (1, 5). The secret data is embedded in the host images to make it secure, and then, the extraction of the embedding process takes place inversely. For experimentation analysis, 20 digital images are considered, and different attacks are applied in the proposed watermarking model. Thus, the watermarked image looks lossless compared with the host image. Moreover, recent literary works and domain transform are also utilized for strength investigation of the proposed watermarking model.

The reading background of Goodreads book club members: a female fiction canon?

PurposeDespite the social, educational and therapeutic benefits of book clubs, little is known about which books participants are likely to have read. In response, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the public bookshelves of those that have joined a group within the Goodreads social network site.Design/methodology/approachBooks listed as read by members of 50 large English-language Goodreads groups – with a genre focus or other theme – were compiled by author and title.FindingsRecent and youth-oriented fiction dominate the 50 books most read by book club members, whilst almost half are works of literature frequently taught at the secondary and postsecondary level (literary classics). Whilst J.K. Rowling is almost ubiquitous (at least 63 per cent as frequently listed as other authors in any group, including groups for other genres), most authors, including Shakespeare (15 per cent), Goulding (6 per cent) and Hemmingway (9 per cent), are little read by some groups. Nor are individual recent literary prize winners or works in languages other than English frequently read.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough these results are derived from a single popular website, knowing more about what book club members are likely to have read should help participants, organisers and moderators. For example, recent literary prize winners might be a good choice, given that few members may have read them.Originality/valueThis is the first large scale study of book group members’ reading patterns. Whilst typical reading is likely to vary by group theme and average age, there seems to be a mainly female canon of about 14 authors and 19 books that Goodreads book club members are likely to have read.

Combining IR and LDA Topic Modeling for Filtering Microblogs

Twitter is a networking micro-blogging service where users post millions of short messages every day. Building multilingual corpora from these microblogs contents can be useful to perform several computational tasks such as opinion mining. However, Twitter data gathering involves the problem of irrelevant included data. Recent literary works have proved that topic models such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) are not consistent when applied to short texts like tweets. In order to prune the irrelevant tweets, we investigate in this paper a novel method to improve topics learned from Twitter content without modifying the basic machinery of LDA. This latter is based on a pooling process which combines Information retrieval (IR) approach and LDA.This is achieved through an aggregation strategy based on IR task to retrieve similar tweets in a same cluster. The result of tweet pooling is then used as an input for a basic LDA to overcome the sparsity problem of Twitter content. Empirical results highlight that tweets aggregation based on IR and LDA leads to an interesting improvement in a variety of measures for topic coherence, in comparison to unmodified LDA baseline and a variety of pooling schemes.

Intertextualidade, metaficção e autoficção: Fronteiras da narrativa de ficção na literatura do início do século XXI

Na literatura da segunda metade do século XX, existem várias obras em que é explícita a alusão e até mesmo a apropriação de personagens e de ideias de outras obras literárias. Narrativas de ficção que têm como tema a própria produção de narrativas de ficção se tornaram também frequentes na literatura contemporânea. Em algumas obras literárias, a linha que perpassa a fronteira entre a figura do autor e a do narrador se tornou bastante fluida. O objetivo deste artigo é examinar como algumas obras literárias bem recentes, produzidas nos últimos dez anos, têm levado a intertextualidade, a metaficção, e a autoficção às últimas consequências. Essas obras, como pretendo mostrar, exploram as fronteiras da literatura com as artes visuais, com o plágio, com relatos autobiográficos, e com o universo de textos publicados sob a forma de postagens nas redes sociais. Em algumas dessas obras, não é sequer evidente se temos diante de nós um “texto”, no sentido tradicional da palavra, ou alguma coisa diferente.

With the face to the future: The kibbutz in recent literary works

The kibbutz, which was considered one of the greatest successes of the socialist dream, failed to survive history, which replaced socialism with both capitalism and globalization. Numerous texts, literary, documentary, and scholarly, have tried to comprehend the social developments that took place in the kibbutz during the period of its demise, especially over the 1980s and the 1990s. This article focuses on two works – Habayta (Home, Assaf Inbari, 2009) and Bein haverim (Between friends, Amos Oz, 2012) – both of which refrain from solely addressing the rift that the kibbutz underwent, but rather attempt to see in the moment of the kibbutz's disintegration a stage in a historical process that will ultimately enable creation of new values on the ruins of the old ones. Both works triggered powerful response from literary critics and from the general public, and contributed to shaping a new perspective on the history of the kibbutz.

“The African Presence in Caribbean Literature” Revisited: Recovering the Politics of Imagined Co-Belonging 1930–2005

Working outward from Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s landmark 1974 essay, “The African Presence in Caribbean Literature,” this article explores the fuller history of the idea of Africa in anglophone Caribbean critical and literary works from the 1930s to the 2000s. It demonstrates that earlier, now forgotten Caribbean critics drew on imperfect and incomplete Caribbean literary imaginings of Africa to frame a counter-colonial politics of identity. The essay also brings back into view writings by Una Marson, Victor Stafford Reid, and Derek Walcott that expressed a different politics of solidarity based on the shared experience of colonial violence. Readings of recent literary works by Charlotte Williams and Nalo Hopkinson reveal the contemporary crafting of this relation around a heightened awareness of both presence and loss, history and imagination. Importantly, this gathering of sources and perspectives allows for an appreciation of the role that a reach toward Africa has played in articulations of Caribbeanness and its complex patterning of cultural co-belonging.

Sastra Diasporik?: Suara-Suara Tionghoa Baru di Indonesia

Since the 'beginning' of modern Indonesian literature in the early twentieth century, Indonesian writers have engaged with the project of defining Indonesian identity. Most serious writers engaged both with the mission of creating a new literature and with the project of interrogating and investigating issues of national identity. It is a mission which continues to inform Indonesian literature in the twenty first century. Literature written by peranakan Chinese flourished at the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. But because the first language of these peranakan writers was low or 'market' Malay, much of it received scant attention from Indonesian critics, who reserved their praise for writing in the court-derived high Malay favored by the recognized publishing houses. Peranakan literature reached its zenith in the 1920s and 1930s-whichwas also a time of heightened Chinese nationalism in Java. Thanks to the meticulous work of two scholars in particular-Claudine Salmon and Leo Suryadinata-much of this early writing has now been documented and critically analyzed. However, Salmon and Suryadinata's commentary effectively ends at 1965. Chinese-Indonesians who did continue to write during the New Order on the whole projected themselves and were constructed by others as 'Indonesian'. They thus assimilated as writers as they did as citizens, and their ethnicity never featured as part of their work. The category 'Chinese-Indonesian literature' for all intents and purposes ceased to exist. It was subjected to the same process of erasure as Chinese ethnicity. Since the fall of Soeharto Chinese-Indonesian writers have begun to write as Chinese-Indonesians, some using their Chinese names, some writing in Mandarin. This paper begins to fill a significant gap in documenting the ways in which recent literary works by Chinese-Indonesians give expression to their understanding of themselves and their place in the Indonesian nation-state.

Self-Expression and World-Expression: Critical Multicultural Literacy in Maxine Hong Kingston and Sandra Cisneros

Self-Expression and World-Expression:Critical Multicultural Literacy in Maxine Hong Kingston and Sandra Cisneros Fatima Mujcinovic (bio) Speaking the word is not a true act if it is not at the same time associated with the right of self-expression and world-expression, of creating and recreating, of deciding and choosing and ultimately participating in society's historical processes. —Paulo Freire Since slave narratives and early immigrant autobiographies, literacy has been featured in United States literature as a major issue in minorities' struggle for power and equality. Some minority writers, such as Native Americans Zitkala-Sa and Simon Ortiz, have depicted the acquisition of dominant literacy as a forcefully imposed method of cultural assimilation. At the same time, Sa and Ortiz have acknowledged the fact that English proficiency, both oral and written, allows Native Americans to communicate their struggles for physical and cultural survival to wider audiences. For many Native American writers who publish in English, the use of dominant language to express indigenous content is an act of political activism and cultural preservation.1 Other minority authors, most notably Frederick Douglass and Richard Wright, have rendered English literacy as an effective instrument for self-empowerment and social integration. Exposing the systemic practices of denying or segregating education on the basis of race, their autobiographies have emphasized the importance of equal access to formal education in minority Americans' struggles for emancipation. As young men, both Douglass and Wright quickly comprehended the link between knowledge and power and pursued literacy/education as a means of reclaiming control over their lives.2 Revealing the meaning of literacy policies as deeply embedded in specific social arrangements and ideologies, these approaches counter the dominant view of literacy as a neutral, autonomous practice. In more recent literary works, US minority authors have gone further to question Western literacy/education as a monolithic ideological concept, exposing its failure to recognize the existence and validity of non-Western forms of knowledge. In their contemporary approaches to the meaning and practice of education in minority contexts, literacy is often presented in relation to cultural difference, hybrid identities, and political agency. For instance, contemporary US Latino/a writers have stressed the [End Page 98] importance of bilingualism in their portrayals of bicultural experiences, linking the concept of bilingual literacy to Latinos' cultural and political rights in the United States. Integration of Spanish and/or Spanglish in their writing in English serves not only to develop distinctly Latino settings and themes but also to interrogate homogenous definitions of modern American culture. Reflecting their strong commitment to cultural diversity and equality, the performance of multicultural literacy allows US minority writers to present non-dominant cultural practices, values, and symbols as meaningful parts of national culture. These interventions also communicate demands for multicultural models of knowledge: as they themselves participate in the creation of such models, minority writers strive to ensure that members of their communities in general are allowed to transform and create literacies. Because traditional definitions of literacy cannot fully convey marginal experiences, new conceptions are being produced and embraced as necessary modes of self-expression. The noted Asian American author Maxine Hong Kingston affirms this idea when commenting on her unique style of writing: "I am trying to write an American language that has Chinese accents; I write the American language the way I speak it. So in a way, I [am] creating something new, but at the same time, it's still the American language, pushed further" (qtd. in Rabinowitz 182). Sandra Cisneros, a prominent Mexican American writer, points out a similar linguistic polyphony in her work: "What I am especially aware of lately is how the Spanish syntax and word choice occurs in my work even though I write in English" ("Ghosts and Voices" 72). To tell the story of their communities, minority authors like Kingston and Cisneros recognize that inserting marks of otherness into the English language enables them to present the uniqueness of their ethnic traditions while also claiming their place in America's culture and language. This conscious process of adapting dominant literacy to create new literary models reflects a democratic understanding of culture, elucidating the need for inclusive and diverse literacy practices...