This article seeks to lay out the use and importance of English in Malaysia from the time when the British ruled what was then Malaya to the present moment. When the British came to colonize the country, they brought with them their culture, their language and their beliefs. They introduced the English language as the medium of instruction in the primary and secondary schools. After Independence, nationalistic sentiments arose and in 1970, Bahasa Malaysia was introduced as the medium of instruction in the schools. With the advancement in science and technology and the advent of globalization, English regained part of its lost status. It is now taught in the schools both at the primary and secondary school level and it is also used to teach Science and Mathematics. Besides, it is the medium of instruction in the private colleges. Currently, the mastery of the English language is much encouraged at all levels of education—from the primary to the tertiary level. Moreover, English is much needed in the commercial and business sectors and as a result, besides the government-sponsored schools, many private and commercial institutions have mushroomed and English is taught for specific purposes.

On 3 August 1665, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, barely eighteen years old, penned a long, dutiful, and what he ultimately char acterizes as a "tedious" letter to his mother. 1 He wrote from off the coast of Norway, while on board the ship Revenge during his first tour of duty in the Second Anglo-Dutch war. The letter begins in a measured, strangely untroubled voice. Rochester describes a crowded "Harbour where twenty shipps were to anchor not bigg enough for seven ... [the ships] all together one upon another ready to dash in peeces ... [the men] having nothing but bare Rocks to save [them]selves, " only to assure his mother in the same sentence that all is well-"that it was not fit for mee to see any occasion of service to the King without offering my self " and that he is "full of hopes and expectation," an earlier naval encounter having proven remunerative, resulting in "shirts and gold, which I had most need of " (Letters, 47). At first, then, Rochester's surviving the ensuing battle that will result in his reporting the loss of "over 500 men and six captains" in the space of only three hours can seem unremarkable. 2 The letter reflects the wry Rochester we have come to expect, in control of his imagery even as he documents a world without order. The details of impending destruction may accumulate, but Rochester's certain tone temporarily reassures, with immediate military action reframed as figurative service to the king and the threat of physical loss reimagined as the occasion for financial gain.By the end of the letter, however, the hint of trauma underlying Rochester's preferred appearance of ease cannot be missed. He con cludes the letter abruptly and crudely with a stark reminder of the brutal economies of war rather than the promised riches allud ed to earlier. The physical loss, as reported to his mother, is both real and immediate: "Mountegue & Thom. Windhams 1 John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, The Letters of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. and intro. Jeremy Treglown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 49. References are to this edition. 2 Rochester's numbers are somewhat off here. Six captains were killed, but only 189 English and 100 Danish soldiers were killed. There were, however, 239 wounded, making the total number of those either wounded or killed 528. For descriptions of the battle and number of casualties, see Jeremy Treglown, Rochester's Letters (Chicago: University of

This article interrogates the function and effect of the penultimate paragraph of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, where Oroonoko is tortured and executed. Reading the scene through the prism of European practices of ritual punishment and judicial torture as well as New World uses of torture, I argue that the scene cannot be read, as many critics have, as one of martyrdom. Rather, the scene emerges as closer in its rhetorical aims to those articulated by Elaine Scarry in her seminal analysis of torture, The Body in Pain (1985). As is the case with judicial and modern torture, Behn deliberately produces a body in pain in order to give legitimacy to the truth of her own narrative. Yet, in opposition to that brutal practice, she simultaneously exposes the fictional nature of her own narrative power. She reminds the reader of the violence inherent in any appropriation of another’s story for one’s own political or literary ends, and in the process paradoxically produces one of the first modern, democratic subjects.

On Monday, Dr. Fordyce forbad the child's having the breast, and we therefore procured puppies to draw off the milk.—William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” 1