Fuck Autonomy: Neo-Orientalism and Abjection in Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission

Fuck revisited

This paper is a follow up to the investigation of McEnery, Baker and Hardie (2000) into the use of the word fuck in spoken British English. Both that paper and this are based on the British National Corpus. However, at the time of writing in 2000, the analysis of fuck in the written BNC had not been completed, hence the 2000 paper focussed on spoken English alone. In doing so, it explored the w...

neo-orientalism, terrorism, and “anticipation of history” in don delillo’s mao ii

the post-9/11 fiction is regarded as one of the indispensable parts of contemporary american literature. prominent novelists such as martin amis, john updike, and don delillo have directly addressed the 9/11 terrorist events in their fiction. delillo’s novels, however, have been of especial interest to the literary circles due to their decades-long preoccupation with the issue of terrorism in i...

Television and Orientalism

Orientalism, proposed by Edward Said (1995), refers to the network of interlocking discourses about the “orient” constructed in western civilization. The orients, in western conceptions, are stereotypically inflated others drastically different from the collective imagination of the civilized West. Said’s argument was initially focused more on Europe and Islamic Culture, but has been applied to...

Book Review: China and Orientalism

Anorexia and Abjection: A Review Essay

This article draws on a review of Megan Warin’s 2010 book, Abject Relations: Everyday Worlds of Anorexia, to discuss the ways in which a feminist ethnographic approach might disrupt dominant cultural narratives of eating disorders and embodiment. My argument draws on feminist work on figuration and ‘body image’ to discuss how the anorexic body becomes a figure of abjection, both in media images...