Thematic Importance Research Articles

Flow, Stagnation, and Renewal: Understanding the Symbolic Dimensions of Water in Anuradha Roy’s ‘An Atlas of Impossible Longing’

Water is one of nature's gifts to the earth, carrying a multitude of meanings and interpretations based on its context. Water in literature is studied from a variety of theoretical perspectives due to its rich symbolism and different narrative roles. This paper aims to explore Indian writer Anuradha Roy’s novel, "An Atlas of Impossible Longing," through Gaston Bachelad’s water symbolism theory and investigates how numerous types of water bodies, including rivers, ponds, and rain, each with its own meanings and thematic importance, with the river playing a central part in the novel. This study explores the symbolism of water through three key themes: "Flow and Transformation," "Stagnation and Reflection," and "Renewal and Destruction." It examines how water functions as both a healing and destructive force in human life. Using a qualitative approach, the study combines textual analysis with theoretical interpretation based on Gaston Bachelard’s symbolism theory from Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Through a close reading of the novel, it highlights how water serves as a metaphorical device, reflecting characters’ emotional states, personal growth, and existential challenges. This research stands out by providing a comprehensive analysis of how Anuradha Roy integrates water symbolism in contemporary Indian Literature through her narrative structure and highlights its multidimensional role in the story. The novelty lies in its comparative analysis of Roy’s water imagery with broader literary traditions, creating new insights into how water symbolism functions both as an ecological signifier and a transformative metaphor in the human experience.

Child Rights, Abuse and Mitigating Options in Nollywood Films: A Study of <i>Wives on Strike</i> and <i>Itoro</i>

Child rights are those fundamental privileges that contribute to the overall development of children in society. The increasing rate of child abuse impinges on the rights of children resulting in numerous negative effects that are harmful to their growth and well-being. Although some Nollywood films portray the problem of child abuse in society, not much has been done to examine the rights of children and how these rights are violated as a result of cultural and social factors that condition the well-being of children. The study examined the representation of child rights, abuse and mitigating options in Omoni Oboli’s <i>Wives on Strike</i> (2016) and Precious Adeyemi’s <i>Itoro</i> (2017). These Nollywood films were selected through a purposive sampling technique because the have thematic importance relevant to the problem of the study. James Garbarino’s Social Habitability theory was adopted as the theoretical framework for the study. Findings revealed that child labour and marriage are dominant abuses of children and teenagers in Nigeria with adverse consequences on their development. It also revealed that the girl child is at the greatest risk of abuse due to cultural and social factors. The study recommended further exposition of this crime, especially other forms of child abuse by Nollywood film practitioners to mitigate its scourge because the future of every nation depends on children.

“He would do nothing in the office”: Work and alienation in cinematic adaptations of Herman Melville’s Bartleby.

This paper analyzes the representation of the office workplace in filmic adaptations of Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener”. Following a brief overview of film adaptations of Melville’s short story, this article will discuss Miro Bilbrough’s (2001) and Gerard Amsellem’s (2013) short films, Andreas Honneths (2010) experimental interpretation as well as Laura Naylor and Kristen Kee’s (2017) stop-motion movie. By, for instance, analyzing how the movies try to replicate the first-person narration, find visual images for Melville’s uncinematic descriptive prose, or underline the thematic importance of writing by incorporating different forms of written text, I will firstly examine techniques of intermedial transposition. Since the filmmakers deploy the setting to reimagine or modernize the story, the set design is to be regarded as an essential part of the adaptation process. Paying particular attention to the usage of space, the visual presentation of physical and metaphorical walls, as well as the utilization of non-human entities as ‘actors,’ I will seek to demonstrate how the movies under study reflect contemporary office environments and dynamics of work culture. Updating the nineteenth-century quills and inkpots to modern office technology, for example, allows the directors to reflect upon how electronic communication can cause or reinforce isolation. Different concepts of alienation serve as an essential theoretical framework for the movies. The adaptations concern themselves with social disconnect, engage in questions of ecological alienation, or focus on a political and socioeconomic interpretation of Bartleby’s passive resistance to productivity and consumption.

An In-Depth Study of Kazuo Ishiguro's 'Never Let Me Go'

The current paper presents the intricacy of the novel "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro. This work is a complex combination of themes such as memory, identity, love, loss, and the ethical impacts of scientific progress via cloning. A thorough evaluation of Ishiguro's use of narrative tools, like first-person narrative, non-linear stories, and emotional distance, will show how such methods intensify the thematic import of the novel and give it a philosophical orientation. The narrative analysis focuses on the Hailsham educational system, social control techniques and the attempt by clones to define themselves despite the limited choices they can make. Comparing with other such books, the paper locates Ishiguro's novel in a bigger literary context, highlighting its relevance in the discussions about human nature, ethics, and the risks associated with scientific advances. The last part reveals the novel's powerful take on how to treasure life, look into human relationships, and fight as humans to find a sense of purpose and meaning, even amid loss and fate.

Environmental Awareness in the Selected Poems of Mary Oliver: An Eco-critical Approach

Ecocriticism is a growing discipline within literary studies that has become prominent as a critical framework for studying the connection between literature and the environment. Ecocriticism is a method of analysing texts that helps us understand how literature reflects and influences cultural views of the natural world. It has gained popularity due to growing environmental concerns. This research examines the reoccurring nature imagery present in Mary Oliver's selected poems, namely "Wild Geese" and her poetry collection, American Primitive, through textual and analytical. It shows how her poetry acts as a medium for actively exploring and articulating environmental awareness. By conducting a detailed examination of these poems, the researcher’s aim is to decipher the complex and detailed depiction of nature created by Oliver, and to understand the thematic importance of repeating themes. The investigation produces significant discoveries that enhance comprehension of the poet's distinctive approach to ecocritical ideas. Ultimately, Mary Oliver is a poet who has a profound sensitivity for the natural world, establishing a profound bond, promoting introspection, and highlighting the ethical aspects of humanity's interaction with nature.

The Spectral Famine in Anthony Trollope’s Castle Richmond

The Spectral Famine in Anthony Trollope’s Castle Richmond

“You Know No Rules of Charity”: A Corpus Analysis of ‘Love’ in William Shakespeare’s Richard III Using Voyant Tools

This essay conducts a corpus analysis of ‘love’ in Shakespeare’s Richard III using Voyant Tools, a free web-based application for analyzing digital texts. While Voyant Tools have been used in Shakespeare classes for educational purposes, it is hard to find any books or journal essays that incorporate the online program in Shakespeare drama research. It is hoped that the paper serves as an example that suggests academic potential of using digital tools in drama text analysis. Although Richard III is rarely discussed with reference to ‘love,’ the high frequency of the word in the text confirms its thematic importance in the play. My analysis of the corpus data makes the following discoveries. First, ‘love’ in Richard III has a broad spectrum of meaning ranging from erotic and familial love to loyalty and self-love. Second, the majority of references to ‘love’ come from or concern Richard and his chief assistant Buckingham, both of whom use the word for purposes of deception. Third, the type of love that is absent from all characters, including antagonist Richmond and those who display sincere love for their family or monarch, is ‘charity,’ the highest form of love modeled on God’s unconditional love for humanity. From these observations, it can be concluded that Shakespeare explores the broad spectrum of human love in order to satirize the absence of charity from the powerful figures that inhabit the world of Richard III as well as to expose the limitations and vulnerability of human love. If Richard III is a play of ‘love,’ as the corpus data suggests, it is not a critique of the title character but of the lack of charity in the world he was born into.

Education topic in All-Russian English language Olympiad

The article considers the tasks of All-Russian English Language School Olympiad (ARELSO or Olympiad) dedicated to the topic of education. The Year of the Teacher and Mentor stimulates a keen interest in educative value of school subjects and their career guidance opportunities, and also of various contests and Olympiads for gifted and talented schoolchildren. The author emphasizes the importance of ARELSO as a means to identify schoolchildrens future vocational orientation. Outlining researchers contribution to the field of developing gifted childrens potential, and preparing them for intellectual contests and Olympiads, we have to admit the absence of full-scale research into subject matter of Olympiad tasks. The relevance of the study is determined by a thorough analysis of the 2009/20102022/2023 Olympiad tasks, and, based on the authors experience as an Olympiad tasks designer, an attempt to offer examples of municipal level tasks dedicated to the topic of education. Such tasks can be found in all parts of the Olympiad (Listening, Reading, Use of English, Writing). The author emphasizes the thematic importance of the Olympiad and the necessity of regularly designing education topic tasks with the aim of schoolchildrens vocational orientation.

Referentiality and thematic importance: The discourse functions of Zauzou classifiers

Marking referentiality is one of the major discourse functions of numeral classifiers in Mainland Southeast Asian languages. However, the reference types of classified and unclassified noun phrases exhibit some extent of fluidity. This paper presents the discourse functions of classified and unclassified noun phrases in Zauzou, a less-studied Tibeto-Burman language in China. Zauzou noun phrases in spontaneous speech indicate no simple correspondence between the presence/absence of a classifier and any fixed referential values (i.e., (in)definiteness and specificity). Findings of both qualitative and quantitative studies only point to a tendency of using classifier phrases to express individualized references and bare nouns for unindividualized references. The fluidity in the reference type of classified and unclassified noun phrases can be largely explained by the split in definiteness and thematic importance of a referent in discourse. Notably, thematic importance plays a secondary role in determining the form of a noun phrase in addition to referentiality. Thematically unimportant individualized referents have a higher chance to be expressed by a bare noun. This study provides a new piece of empirical evidence for the patterns of semantic-pragmatic interaction in manipulating the use of numeral classifiers as well as the typology of definiteness marking.

“It is still light outside”

Abstract In the film adaptation of Lust, Caution, the importance of sex is apparent. This is not necessarily the case in Se, Jie. In Eileen Chang’s story, there is an interconnection between sex, death, and a ring. This relationship is portrayed differently in Julia Lovell’s Lust, Caution. Viewing Eileen Chang as world literature reveals similarities and differences between Se, Jie and Lust, Caution and their different thematic emphases. This article explores how the imageries of the ring, sex, and death are interrelated. The transaction involving the ring in Chang’s text is similar to a sexual transaction. Analyzing the difference between the source and the target texts reveals how Lovell places a “heavier” emphasis on women’s bodies, suggesting the suppression women suffer in a patriarchal society. While the thematic importance of death is also present in Lust, Caution, it is brought out by the notion of foreignness and undecipherability.

The Thing around your Neck by Chimananda Ngozi Adichie: A Stylistic Perspective

The study and analysis of texts from a linguistic and literary viewpoint is known as stylistics. This research looked at the fundamental language devices Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie employed in The Thing Around Your Neck to communicate with her audience and the larger society. A functional approach was used, in which special attention was paid to the stylistic function, impact, and thematic importance of language elements in literary texts. Morphology, graphology, phonology, syntax, lexico-semantics, and point of view were the stylistic devices used. After using these techniques on the novel, it became clear that language is an essential component of all works of art and that a work's success depends on the writer's skill in manipulating language. Through her systematic use of language, Adichie has made adjustments that have improved understanding of her work.

An Evolving Inquiry of Monastic Spiritual Care for Aging Inmates

This investigation involved focus-group inquiry of the Oblates in Prison Program, a faith-based ministry founded on monastic principles in the Rule of St. Benedict. Data from a Benedictine Order monk and program coordinator, ordained prison minister, and lay ministry volunteer were collected. Participants were asked a series of questions regarding the spiritual care of aging prisoners. Responses were coded and cross-compared for thematic content. Of central thematic importance was implementation of a spiritual care model using traditional monastic rules for daily living. A second theme centered on purposeful rebuilding of self-renewal through stability and obedience. A final emergent theme encompassed institutional acceptance in the provision of religious sacraments, sacred texts, and artifacts. Results highlight the broader implications of providing spiritual care and outreach to aging prisoners. The role of restorative justice for successful delivery of faith-based spiritual care for improved rehabilitation of aging inmates will be further addressed.

The Long Civil War: New Explorations of America's Enduring Conflict ed. by John David Smith and Raymond Arsenault

Reviewed by: The Long Civil War: New Explorations of America's Enduring Conflict ed. by John David Smith and Raymond Arsenault Lawrence Kreiser (bio) The Long Civil War: New Explorations of America's Enduring Conflict. Edited by John David Smith and Raymond Arsenault. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2021. Pp. 246. $40.00 cloth) The introduction to this collection of ten essays is worth the cover price alone, for its insightful discussion on the "Long Civil War." John David Smith and Raymond Arsenault argue that, well into the twentieth century, scholars attempted to almost buttonhole the fighting that raged between 1861 and 1865 into a tight chronological and thematic focus. The postwar ended when the nation's [End Page 332] calendar flipped to 1878, and the struggle for civil rights culminated with the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. Only relatively recently, however, have historians recognized that the Civil War continues to define American society. That is not a cause for dismay, as if the war is too complex and contradictory to fully understand. Rather, The Long Civil War offers the opportunity for a more nuanced understanding of twenty-first-century Americans as a nation and people. According to Smith and Arsenault, the volume's essays demonstrate how "the Civil War and its wide-ranging consequences and implications remain a yardstick that can be used to measure the American experience. The essays illustrate how historians can accommodate and integrate ambiguity, selective memory, and the power of myths and symbols in their assessments of the war's geographic, temporal, and thematic importance" (pp.12–13). The persistence of antebellum questions on race into the Civil War and beyond is the focus of the first two essays. Daniel Kilbride writes on the interchange between American missionary work and imperial ambitions in Liberia and today's Nigeria. Stanley Harrold argues that the abolition lobby reached its greatest success when proslavery congressmen most aggressively attempted to counter it during the late 1830s and early 1840s. Paul Cimbala and Diane Miller Sommerville analyze the influence of the Civil War on individual participants in the next two essays. Cimbala details the motivations and expectations of Union officers in the Veteran Reserve Corps, while Sommerville demonstrates that the changing rhetoric of "political suicide," especially in the South, provided contemporaries a new framework for understanding the war's severity. Biographical essays on Emory Upton, a Union officer, and Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, a well-known southern historian, are the next two contributions. James Hedtke argues that Upton's writings on military science survived his own death through self-violence and influenced the development of the modern American military. John David Smith details the connections between Phillips's service as a nonmilitary [End Page 333] staff officer at Camp Gordon, Georgia, a segregated military base during World War I, and his academic writings. The ongoing controversies over historical memory form the basis for the last four essays. James Horton and Lois Horton write on the changing perceptions of Abraham Lincoln among Black Americans, and Stephen Whitfield on the continuing resonance of the Confederacy among many white southerners. During the mid-twentieth century, the legacy of the war on the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, and the nostalgic—and commercial—portrayal of the blue and gray in the historical movies of Walt Disney are discussed by, respectively, Michael Birkner and Raymond Arsenault. The Long Civil War is a pleasure to read. The essays highlight continuing ways to understand the influence of the nation's most critical domestic crisis, as well as new avenues for innovative scholarship. Lawrence Kreiser LAWRENCE KREISER, JR. teaches history at Stillman College. He is the author of Marketing the Blue and Gray: Newspaper Advertising and the Civil War (2019) and coeditor of The Civil War and Popular Culture: Memory and Meaning (2014). Copyright © 2021 Kentucky Historical Society

“Covert Progression” and Dual Narrative Dynamics

In many fictional narratives, the plot development exists in tension with a “covert progression” in the shape of a powerful hidden dynamic, which is essentially different from previously investigated deeper-level meanings and which complicates readers' response in a distinct way. The overt and covert progressions parallel each other throughout the text. The plot development in itself may be interpreted from various angles, and the parallel covert progression further complicates the picture in conveying contrastive or even opposing thematic significance, character images, and aesthetic values, thus arousing or having the potential to arouse more complicated response from readers. The ways the two kinds of dynamics interact with each other are diversified, ranging from harmonious complementation to drastic subversion. In those narratives containing such dual dynamics, readers paying attention only to the plot development—no matter how many angles critics try to approach it—will result in a partial or false picture of the thematic import, character images, and aesthetic values. Since Aristotle, investigations of narrative fiction have focused on the plot development. In order to uncover and to account for the “covert progression” and dual dynamics, we need to break free of the bondage of the long critical tradition and to extend or transform the relevant theoretical concepts and models not only in narratology, but also in stylistics and translation studies.

Writ in Water: Seeing Time in Ovid’s Narcissus Episode*

This article explores the representation and thematic importance of time within Ovid’s account of Narcissus. It argues that perceiving Narcissus for the characters within Ovid’s narrative provokes a recognition of the experience of time that becomes central to both the tragic and erotic aspects of his story. In presenting Narcissus as both the subject of a diachronic narrative and a static image, Ovid at once uses the medium of his representation to illustrate his theme and makes his poem a mirror in which his own audience can apprehend the mutability of time.

Students’ Perceptions of Textbooks in Moroccan High Schools

The objective of this study is to reveal the different perceptions, practices and problems related to speaking skills in Moroccan secondary education in general. The sample of the study consisted of students coming from different schools in the academy of Rabat-Salè-Zemmour-Zaer area. The results revealed a discrepancy between classroom activities, textbooks activities and the objectives of the guidelines set for the teaching of speaking in Moroccan high schools. The results also showed that the thematic importance, thematic variety and the preference of listening-focused textbooks including listening to songs are found to be what students perceive to be their most significant inclinations. The study concluded with a number of pedagogical implications for the teaching/learning process.

Opinions and perceptions of Indigenous mental health applications from service providers and youth samples: a pilot study

Objective To evaluate opinions and perceptions around managing mental health and the relevance of available mental health applications (apps) for Indigenous youth populations by surveying values of Indigenous service providers and youth samples in a regional area, in order to better target online mental health information. Method Participants were 15 Indigenous youths (6 males, 9 females) with a mean (SD) age of 16.93 (2.37), and 30 Indigenous service providers (6 males, 24 females) with a mean age (SD) of 34.59 (12.26). Participants were recruited through a Queensland regional Indigenous community organisation, and given a face-to-face survey, (developed with Indigenous community members) during a social event. The survey asked how participants improve their mental health, their knowledge of current Indigenous mental health applications, and their perceived importance of values presented in those applications. Results Although Indigenous youth were not familiar with existing mental health apps, overall, participants agreed with the values presented in available mental health apps. Compared to Indigenous youth, service providers overall perceived presented values as significantly more important, and specifically found ‘Nature in the design’, ‘Themes of strength’, and ‘Themes of community’ to be most important. Regarding content, service providers and youth had different strategies for bolstering mental health with Indigenous sports stars the least popular in both groups. There were no statistical gender differences in thematic importance for bolstering mental health. Conclusions Mental health applications are little utilised by Indigenous youth so awareness needs to increase. In addition, these are viewed differently between service providers and youth. This may have relevance for uptake and usage of these apps within the mental health service delivery.

"Obliged to yield": The Language of Patriarchy and the System of Mental Slavery in Mansfield Park

This essay argues that a close reading of language in Mansfield Park—especially the words "duty," "gratitude," "obligation," and "ought"—correlates patriarchy with mental slavery and marks Fanny Price as the text's representative slave. Yet, to borrow a phrase from William Blake, the same linguistic "mind forg'd manacles" that enchain Fanny also constrict the rest of the characters in the romance. In Mansfield Park, no person is free. Ultimately, the essay contends that Austen's romance unmasks patriarchy as an inescapable system of mental slavery, and it sheds light on the complexities and subtleties of language in this work as countless scholars have already done in Austen's other novels, which, unsurprisingly, often foreground the thematic importance of specific words in their very titles.

The Suffusion of the Televisual in The Crying of Lot 49

To say that technological media play a prominent role the narrative of The Crying of Lot 49 is to state the obvious. The thematic importance of media systems within the novel is apparent to any attentive reader, and such a substantial portion of the voluminous body of criticism that has been written on the novel deals with this topic that one feels hard pressed to bring anything to the conversation that has not already been said so many words. Still, there is one aspect of the novel's engagement with media that has yet to receive the critical emphasis it deserves: its pervasive televisuality. Television looms large the novel from the very beginning, when Oedipa Maas, having just discovered that she is going to be executor of the estate of her former lover Pierce Inverarity, stands in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube (1). It continues to play a formative role throughout, at times explicitly through the content of the narrative, but also a subtler way, by providing the text with a shape and a model. The novel's structure adapts a range of uniquely televisual experiences into textual ones, foregoing the more traditional pleasures of reading the process. Although critics have often made reference to the novel's explicit treatment of television alongside its treatment of other forms of communication and dissemination media, it is to be my contention that television as the novel engages with it is not one instance of a technological medium among others but rather the ultimate technological medium through which all the others must be understood, including the medium of the novel itself. A main critical line on Thomas Pynchon's overall attitude toward television is best exemplified by the approach taken Kathleen Fitzpatrick's The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel the Age of Television, which focuses on the ways which Pynchon's novels endeavor to close themselves off and distance themselves from the televisual order to shore up the distinction between popular and high art media. According to Fitzpatrick, Pynchon and some of his like-minded contemporaries have used their writing to perpetuate a two-sided narrative about the role of media post-modern American culture. On one side are the high-tech media of sight and sound, a proliferating network of signals that threatens individualist subjectivity with its vastness and homogeneity. Television is usually figured as the primary aggressor or technological medium par excellence here, with radio, the telephone, film, photography, and the mainstream press acting as its accomplices. On the other side is the supposedly marginalized (despite being white and male) novelist, a protesting, underdog voice scarcely heard over the electronic din of the never-ending audiovisual spectacle. This posturing is both strategic and bad faith. Paradoxically, by painting a picture of a media landscape which the novel is a fading relic and newer media are the usurpers of its role as cultural arbiter, the art novel is able to maintain its identity as a distinctive and morally superior medium. The feigned death that this cadre of literary novelists continually acts out constitutes the interior logic of their survival, their renewed livelihood through martyrdom. Fitzpatrick's argument represents a school of thought that I do not intend to oppose here. Rather, I hope to compliment and extend the work that readings such as hers have done toward explicating the relationship between the postwar American novel and television, a relationship that remains under-theorized despite many attempts. (1) The qualification I would like to append to this argument is that it leaves unaddressed what seems to me to be the more formative dimension of the relationship between television and at least some of the novels that are so invested critiquing it. This is because, while the argument accounts for the logic that sustains these pseudo-marginalized art novels qua art novel, it fails to address what makes them viable as novels. …

Mapping courtship and kinship in classical Japan: The tale of Genjiand its predecessors

Literary critiques of Murasaki Shikibu's eleventh-century The Tale of Genji have often focused on the amorous adventures of its eponymous hero. In this paradigm-shifting analysis of the Genji and other mid-Heian literature, Doris G. Bargen emphasizes the thematic importance of Japan's complex polygynous kinship system as the domain within which courtship occurs. Heian courtship, conducted mainly to form secondary marriages, was driven by power struggles of succession among lineages that focused on achieving the highest position possible at court. Thus interpreting courtship in light of genealogies is essential for comprehending the politics of interpersonal behavior in many of these texts. Bargen focuses on the genealogical maze--the literal and figurative space through which several generations of men and women in the Genji moved. She demonstrates that courtship politics sought to control kinship by strengthening genealogical lines, while secret affairs and illicit offspring produced genealogical uncertainty that could be dealt with only by reconnecting dissociated lineages or ignoring or even terminating them. The work examines in detail the literary construction of a courtship practice known as kaimami, or looking through a gap in the fence, in pre-Genji tales and diaries, and Sei Sh?nagon's famous Pillow Book. In Murasaki Shikibu's Genji, courtship takes on multigenerational complexity and is often used as a political strategy to vindicate injustices, counteract sexual transgressions, or resist the pressure of imperial succession. Bargen argues persuasively that a woman observed by a man was not wholly deprived of agency: She could choose how much to reveal or conceal as she peeked through shutters, from behind partitions, fans, and kimono sleeves, or through narrow carriage windows. That mid-Heian authors showed courtship in its innumerable forms as being influenced by the spatial considerations of the Heian capital and its environs and by the architectural details of the residences within which aristocratic women were sequestered adds a fascinating topographical dimension to courtship. In Mapping Courtship and Kinship in Classical Japan readers both familiar with and new to The Tale of Genji and its predecessors will be introduced to a wholly new interpretive lens through which to view these classic texts. In addition, the book includes charts that trace Genji characters' lineages, maps and diagrams that plot the movements of courtiers as they make their way through the capital and beyond, and color reproductions of paintings that capture the drama of courtship.