US novelist and journalist Helen Benedict’s 2011 fictional work Sand Queen, the first novel about the Iraq War (2003–11) written by a woman, has great potential for feminist approaches, especially regarding its use of gender-identity models. Through her positioning of the narrators, her multiple narratives, and the linguistic elements in this work, Benedict has created a unique artistic structure that has broad implications for the study of narrative, the themes of war, displacement, and trauma, and cross-cultural understanding. The current study examines Benedict’s work to demonstrate her gender-conscious view of war in her depiction of US soldier Kate Brady and Iraqi medical student and interpreter Naema Jassim as the central consciousnesses through which the narrative is told. Taking advantage of third-wave feminist approaches to gender, the study discovers diverse perspectives and distinctive viewpoints on the concept of gender identity. Offered by the novel’s first-person character-narrators, these viewpoints explore the fictional universe mapped out by Benedict in the text. In the context of the Iraq War, based on models of gender identity interspersed throughout the narrative, the study reveals how the challenges and/or reaffirmations of normative gender ideologies dominated patriarchal systems of military institutions.

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Waiting for Godot and Endgame are rich in terms of interaction between characters and their surrounding contexts. The present paper examines these interactions according to the mathematical theory of games proposed by Steven J. Brams in Divine Games: Game Theory and the Undecidability of a Superior Being. The framework of Search Decision is used to examine the differences between the two plays in terms of interaction between the “state of nature” and Person, which provides a clear understanding of the reasons behind strategies characters may take within uncertain environments.

“The Monkey Puzzle” is one of the most interesting as well as intimidatingly complex poems of Marianne Moore. It envelops Moore’s attitude as an objectivist poet moving towards the relationship between language and the world. The scarce critical attention it has received does not reflect the high status it should have in Moore’s oeuvre. The present paper builds on the body of research that does exist, and from there moves on to a detailed analysis of the poem in an attempt to show how a catachrestic divergence from significatory processes is at work all throughout this poem. The reinterpretation of the poem through a focus on its  catachrestic bounciness will not only shed light on some of its most complex imagery, but will also show how a philosophical filament runs through the whole poem and invites the readers to trespass the boundaries of the significatory walls drawn around our imagination.