Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak (1999) is her first landmark work addressing a social problem—rape—that is all too common to girls entering adolescence in the United States. This paper employs a feminist approach that presents the painful narrative of the rape victim and investigates the novel’s promotion of individual, resistant action within the oppressive social structure, achieved through what the postmodernist feminist Judith Butler calls “gender performativity”. It is this individual agency or subjectivity that enables the protagonist in Speak to overcome the adverse effects of rape, which is the product of a patriarchal system that regards females the second sex, to borrow the term by the French, feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir. As such, Speak functions as a site of discursive resistance against such a patriarchal system by resisting some of the popularly held myths that discredit rape victims' narratives.
It is obvious that the novel is one of the most preferable ways of story-telling and it is an important way of representing experiences and ideas in the context of various conditions. Being the most characteristic and powerful form of literary expression, the novel in the modern age has acquired a significant attention in literature. Like all literary forms, the novel can shape a set of attitudes regarding society, history and the general culture of which the novel is a part and this is a very important justification for reading novels.Upton Beall Sinclair the Jungle (1906), is one of the most effective and enduring pieces of American social protest fiction. The author has adapted the journalistic approach of earlier muckraking exposés such as Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1890) and Lincoln Steffens's The Shame of the Cities (1904). The research shows the impact of capitalism, Social Darwinian theory and the political system of governments on social life, which can cause disappointment and a horrible life to people, whilst other political systems such as socialism can offer a better life. The Jungle traces the unavoidable death of Jurgis Rudkus and his family, poor Lithuanian immigrants have escaped to the USA, and whose dreams have been destroyed by the greedy capitalist system of Chicago's meatpacking industry. Towards the end of the novel, Jurgis is shifted to a proletarian hero, who finds salvation in socialism.The study ends with conclusions and the list of resources consulted with abstract in both Kurdish and Arabic languages.
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Martin Amis’s novels are known for their representation of the dilemma of human beings in facing the problems of their age. Problems that may lead them to the status of crisis and expose them to sever psychological pain. This paper deals with issues related to identity and the traumatic conditions of the characters in two of Martin Amis's outstanding novels which are Money and London Fields. Using a descriptive analytic approach, I will be highlighting how these characters pass through a status of crisis while living in an era of material idolization and greed that results in death of love and human noble emotions which consequently lead them to the verge of apocalypses. Although the setting of these novels are United Kingdom (UK) and the United States of America (USA), the author wants to present the case as an international problem that may affect human life in different places of the world. Through a harsh language and a realistic manifestation, Amis is disclosing the true face of modernity which apparently is very attractive but deep inside is full of atrocities and disaster. I will also indicate how some of the main characters overcome the challenges they face and are able to find out their lost identities after paying high prices both emotionally and psychologically.
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