Edward Said’s groundbreaking text, Orientalism is a contrapuntal reading of imperial discourse about the non-Western Other. It indcates that the Western intellectual is in the service of the hegemonic culture. In this influential text, Said shows how imperial and colonial hegemony is implicated in discursive and textual production. Orientalism is a critique of Western texts that have represented the East as an exotic and inferior other and construct the Orient by a set of recurring stereotypical images and clichés. Said’s analysis of Orientalism shows the negative stereotypes or images of native women as well. As a result, Orientalism has engendered feminist scholarship and debate in Middle East studies. For Said, many Western scholars, orientalists, colonial authorities and writers systematically created the orientalist discourse and the misrepresentation of the Orient. George Orwell as a Western writer experienced imperialism at first hand while serving as an Assistant Superintendent of Imperial Police in Burma from 1922 to 1927. One of Orwell’s major concerns during his life was the issue of imperialism and colonialism which is reflected in his first published novel, BurmeseDays. Orwell’s own political purpose in this novel was to convince the reader that imperialism was morally wrong. Although he saw imperialism as one of the major injustices of his time and had declared himself against Empire, in Burmese Days, Orwell, consciously and unconsciously, repudiated his views and followed the Orientalist discourse. In this study, the authors demonstrate how Orwell maintains a white male Eurocentric imperialist viewpoint. The authors attempt to examine how the ‘female subalterns’ are represented in Burmese Days. While Oriental women are represented as the oppressed ones, they are also regarded as being submissive, voiceless, seductive and promiscuous.

This paper aims to study the relation between space and power in Nadine Gordimer's first novel of the apartheid regime, The Lying Days (1953) and her first novel of the postapartheid era, None to Accompany Me (1994) in the light of Michel Foucault's theory of space and power. The paper first introduces Gordimer and the concept of apartheid. Then, it states the common engagement of Foucault and Gordimer with the concepts of space and power in their work, the significance of the study and the limitations of the research. After offering the literature review, the researchers discuss Foucault's theories and his key concept of heterotopias (other spaces) and the relation between his ideas and apartheid. After that, drawing on the theoretical insights of Foucault, the researchers explore how Gordimer's selected novels display an ongoing and developing understanding of the importance of space as a way of explaining key questions of power, resistance and social organization and reflect on the geopolitics of apartheid and its policies of spatial control in South Africa. The researchers also explore how heterotopias as sites of social struggle and resistance challenge apartheid. The researchers examine space as a technique of control and domination, as well as a means of resistance.

ABSTRACT. East of Eden one of the most controversial works by John Steinbeck since its publication up to now has been receptive to many critical discourses in almost all of the critical approaches. One of the most important reasons to this critical reception is its wide circle of themes and symbolic nature. Having created a world full of universal values, Steinbeck succeeded to challenge many of these values. This paper tries to examine East of Eden with regard to feminist approach. By an over view of the main female characters in the novel especially Cathy Ames as devil incarnate and also the relationship between male and female characters, this paper intends to go through the issue much more deeply and find the dominant viewpoint dominating the whole atmosphere of the novel toward the expected role of women in society and family.

ABSTRACT. This essay claims that the rejection of Lukács's realism is quite problematic, in the sense that his opponents such as Adorno and Althusser symbolically used the name of Lukács and perpetuated the suspicion of Lukács's compromise with Stalinism. The essay argues that Lukács's model of reflection is not couched in Stalin's socialist realism, a theory that assumes the transparency between aesthetic forms and reality, but rather raises the essential problems of the condition of writers in capitalist society. Lukács's realism aims at providing a practical strategy to overcome cultural reification, focusing on the mediation between an author and his material condition. An investigation of Lukács's realism reveals that Lukács's way of understanding realism arises from his emphasis on objectivity rather than subjective reflection such as Kantian philosophy. The essay claims that this is the kernel of Lukácsean reflection theory signified by an aesthetic of realism definitively opposed to Stalin's socialist realism. From this perspective, the essay takes Althusserian Marxism as the occasion to stage a wide consideration of anti-realism. It proposes to elucidate the implicit assumptions behind the decline of Lukács's realism, and the reification of cultural fields that gradually came to dominate Western literary apparatuses.

Theodore Dreiser, an American novelist, had experienced financial insecurity in his family and tasted the bitterness of poverty. So, through the contrast of affluence and poverty, he depicted class distinction, oppressive ideologies, and social inequality in a capitalist and consumerist society in his literary works. It is perceivable that through a Marxist reading of his works, one can feel the way he tried to portray the urban capitalist society in America in the late nineteenth century and the negative effects of capitalism on individuals and their behavior and values. This paper intends to discuss Marxist critique of class oppression, commodification, and consumerism in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. The characters in this novel commodify and oppress one another in order to achieve their own personal goals; someone victimizes another person to his own convenience and becomes a social climber while there is no financial security for the other one who falls to misery. The difficult conditions of the workers and the lower class versus the comfortable conditions of the higher class in such a capitalist society are discussed in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. Besides, the ruling class constructed false ideologies which just benefit them and they instill these ideologies into the minds of the lower class and in this way the labor source, or base, is governed by the superstructure. So, the role of ideology in the society and the Marxist view of its function in capitalist society are also discussed in this paper.