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This research closely reads a short story by Alfian bin Sa’at entitled “Birthday” in relation to the historical narrative and the political economy of 1990s Singapore using the perspective of Terry Eagleton’s Marxist literary criticism. The result of this study shows 1) that Alfian challenges a portion of the historical narrative of Singapore’s political economy in the 1990s at which ideology works to justify the power hierarchy, yet altogether highlights the other portion of it to shed some light on the oppressed; 2) that challenging and, at the same time, highlighting the historical narrative are Alfian’s strategy to endorse his political commitment while not being openly partisan; and 3) that Alfian carefully configures the literary form and content of his work – through his use of multilingualism and Singaporean English – to advocate his idea of the future of Singapore and – through his use of simple sentences that build a stream-of-consciousness plot – to underline the complex social realities whereby issues of inequality (gender, racial, and class) are correlated. This study implies that the use of Marxist literary criticism in reading a literary work from a formerly colonized country cannot neglect the traces of neo- and/or colonial experiences since colonialism itself, following Marx and postcolonial theorists, is a more acute form of capitalism. However, this paper finds that, different from the usual postcolonial reading, the Singaporeans (its capitalists and government) are as complicit as the Western neo-colonial enterprises for the inequalities and oppression happening in the region.

This research analyzes how the narrative structure of Poe’s tales, namely “The Black Cat” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” can be imposed with a certain idea about Self or the nature of human subjectivity. Poe’s tales illustrate that human subjectivity consists of two contrasting tendencies for destructiveness/imagination and reflection/cognition. They also show that the Self is always in tension with the Other. To counter this tension, Poe’s tales suggest that the Self should take a moment to reflect upon its subjectivity and let the Other reveal its alterity before interacting with it so that a more harmonious, or at least less problematic, relationship between the two can be established. Reading the selected stories using the Barthesian perspective, this paper sees this imposition as an act of myth-making which in itself is always ideological since there is a certain political and/or economic agenda driving it. Hence, the myth of Self in Poe’s tales needs to be demystified, a process through which Poe’s idea of Self is unmasked as his cries for those in power to take a moment of reflection about the mess they had put into the 1840s United States political-economic condition. This result implies that myths are not always constructed by the ruling class to justify its domination, but can also be written by the oppressed group to voice its concern. In this way, this paper subscribes to the Foucauldian notion of power.

Written in the spirit of critical tradition, this paper aims to demystify the hegemony induced in the media coverages about the critique of Indonesian former president, Megawati Soekarnoputri, towards its millennials for ‘lacking contribution to the country’. By applying genre, deconstruction and dynamic perspective of ideological tension analyses, this article reveals how three different medias report the phenomenon differently by bringing up different topics to be discussed for their own purposes. While scrutinizing the relationship between the phenomenon and its news reports, this paper sees a need for a transvaluation to the concept of nationalism which in the end negates itself since the conception of nationalism itself has to do with power struggle that has the potential to degenerate the Self and harm the Other.

This article interprets Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" using systemic functional grammar analyses (genre, transitivity, mood structure, and thematic structure) and thus implements the view that textual or linguistic justification is crucial for a credible literary reading. The SFG analyses result in the textual symptoms signifying that the short story deals with existential and feminist issues pessimistically that calls for a reexamination of Sartre's and Beauvoir's existentialismespecially on the notion of freedom, intentionality, and desire. However, the implementation of SFG itself raises a problem since the interpretation can be achieved without even implementing it in the first place. This research, therefore, highlights the question of the position that linguistic analysis has in literary reading; re-addressing the fundamental philosophical problem on the notion of credibility, objectivity, and methodology. However, the application of SFG is very useful in understanding Kate Chopin's literary style and the proof of the non-existing line between language use and gender.the story to 'counter' this feminist reading by showing the limit of its theoretical practice implemented in, to use Lacanian term, the symbolic order which is society. Berkove (2000), for instance, interprets this story as an illustration of how an exaggerated and egoistic self-assertion can destroy one's soul while Chong-yue & Li-hua (2013) read it as an illustration of an ungrateful and unfaithful wife. This type