İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Bölümü / Department of English Language and Literature

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Browsing İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Bölümü / Department of English Language and Literature by Author "ALBAN, GILLIAN MARY ELIZABETH"

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    Maternal, Snake-Tailed Foundress Melusine a Transformative, Monstrously Transgressive Serpent Woman Under the Gaze
    (Indiana Univ Press, 2024) ALBAN, GILLIAN MARY ELIZABETH
    This article evaluates the fascination of the protean serpent woman or siren Melusine, demonstrating the illustrious heritage of this hybrid foundress of the Lusignan dynasty. Her supernatural achievements are celebrated through history, literature, and culture, despite her betrayal by her weaker husband. As feminine nymph or maternal foundress, Melusine and her achievements serve as exemplary for powerful women. She represents woman castigated as abject, monstrous, and possessed of a terrifying vagina dentata from the voyeuristic male perspective, whose usurping gaze destroys her authority. She yet remains revered and desired for her creative life force and the phallic or hermaphroditic power represented by her tail. Whether as snake -tailed woman in Eden or connected with fertility goddesses or the Virgin Mary, the protean Melusine emerges as a magnetic, sovereign figure in her self-sufficient sexuality. Her transgressive prowess as a theriomorphic, transformative woman breaks through boundaries and overturns debilitating assumptions regarding her sex, blazoning her unruly force. Castigated as Other while revered as divine, her story rises above any slighting gaze to amaze us with her stunning tale or tail, evoking admiration despite all attempts to diminish her.
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    The Paradox of Thanatos: Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: From Self-Destruction to Self-Liberation by Tanguy Harma
    (Cankaya University, 2023) ALBAN, GILLIAN MARY ELIZABETH
    Tanguy Harma’s monograph entitled The Paradox of Thanatos: Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: From Self-Destruction to Self-Liberation, with its fascinating cover illustration by Vasil Stanev, “2 Sugar Skulls,” presents an in-depth study of the Beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg as inheritors of the European Existentialist and the American Transcendentalist tradition. It elaborates these two writers’ struggle to achieve meaningful life in post-war America under hegemonic capitalism and consumerism, crushed beneath conformity and social control, as they struggle towards a more authentic self-expression and liberation beyond the restraints that curtail transcendence.
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    The Petrifying, Apotropaic Gaze and Matrixial Vulva of Medusa, alongside Genital Display Figures
    (Indiana University Press, 2023) ALBAN, GILLIAN MARY ELIZABETH
    This review of ten articles, books, and chapters on the mythic Medusa and genital display figures illustrates Medusa's petrifying and apotropaic gaze and her engulfing vulva, or eye blazoning her matrixial force, as her severed head demonstrates her abiding pro-creative, indomitable force. Through a history of women held under scrutiny while feared by patriarchy, with men projecting their own fear of castration onto them, the Medusa figure emerges as stun-ningly uncastrated, asserting her force and returning her stony gaze in the reflexive action pivotal to this myth. Objectified under the male gaze, her vulva faces the viewer, her inspirational force born through the birth of Pegasus even as she is crushed in rape and death. The mythic Medusa and vulva display women persistently retain their hold on the male unconscious in rising above castiga-tion, asserting their amazing procreative force over life and death, enabled through Medusa's stunning tale and transfixing gaze.
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    Thanatos in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Homer and Barker’s Achilles, Barnes and Saunders: Warding off Death before Release into the Unknown
    (Çankaya University, 2021) ALBAN, GILLIAN MARY ELIZABETH
    This paper offers an existential approach to writers’ responses to death, evaluatingtheir different views regarding our ultimate destiny, Thanatos. It considers thedeliberations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the archetypal death-ponderer, and Homer’sAchilles, approaching our own time through contemporaries like Julian Barnes,George Saunders and Pat Barker. These writings spanning hundreds of yearsdemonstrate our desire to evade or control death, while anticipating ultimatejudgment for behaviour in this life, before loosening our attachment to life inaccepting our final fate. We watch Hamlet’s concern for his father’s ghost tortured inpurgatory and his wish for revenge, as it became surpassed by Hamlet’sinterrogations concerning his own mortality, still obsessed by death, to which forcehe finally surrenders. While Achilles had initially embraced a gloriously heroic,youthful death, Homer subsequently shows him mourning the loss of his life in Hades;Pat Barker shows Achilles as reconciled to death, even while attached to life inconsidering his child’s future. The contemporary George Saunders presents Lincoln’syoung son caught in a liminal bardo of the dead, who are trapped in attachment totheir mortal state, while Willie is enabled to transition to his final state of possiblejudgment and closure. Julian Barnes’ wish-fulfilment dream or desire of heaven offersthis ideal as a debased, corporeal paradise, leaving his character longing for meaning,even while trapped in the limitations of his own personality. Visions and dreams fromHomer and Shakespeare onwards offer cryptic clues regarding unknown futurestates. These literary reflections through disparate eras indicate the humanaspiration to evade death and whatever lies beyond it, while often positing a finalsurrender to death, alongside a wish for it to make sense of life through karmicresolution.