Critical Literary Studies

This study examines how The Maximus Poems by Charles Olson and The Opening of the Field by Robert Duncan build on Fredric Jameson’s critique of pastiche, offering a more immediate and engaged model of postmodern writing. Drawing on Jameson’s reading of Lacan—particularly his use of schizophrenia as a way to describe the breakdown of the signifying chain in late capitalism—the research explores how both poets confront the fragmentation of language and its absorption into commodified culture. Olson’s projective verse emphasizes presence and locality, while Duncan’s layered syntax and mythic references resist fixed interpretation and invite open-ended exploration. The study uses close reading and theoretical interpretation to show how both poets turn poetic form into a site of resistance, where language—though fractured— still carries meaning and shapes how we see the world. In Jameson’s terms, these works function as “symbolic texts,” where personal expression and social contradiction intersect. Rather than mirror postmodern disorientation, the poems open up a space for a different kind of awareness—one that moves through the tension between imagination and structure, and points toward the hope and possibility woven into poetic form. 

The impact of colonization on identity construction has emerged as a critical area of inquiry, particularly among postcolonial writers, novelists, and theorists. This paper investigates the psychological and cultural ramifications of colonial domination on the identity formation of colonized individuals, with particular emphasis on experiences of alienation and identity loss. Kiran Desai’s novel The Inheritance of Loss (2006) is analyzed through the theoretical frameworks of Stuart Hall’s concept of cultural identity and Frantz Fanon’s exploration of colonial trauma and its effects on subjectivity. This study contends that colonization fundamentally disrupts the continuity of cultural identity and induces a condition of psychological fragmentation, resulting in enduring displacement, alienation, and a decentered sense of self among the colonized. The findings demonstrate that in The Inheritance of Loss, colonial trauma manifests through internalized cultural inferiority, linguistic alienation, and intergenerational identity rupture, particularly visible in the judge’s self-erasure and Biju’s diasporic disillusionment. These experiences reveal a uniquely postcolonial condition of fractured identity, marked by alienation, double displacement, and a decentered sense of self rooted in the enduring psychological legacies of colonial domination.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is a cornerstone of Gothic literature, renowned for its dark settings and themes of death, isolation, and vengeance, all of which evoke terror. These elements create profound unease in readers, which Sigmund Freud calls the uncanny. While Freud’s psychoanalytic account emphasizes repressed fears and childhood anxieties, Nicholas Royle’s expanded theory redefines the uncanny as a literary mode which destabilizes identity. This article aims to apply Royle’s theoretical framework to analyze Shelley’s characterization of Victor Frankenstein and his Creature, focusing on five central concepts: silence and isolation, thought, the double, the phantom, and the death drive and repetition. From this vantage point, the study depicts how silence resounds with ghostly echoes in solitude, thought can make the identity fractured, doubling becomes a rupture of the self, the phantom uncovers hidden traumas and inherited secrets, and the death drive takes form as compulsive repetition which haunts the mind. These elements reframe the novel’s horror as uncanny. The findings suggest that through a Roylean perspective on the uncanny, Shelley’s Frankenstein transcends traditional Gothic boundaries by dramatizing the instability of the self and the persistence of what cannot be fully known or repressed.

This research explores fictional representations of the Iraq War by American writers, focusing on how neglecting soldiers’ individuality renders their psychological suffering invisible. This theme is especially prominent in American literature on the Iraq War, where protagonists — often American soldiers — experience deep psychological crises and struggle to reintegrate into civilian life. Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds and Roy Scranton’s War Porn portray the war’s devastating consequences and lasting impact on soldiers. Even after returning home, these soldiers face ongoing psychological battles. Using theories of Survival Psychology and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, this paper analyzes how these novels illuminate the American war in Iraq and its far-reaching effects. The war affected not only Iraqi civilians but also American combatants, inflicting enduring psychological harm. This study identifies a recurring pattern of destruction that affects both the external environment and individual identity. By highlighting the psychological trauma and the depersonalization of soldiers’ suffering in War Porn and The Yellow Birds , the paper exposes the complex and often baffling aftermath of war. These narratives reveal how war continues to shape the lives of American veterans long after combat ends, offering a deeper understanding of the hidden psychological toll of modern warfare.

The present paper intends to study Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go from the perspective of Cyborgian concepts of hybridized subjectivity, speed, metamorphic becoming, bio-narrative and bio-discourse, which intersect with cyborg biotechnology to create the bio-capital characters. Ishiguro portrays the non-unitary bio-subjectivities along with challenges of clones through tracing the main character’s memories. The Cyborgian theories of Donna Haraway, Paul Virilio and Rosi Braidotti are mainly used to analyze the genetic organs of the selected novel in bio-discourse. Cyborg biotechnology drains its bio-power, merges borderlines between the conventional polarities, de-politicizes it by destroying inequality in a natural history of transhumanism and, ultimately, makes hybridized privileged – unprivileged subjectivity. Cyborg bio-capital body is a kind of genetically modified object with a shifted boundary; a bio-semiotic body, not the human physiological body. In the novel, this study explores that cyborgian bio-capital subjectivity is the imitation of the original one due to three reasons: first, it has lost its human uniqueness; second, its self-automation is changed into a possible being; and, finally, its biological facet has constructed the equal bio-subjects. A cyborgian bio-capital subject is partly organ and partly machine in the cyborg biotechnology. The thematic features of Ishiguro’s novel as the quintessence of cyborg bio-narrative, including nomadic bio-subjectivity, development of fabricated trans-subjects, bio-animals, trans-genetic organisms, decentered subject, bio-molecule and mechanical body, are the focal points of analysis in this study.

The present paper examines the juxtaposition of Wyndham Lewis's polemical and disputatious works Hitler (1931) and The Hitler Cult (1939) under the theoretical framework of the political trajectories of Fascism to present an intriguing lens through which to examine Lewis's evolving views on fascism and Adolf Hitler during the tumultuous peak and trough of the twentieth-century authoritarian regime. By delving into the nuanced language of Lewis's notorious writings on fascism, the conjectural boundaries of his intuitive, conceptual, and artistic framework established his reputation as an avant-garde advocate of fascism. In this fashion, the paper encapsulates Lewis's vision of his manifestation of the political insights of fascist predispositions, which reveal a loading towards specific socio-political matrixes over the course of the interwar period (1919-1938). Building logically on this political concept, the present study is meant a) to reflect Lewis's initial fascination with the fascist movement and its charismatic leader, Adolf Hitler, to portray him as a dynamic and transformative figure who embodies the spirit of the times and offers a viable substitute for the perceived failures of liberal democracy and socialism; and b) to represent a critical reassessment of Hitler and the fascist movement in light of the escalating tensions and atrocities of the late 1930s. In The Hitler Cult (1939), Lewis adopts a more skeptical and condemnatory stance toward Hitler and the cult of personality surrounding him by exposing the contradictions and hypocrisies of Hitler's regime and criticizing its propaganda techniques, suppression of dissent, and expansionist ambitions.

This article presents new outlooks toward gender transfiguration in David Hare’s Skylight and Pravda in the light of Judith Butler’s theory of Gender Performativity. It examines whether the linguistic performance of Hare's characters is an innate feature or a hallucinatory effect of their naturalized and gendered bodies. Butler asserts that performativity is a ritualized production and a constrained reiteration of cultural intelligibility under the prohibition pressed by power regimes. Surveying Skylight and Pravda elucidates that gender identity is an imitation, which leads Hare’s characters to resignify and recontextualize the parodic gender reproductions. Moreover, the gendered subjects were subordinated to the language that interpellated them, so that each individual became a linguistically stylized occasion. Therefore, the ever-shifting identities of Hare’s characters were established by the power of the injurious language that interpellated the subjects. Springing from the discussion about gender performativity of Hare’s characters, the article concluded that identity is a phantasmatic construction, and what an individual performs is a non-intrinsic parody of the culturally constructed regulations. As a result, the culturally acquired gender is crafted based on the socially recognizable standards, which shape the directionality of the self-representation.

The present article intends to apply Deleuzist tenets on Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra . Deleuze posits that an artwork is a desiring machine endowed with the basic components of becoming woman, becoming animal, nomadism, war machine as well as BwO (body without organs). Drawing upon them, this research aims to dissolve Rome-Egypt duality and its corresponding genderized subjectivity and racial bias. The major questions raised in the research include: First, how do the early modern biracial lovers, from contrasting geographical spaces, merge in parallelism, and to what effect? Second, to what extent is the course of desubjectification carried out? Third, what vantagepoint (in culturalists’ parlance) is envisioned for the future polity? To answer these questions, the present study probes into Deleuzist theories to demonstrate the characters’ decisiveness to transgress hegemonic codes and legitimate ideological power relations. These formulations align with Ovidian tradition of metamorphosis. Bodies in flux, reenact Shakespeare’s lovers in perpetual passage both within and without until Rome and Egypt – summing up the white/nonwhite polarity – consolidate. The disruptive theories appropriated by the lovers drive them to the communion of the disadvantaged. The final egalitarian gesture would envision a future polity of inclusion, diversity and equity.

Since its creation, Shakespeare’s Hamlet has served as a mirror to the anxieties of its time. Though various analyses of the contemporary film adaptations have routinely addressed themes of surveillance, the precise psychological effects of this surveillance on the protagonist are still under-examined. This paper addresses this lacuna by examining how Michael Almereyda’s (2000) and Gregory Doran’s (2009) film adaptations of Hamlet present the protagonist’s tragic flaw as not indecision, but rather a pathological narcissism engendered by a postmodern culture of surveillance. The paper contends that these films utilize the omnipresent camera—both diegetic and non-diegetic—to create a Hamlet whose self is fragmented by the inexorable gaze. This perpetual watching, coupled with a cultural movement toward hyper-subjectivity, engenders a pathological narcissism that becomes integral to his personality. The results and findings in this article demonstrate that these adaptations employ strategies such as mise-en-abyme not merely to condemn surveillance, but to diagnose a specifically postmodern malaise wherein the self is caught in a feedback loop of self-recording and performance, ultimately leading to a questioning of the nature of identity in an era of digital mediation.

Post-colonial reading looks at the description and analysis of literary works from a different window than the mainstream literature and science. From this theoretical approach, the works of Abdulrazak Gurnah contain important Factors that represent and describe the two worlds of the West and the East in different ways. To examine these Factors, five novels of Gurnah have been analyzed in this article. These stories are illustrative examples for the world of Gurnah’s writing and stories. To analyze the texts, I have used the categories of time, place, and language as ‘moments’ that articulate this world. The analysis shows that these variables have affected the content and theme, of his stories in different ways, of course with differences in quantity and quality. Despite the difference in the description of the two worlds that Gurnah has dealt with, with the passage of time his stories have tended towards globalization. The attitudes of these texts are mainly placed in an ‘in-between’ space and are not necessarily placed on one side of the border. In general, despite the relatively more positive representation of the western world, Gurnah has fulfilled his mission in raising the voice of subalterns to some extent.

Forough Farrokhzad (1934-1966) emerged as a distinguished intellectual contemporary Iranian poet whose poetry, while embracing the notion of “tragic culture,” rejects every dualistic structure and gender essentialism. Instead, it posits the potential for human empathy, thereby contributing to a deeper understanding of gender dynamics within the broader context of human experience. According to “Typology of Women” in Nietzsche's writings, the tragic vision is determined in the theory of the “Dionysian Woman” after passing through the stages of “desire for illusion” and “desire for truth.” On the other hand, this potentiality within Farrokhzad's poetic corpus exhibits a gradual and evolutionary character. In accordance with her aesthetic approach, it serves as a manifestation of the “transformations of the soul” delineated by Nietzsche. His conceptual framework posits a “transformative journey of the soul,” progressing from the stage of submission (camel) through rebellion and destruction (lion) to ultimately attain the stage of innocent creation (child). Employing an analytical-descriptive methodology, this study elucidates the manifestation of the transformative paradigm in Farrokhzad's poetry, primarily evident in her dual modes of "erotic" and "rebellious" poetic expressions, which reflect her engagement with metaphysical themes. Furthermore, an exploration of the imprint of the "love of fate" concept in Farrokhzad's verse is presented as a derivative outcome.

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels has long been read as a satire targeting the 18th-century British politics, scientific rationalism, and imperial ambition. But beneath its satirical surface, the novel grapples with deeper philosophical questions—about how desire is shaped, how subjectivity is produced, and how individuals are caught within the systems that define them. Although scholars have extensively explored the text from political and ethical perspectives, its engagement with the dynamics of desire has not been examined through the theories of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Slavoj Žižek. This study brings those frameworks into conversation with Swift’s narrative, drawing on the concepts of desiring-machines, social-machines, the Body without Organs, and the desire of the Other. Through a close reading of Gulliver’s four voyages, the paper traces the dynamics of desire and Gulliver’s gradual alienation from the social structures, culminating in an ontological rupture—a rejection of the codes that once shaped his identity. Rather than upholding Enlightenment ideals, Swift offers a portrait of a subject unravelling under their weight. In this light, Gulliver’s Travels emerges not only as a political satire, but as a profound meditation on desire, control, and ontological rupture.