English Text Construction - Volume 13, Issue 1, 2020

Helen Oyeyemi’s 2011 novel Mr. Fox artfully remasters the “Bluebeard” fairytale and its many variants and rewritings, such as Jane Eyre and Rebecca. It is also the first novel in which Oyeyemi does not overtly address blackness or racial identity. However, the present article argues that Mr. Fox is concerned with the status of all women writers, including women writers of colour. With Mr. Fox, Oyeyemi echoes the assertiveness and inquisitiveness of Bluebeard’s last wife, whose disobedient questioning of Bluebeard’s canonical authority leads her to discover, denounce, and warn other women about his murderous nature. A tale of the deception and manipulation inherent in storytelling, Mr. Fox allows for its narrative foul play to be exposed on the condition that its literary victims turn into detective-readers and decipher the hidden clues left behind by the novel’s criminal-authors. This article puts the love triangle between author St. John Fox, muse Mary, and wife Daphne under investigation by associating reading and writing motifs with detective fiction. Oyeyemi’s ménage à trois can thus be exposed as an anthropomorphic metaphor for the power struggle between the patriarchal literary canon, established feminist literature, and up-and-coming (black British) women writers, incarnated respectively by Mr. Fox, Mary Foxe, and Daphne Fox.

This article traces the textual elaboration and expansion of dreams as embedded narratives in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). Drawing on Marie-Laure Ryan’s modal system, the objective is to lay bare Coetzee’s staging of the possibility of encountering the other in the world of dreams as the only domain that is not controlled by territorializing forces of the imperial state. Ryan’s modal system is used to differentiate the fantasy universe (F-universe) of the protagonist’s dreams as the only possible venue for such an encounter with the other. We suggest that such unauthorized (I-Thou) encounters – which closely accompany (and interact with) the events in the textual actual world (TAW) – widen the doubtful magistrate’s horizon of vision and facilitate his liberation by disconnecting him from the imperial state.

This article focuses on an interrelation of various scales of perception in Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015). Basing itself on Timothy Clark’s delineation of scalar ambiguities, it argues that Satin Island’s main protagonist, U, embodies a process of growing awareness of the world’s infinite complexity, discovering personal authenticity by withdrawing from action. His perspective is contrasted with the all-pervading Koob-Sassen, which represents a level of complicatedness that contradicts an individual perspective and the possibility of causal thinking. Finally, U’s entire narrative is cast into doubt by an oil spil, signifying a global occurrence whose rift effects are impossible to gauge, let alone predict. As these various scales are explored, the article shows that the novel thematises different levels of what Clark terms the Anthropocene disorder, in which human action can counterintuitively bring about catastrophic consequences.

We report the findings of a diachronic study of 100 research paper abstracts published in four different periods (from 1943 to 2018) in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, one of the most prestigious astrophysics journals written in English. Our main results show that research paper abstracts have evolved over time in the sense that they have become longer, more informative and more precise. They also reveal an overall increase in the number of authors, active and modal verbs, self-mentions and compound groups per total number of words. Likewise, compound structures are becoming more and more complex. These outcomes may be explained in terms of a rising collaboration scenario and an attempt to increase authors’ visibility.

This study aims to determine the linguistic and discoursal differences in essays produced by Iranian test-takers of TOEFL-iBT in response to integrated and independent writing tasks. A sample of 40 essays, written by 20 Iranian test-takers of scored integrated and independent writing tasks, was compared and analyzed in terms of the four latent constructs of text easability (fourteen variables), cohesion (nine variables), lexical sophistication (nineteen variables), and syntactic complexity (six variables), using the Coh-Metrix 3.0 program. Results indicate differences in the linguistic and discoursal features of integrated and independent writing tasks. The findings reveal that the scores on writing tasks of EFL test-takers can be anchored empirically through the analysis of some discourse qualities like cohesion. Independent tasks contain more connectives and particles so they can result in better discourse structure organization and the generation of more cohesive devices. Stakeholders of the test should verify test constructs in terms of particular contexts like EFL and communicative views of language proficiency. Consequently, the findings contribute to the ongoing validity argument on TOEFL-iBT writing tasks for designing and interpreting scoring schemes for the writing component of the test.