This article traces the process in which the narrator Offred's narrative is constructed as her own survival strategy. Faced with unavailability of adequate discourse to narrate her story in the suffocating totalitarian society, Offred comes up with a highly fragmented narrative where she constantly vacillates between past and present, her own life experience and others' life-stories, and reflections on past events and alert consciousness on current surroundings. Thus the narrative form becomes an amalgam of disparate lives, different moments, and contradictory perspectives. While this highly fragmented narrative form constantly blocks the unified representation of Offred's and others' life-stories, the very aesthetic form enables the oppressed people's lived lives to be narratively re-inscribed without losing their respective individualities. Further, throughout the narrative process, a sense of solidarity between the narrator and the oppressed others emerges in contradistinction to the dominant and abstract discourse of the regime whose edifice is maintained essentially by the legitimation and imposition of its national idea(l). Ultimately, the narrative's dialectical movement of fragmentedness and solidarity, collectivity and individuality demonstrates that the 'beyond' of dystopian present lies not in a coherent utopian program but the ruptures that social others make within the society.

Exploring the combined racialization and sexualization of African American females, this essay first examines American modern history in which black women have been deemed contrary to the norms of heterosexuality and white patriarchy. I consider how such cultural stigmatization of black women's sexuality has served to justify their exploitation and oppression in modern American history. This essay then addresses Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (2006), a cinematic adaptation of British novelist P.D. James's 1992 book of the same title, in order to investigate how the discursive violence enacted on black females has been challenged or applied to post 9.11 global culture.
Paying attention to the film's Americanization of James's story such as obvious visual and verbal references to the US that are not in original, my essay explores how Cuarón's cinematic text bears and interrogates the traces of white values and rhetorical strategies of American racial segregation. In this way, I analyze Children of Men as cultural space in which American racial and sexual discourses are questioned or articulated. My essay concludes that the film reinscribes the ideology of compulsory heteronormativity while powerfully criticizing the cultural logic of racial segregation.

The conspicuous obsession of the upper middle class people in Virginia Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out, is with work. Upholding a Victorian legacy that valorizes work and industry as a vehicle of the self-cultivation and a proof of personal respectability, these people feel responsible for, involved in, or at least interested in the project of educating Rachel Vinrace whom they largely presume to do nothing. Rachel's idleness in the novel is at once taken for granted and yet subtly berated and controlled. Far from doing nothing, however, Rachel constantly thinks, reads, and grows in her own way. Through the very act of being idle―thinking, reading, and playing which nobody in the novel is capable of reading properly― she educates herself. Her ostensible idleness provides an alternative possibility of Bildung as it enables her to see through the social system and to reach the epiphanic moments of being, that is, the moments of an impersonal state connected to things and beings, while fashioning her own individuality. Rachel is not so much killed off by social reality or the marriage plot that plots against her life; rather, she remains undead, living beyond the world that she finds lazy and dull.

This paper introduces the Scottish immigrant writer, Leila Aboulela, originally from Sudan and, using the perspective of postcolonial feminism, explores her Muslim novel, The Translator (1999) for its familiar yet strange aesthetics. Through her first critically-acclaimed novel, Aboulela, often called an Islamic feminist writer, sensitively portrays the romance between Sammar, a young Sudanese widow who is also an Arabic translator, and Rae, a Scottish Islamic scholar at a British university. The novel, set between Aberdeen, Scotland and Khartoum, Sudan, juxtaposes the contrasting landscapes and cultures of the two cities where Sammar tries to embrace and build her new home, both spiritually and physically. This paper compares and contrasts Charlotte Bronte's iconic Jane Eyre characters, Jane and Rochester, to Sammar and Rae, a Muslim Jane Eyre and a converted Orientalist, but within a context of profound religious devotion. Not only does The Translator rewrite or 'write back' to the classic Orientalist fantasy, in which white men save brown women from brown men, as the prototypical definition on the relationship between colonizer and colonized; but the novel also explores the unsympathetic Western gaze on Muslim identity, migration, and Islamic spirituality.

Elizabeth Joscelin's published advice for her unborn baby (The Mothers Legacy to Her Vnborn Childe) marks another landmark of 17th century female advice literature. The significance of this work in the history of feminism does not stop at the fact that it was written by a woman in early modern times, when women were not usually allowed to voice their thoughts in print form. The beauty of Joscelin's work lies in the multi-layered, well orchestrated imagery and language, which pronounce existential anxiety and fear of pregnancy more clearly than any other comparable mother's advice book in her times. By comparing her advice book with other books of the same genre, especially with Dorothy Leigh's Mothers Blessing, this paper attempts to illustrate the salient features of her work. To appreciate fully the significance of these features, the paper also describes the historical shift of a religious discourse on maternal death. While noting the metaphorical collapse of gender distinctions in post-Reformation discourse on maternal death, the paper concludes that Joscelin's text, especially the closet scene, registers rich interplay of binary oppositions between death and life, between private and public, and between woman and man, of course, not to strengthen but to problematize them.