فهرست مطالب رویا الهی

The present article endeavors to examine Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist so as to attest to the political resistance effected by its formal aspects. The researchers are inclined to survey Hamid’s novel in the light of the mind-sets of the illustrious contemporary philosopher and literary critic Fredric Jameson. According to Jameson, it is a falsehood to think that the form of a work of art should be considered to be less important than its content owing to the fact that the formal aspects of art embody resisting possibilities and are prone to galvanize the reader into subversive activity. The question the article poses is that whether the novel’s development of dramatic monologue can provide the reader with a unique opportunity for political resistance. In this regard, the formal aspects of the novel can silence the American citizen in order to enable the reader to perceive the world through the eyes of the novel’s Third-World speaker.

This article is an attempt to study subject formation in relation to gender in Margaret Atwood's (1939-    ) Surfacing (1979) and Bodily Harm (1983) within the frame of the uncanny. The issue of gender has been discussed in Atwood's novels from different perspectives but this article claims that what have been rarely discussed in Atwood's novels are the unrepresentable realities in relation to gender which can be foregrounded by dislodging the uncanny. The uncanny which was once a rather  minor issue in Freudian oeuvre has been reconsidered in the contemporary era by prominent thinkers, such as Jean-François Lyotard and Julia Kristeva whose ideas are used in elaborating the unrepresentability of gender in this article. The idea of the female sublime is the most significant issue in the context of the uncanny in this article which challenges any representational system of gender formation and problematizes our preconceived hence familiar perceptions of gender formation and reevaluates them in an unfamiliar, dynamic and unrepresentable space.

The Uncanny whose presence at least refers back to Freud's 1919 essay of the same title has been reconsidered by critics in recent century. The uncanny is no more attributed merely to the realm of aesthetic or psychology as Freud attempted to explain. It is rather an interdisciplinary issue to discuss our modern anxieties such as migration, gender, history, etc. Margaret Atwood (1939- ) is a contemporary Canadian writer who has reconsidered history. What makes her different from other writers is the way she rereads history. This article is an attempt to study The Handmaid's Tale, her 1985 novel through the uncanny. In her novel, history is a narrative whose uncanny reading foregrounds the unrepresentable realities in relation to subject formation. Through the uncanny, history which has been taken for granted as a familiar, clear and unchangeable "fact" becomes a strange, ambiguous and alternate "sign". The theories of Sigmund Freud and Jean-François Lyotard are mainly consulted to delineate the uncanny and history and their tendency to foreground the unrepresentabilities of subject formation. In Atwood's novel, Language and memory function as two significant uncanny issues whose indecisive and abeyant nature shun any historical "fact" to actualize as a familiar, clear and unchangeable given. This in turn, keeps the reader incessantly in the state of indecision and ultimately renders the process of subject formation as unrepresentable.