Journal of Critical Studies in Language and Literature

Text, Truth, and Theory: Rethinking History through Postmodern and Post-Structuralist Lenses

2025-07-26T11:57:28+00:00

This paper aims to deconstruct the claim that postmodern narrative lacks historical truth by challenging the assumption that history no longer retains its representational authority. Drawing on Linda Hutcheon's concept of historiographic metafiction, the study argues that postmodern historical fiction remains deeply engaged with history, though it reconfigures historical truth as a discursive and textual construction rather than a transparent mirror of the past. Through the theoretical frameworks of post-structuralism and historical skepticism, particularly the works of Hutcheon, Edward Said, and Hayden White, I argue that postmodern fiction does not abandon history but interrogates the conditions under which it is constructed, represented and legitimized. Rather than being ahistorical, postmodern historical fiction critically examines the processes of narrativity that shape historical understanding. Hutcheon emphasizes that texts are never severed from their historical and material referents, and postmodern fiction highlights this embeddedness by drawing attention to its own narrative strategies. I draw on Toni Morrison's Beloved as a case study of postmodern historical fiction that challenges conventional historiography. Morrison's work exemplifies how fiction can recover silenced voices and reconstruct forgotten histories, presenting history as a site of struggle rather than a settled truth. Ultimately, postmodern fiction does not retreat from history but instead foregrounds its complexities and contradictions. In an age marked by post-truth and historical revisionism, such fiction offers vital insights into the contested nature of historical knowledge and the ongoing need to question how the past is narrated.

Aryanism and Anti-Semitism: An Overview of Wyndham Lewis’s The Hitler Cult (1939) and The Jews, Are They Human? (1939)

2025-07-26T12:09:19+00:00

This paper examines Wyndham Lewis’s critical engagement with race politics in his 1939 polemical texts The Hitler Cult and The Jews, Are They Human?, with particular focus on the themes of Aryanism and anti-Semitism. Written at the height of Nazi influence, Lewis’s works reflect a complex interaction with the racial ideologies of the period. In The Hitler Cult, Lewis analyzes the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement, shedding light on how the doctrine of Aryan supremacy was employed to legitimize a radical reordering of society and the conceptualization of a “new human.” In The Jews, Are They Human?, Lewis turns his attention to the pervasive anti-Semitism of the era, interrogating the prejudices that underpinned Nazi rhetoric and policy. This paper explores how Lewis, through irony and critical distance, exposes the contradictions and dangers embedded in fascist racial doctrines.

Otherness and Gender Subjugation in Antony and Cleopatra

2025-08-10T12:25:47+00:00

Indeed, a significant disjunction is present between the Orient and the Occident; Orientalism by Said is a thorough example of this strong argument. Ethnic and gender hierarchies entangle the two great noble persons from East and West, turning into a fire that blindly follows footsteps, endangerously shaken or may threaten to undermine the whole Empire’s foundation. The article is an in-depth and comprehensive research study that explores how the Empires of the East and West are perceived as morally corrupt due to their excessive emphasis on duty. It outlines the factors of trade, as well as the relationships between Eastern and Western powers, and cultural assimilation, in the context of Imperial Rome’s expansion to the East. Additionally, it highlights Shakespearean themes of love and madness. Furthermore, it also asserts that Europe at the time of the play, Antony and Cleopatra, was anxiously concerned about the expansion of Islam, as well as the Turkification and conversion of colonizers to nativization. The conclusive argument is an assurance that masculinity and femininity are the two contradictory subversions that corrupt civilizations.

Poetic Alchemy: An Integrated Linguistic Model for Representing Romanticism in the Translation of Wordsworth’s Poetry

2025-09-10T12:45:40+00:00

The metaphor of ‘poetic alchemy’ frames a critical challenge in poetry translation: extracting the literary essence from simple utterances as an alchemist extracts the ‘philosopher’s stone’ from raw materials. Reconstructing the external syntax structures in ST does not automatically lead to the representation of their literary features and in-depth meaning in TT. Though scholars do notice the existence of something ‘under the surface’ of utterances in poetry, it is still difficult to specify what it is, because each literary school embodies distinctive characteristics that cannot be generalised. Therefore, this study takes Wordsworth’s romantic poems for experimental analysis, attempting to explore how to determine the literary uniqueness of certain poetic schools and reproduce it through appropriate strategies. An Integrated Linguistic Model (ILM) is designed for textual critical analysis: The Skopos Theory + Communicative and Semantic Translation. The former helps justify the criteria of ‘representing romanticism’ in translating Wordsworth’s poems, while the latter describes avenues to meet those criteria. This model operates as a ‘crucible’ that facilitates ‘transmutation’ in an alchemical process. Lessons drawn from the analytical experiment are aimed to provide references for scholars as well as translators who focus on digging out hidden essence in literary translation.

Depression and Healing: An Analysis of the Duality of Space in August Wilson’s Fences

2025-09-15T11:57:34+00:00

This paper employs Henri Lefebvre’s theory of spatial production to analyze the duality of space—as both a source of trauma and a site of healing—in August Wilson’s Fences. It argues that physical, ideological, and symbolic spaces within the play, particularly the workplace, the baseball field, and the fenced yard, are instrumental in shaping the intergenerational trauma experienced by the African American Maxson family in mid-20th-century America. The workplace and baseball field function as arenas of racial exclusion and structural oppression, epitomizing the systemic barriers that inflict profound psychological wounds on Troy Maxson, hindering his aspirations and perpetuating economic and social inequality. Conversely, the fenced yard evolves into a complex representational space. Initially embodying Troy’s need for control and defense against external and internal threats, the fence gradually transforms into a space of potential healing. Facilitated by Rose Maxson’s intervention, the yard becomes a locus for familial connection, reconciliation, and the challenging of transgenerational trauma. Cory’s eventual participation in Troy’s funeral, signified by the shared ritual of song, marks a crucial step towards breaking the cycle of inherited pain. The paper concludes that Wilson masterfully utilizes space, especially the fence’s shifting symbolism, to demonstrate how environments of oppression can simultaneously harbor the potential for resilience, recovery, and the reclamation of identity and belonging within the African American experience, ultimately offering a vision of healing amidst historical trauma.

Urban Hellscapes: Milton’s Pandemonium and the Political Theology of the East India Company

2025-09-19T12:30:54+00:00

John Milton’s Pandemonium, the infernal capital built by Satan and his followers, presents a potent allegory for the East India Company’s (EIC)^[i] exploitative urbanization and economic dominance in 17th- and 18th-century South Asia. It’s grandiose, and yet morally bankrupt architecture mirrors the EIC’s transformation of Indian cities like Calcutta and Madras into hubs of imperial extraction, where wealth was accumulated through coerced labour, taxation, urban racialism and militarized trade. This paper demonstrates that both Pandemonium and the EIC’s colonial urban centres functioned as sites of oppressive governance, where dazzling facades concealed systemic violence and moral decay. Furthermore, the paper highlights how Milton’s critique of Satan’s tyrannical ambition prefigures the eventual collapse of the EIC, underscoring literature’s capacity to interrogate imperial capitalism. This analysis employs Roy’s Colonial Urbanism, combined with Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicism, to investigate the conundrums. The study calls for further interdisciplinary explorations of early modern literature as a mirror to contemporary capitalist exploitation.