Research Articles (English)
http://hdl.handle.net/2263/2977
2024-03-29T01:24:30ZThe gender performances of Margaret Atwood's Aunt Lydia in the Testaments
http://hdl.handle.net/2263/95362
The gender performances of Margaret Atwood's Aunt Lydia in the Testaments
Weiss, Jordyn Jade
This article examines the different gender performances that are demonstrated by the version of the character Aunt Lydia that Margaret Atwood focuses on in her latest novel, The Testaments (2019). The research is primarily informed by Judith Butler and her various works on the subject of gender performance. In The Testaments, Lydia performs two gender roles: publicly, that of the Aunt, and, in private, that of a woman who aims to restore Gileadean women’s freedom. The gender of the Aunt is performed consciously, whereas the second gender is performed significantly more unconsciously.
2023-04-01T00:00:00ZEditorial : Plunging into the depths of scholarly critique
http://hdl.handle.net/2263/94032
Editorial : Plunging into the depths of scholarly critique
Gray, Rosemary A.
This issue of English Academy Review provides both contributors and readers of our internationally acclaimed journal with a rare opportunity to imagine themselves as novice deep-sea divers, not in search of a Tennysonian Leviathan but rather plunging into the depths to view the wonders of one of the world’s surviving coral reefs, a metaphor for the contents of this issue. As we view Nature’s bounty beneath the ocean, we may not be able to identify all the wondrous types of fish, sponges, anemones, plankton, octopi, starfish and other sea creatures, or the seaweed, ferns, rocks, barnacles and carnivorous plant life beneath the seas. In like manner, we may not be familiar with the wide variety of texts explored and interrogated here or the scholarly readings thereof, yet we will still be able to enjoy them and to be intrigued by dipping into them.
2023-01-01T00:00:00ZAcademic, keyword, and plain English subtitles for natural sciences students : intralingual views
http://hdl.handle.net/2263/93906
Academic, keyword, and plain English subtitles for natural sciences students : intralingual views
Kruger-Marais, Elmarie; Kruger-Roux, Helena
The study is an analysis of the reaction of students in a faculty of natural and agricultural
sciences (NAS) to subtitles and also includes an investigation of their responses thereto.
Reception of and responses to academic English (close to verbatim transcription), plain
English, and keyword English subtitles were explored by showing participants subtitled
videos related to the content of their module. Participants were then asked to complete
demographic and affective questionnaires, and participated in focus group interviews to
investigate their reception of the various subtitles. The results show that participants
responded particularly well to plain English subtitles. The focus group interviews indicated
that they found all three sets of subtitles useful for note-taking purposes, adjusting the speed
at which they accessed and processed information by pausing the videos, highlighting
important information in the study materials, and being able to engage aurally and visually
with the materials. From a higher education perspective, this emphasises students’ readiness
for subtitles as an academic mediation tool.
CONTRIBUTION : This article aims to fill existing gaps in the fulfilment of higher education
institutions’ language policies, which have been exposed by the thrust for multilingualism
in higher education. Research into academic subtitling as an academic mediation tool can be
used to bridge this gap, thereby supporting innovative research in higher education.
DATA AVAILABILITY : The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article and/or its supplementary materials.
2023-08-31T00:00:00ZToward de-exceptionalizing migration : intra-African diasporic writing in South Africa
http://hdl.handle.net/2263/93543
Toward de-exceptionalizing migration : intra-African diasporic writing in South Africa
Fasselt, Rebecca
Migration has never before occupied such a prominent place in African
cultural production as it does today. Yet, notwithstanding an increasing
focus on intra-African migration in the social sciences, literary migration
scholarship has largely focused on African migration to the West, as the
growing body of studies on outward-oriented Afropolitan migration novels
indicates. In this paper, I examine how the Afropolitan consciousness
that structures South-North migration novels is reframed in literature of
continental migration and mobility in post-Marikana South Africa. While
the themes of xenophobia and migration have emerged as central preoccupations
in South African literature from the early 2000s onward, there
has been a shift in literary production more recently with the publication
of a range of works by African diasporic writers in South Africa. Drawing
on Ekow Duker’s Yellowbone (2019), Rémy Ngamije’s The Eternal Audience of
One (2019), and Sue Nyathi’s The Gold Diggers (2018), I argue that these texts
interrogate South Africa’s complex relationship to “Africanness” and forge
new pathways for continental dialogue that allow us to resituate South
African-based writing within larger debates in contemporary African literary
studies. This category of intra-African diasporic fiction calls into question
simplifying binaries of outward, Western-oriented African writing and
locally produced popular, yet internationally disregarded, texts (Harris).
Rather, it scrutinizes the idea of “Africa” in global literary circuits from
the position of intra-African diasporic subjectivities. Drawing attention to
the long history of intra-African mobilities, the cross-continental thrust in
many of these works also productively speaks to recent scholarly efforts to
reframe migration studies in ways that insist on the de-exceptionalization
of migration and the breakdown of binary formulations of migrant and
non-migrant identities.
2022-09-01T00:00:00Z