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Volume 4 Number 7 July 2018

A Feminist Reading on Sleeping Beauty


Authors: Shuang Yi
Pages: 106-111
Abstract
The fairy tale is usually regarded as children’s literature. It shapes the characters through rich fantasy and exaggeration. The story reflects every aspect of our life and has an educational effect on readers, especially on children. Originated from the folk lore, fairy tale is one of the most important materials for the research on local conditions and customs at that time as well as its function of moral education. However, feminists analyze it from a brand new perspective. As most of the fairy tales are written or edited during the period when men hold the leading role in society, it is unavoidable that they contain the ideology of patriarchy to some extent. The paper will focus on one classic fairy tale in The Grimm Fairy Tale -- Sleeping Beauty (Briar Rose in Grimm’s book) and try to analyze the contexts from the angle of feminism. The purpose is to reveal the patriarchy hidden behind the seemingly romantic story. What’s more, it is also helpful to put forward the depth and scope of the research of feminism to improve and develop the women’s liberation, and enrich the diversification of the methodology and perspective of research. From the angle of feminism, it can be concluded from the fairy tales that in patriarchal society, women are in the position of “the other” and totally dependent on men, mentally and financially. They have to obey the social rules set by men and meet men’s pleasure for the seemingly happy ending. There are so much left for us to accomplish in the purpose of changing this situation.

Literature of Exhaustion in John Barth’s Chimera: A Narratological Study


Authors: Alireza Farahbakhsh ; Narges Yeke Yazdani
Pages: 100-105
Abstract
This paper seeks to discern the narratological aspects of John Barth’s famous essay titled “Literature of Exhaustion” in narrative qualities of his own novel, Chimera. Different narrative elements are discussed in the process of reading the essay; they include the death and rebirth of Barth as the author of Chimera, intertextual narrative qualities, hypertextual narrative qualities and the functions of parody and self-reflexivity. Each concept will be discussed in a separate section. The first section aims to discuss the author’s role in the process of narrating the novel to assert his identity and authority in the novel; moreover the author tries to immortalize himself by appearing and disappearing in each part of the novel. The second section focuses on ‘intertextuality’ as one of the major themes of the novel. As Chimera includes the network of textual relations, it is not an independent text and it is a combination of different pre-texts. The third section is going to examine the influence of ‘hypertextuality’ on the novel as it marks the role of pre-existing texts on Chimera. The last section intends to examine the functions of parody and self-reflexivity because the novel undermines the artist’s personal development and the process of narration. The article concludes that parody and self-reflexivity can be regarded as main key terms in John Barth’s narrative techniques. In his Chimera, Barth tries to change the old to the new by various modes of interntextuality, self-reflexivity, and parodic relations such as paradying character’s features to construct and explore a new narrative context.