Overcome with horror at the bloody climax of the battle of Pharsalus, Lucan's narrator threatens to derail his own epic project by wishing tears would perish, and claiming he will stay silent. This assertion – immediately disregarded – illustrates a paradox in Lucan’s text: his work is epic, both in its martial content and its meter, but the nature of civil war disrupts the narrative by provoki...

This study aims to offer a critical analysis of V. S. Naipaul’s second Islamic travelogue Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (1998), which chronicles the author’s excursions to the 4 non-Arab Muslim countries of Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia. This critique is presented, firstly, through problematizing the author’s theorization on the theme of Muslim conversi...

Narrative, the creation of imaginative projects and experiences displayed in expressions of movement and voice, is how human cooperative understanding grows. Human understanding places the character and qualities of objects and events of interest within stories that portray intentions, feelings, and ambitions, and how one cares about them. Understanding the development of narrative is therefore...

Trumpeted as the artistic hallmark, central to Russian Formalism, and persistent ever since, estrangement yet remains an ill-defined term.We have nothing like a comprehensive approach to it, equipped to specify its workings by kind, medium, art form, discourse level, historical context. Narrative, Shklovsky’s own forte, would appear the paradigm case, as the most inclusive genre and the most ak...