Joyce Carol Oates’s Carthage as a Modern Troilus and Cressida Story

Both Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Joyce Carol Oates’s Carthage are set in times of war, the Trojan War and the Iraq War, respectively, and both are associated with love on the one hand, and loss on the other. In fact, Carthage contains many echoes of the past, with the main characters of the novel, Juliet and Cressida Mayfield, bringing connotations with Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s works, their father compared to an old Roman general, and Corporal Brett Kincaid likened to the hero of chivalric romances. The aim of this article is to argue that Oates’s Carthage may be seen as a modern Troilus and Cressida story in that it presents aspects of medieval reality in a modern guise, with the most poignant and recurrent association being that between the “war on terror” and medieval crusades and the emotion dominating the characters’ reactions being rage, an emotion which occurs in relation to the fires of passion and war in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, and Joyce Carol Oates’s Carthage.

Navigating and resisting the compulsory military service in Iran: embodied experiences of non-heterosexual Iranian men

In the homosocial space of the all male military service, (hetero)masculinity and gender normativity are promoted and bravery and warrior mentality are highly valued. On this basis, policing gender and sexuality is a relevant issue, aiming to reward heteronormativity and hyper masculinity and marginalize non heterosexuality and gender nonconforming performances. In the Iranian context, since the Iran Iraq war (1980–1988), military service has produced a feature of militarized (hetero)masculinities through the cult of martyrdom. It enforces soldiers to stand up against the enemy, be willing to seek martyrdom and sacrifice themselves in order to protect the Islamic Iranian homeland. It is a symbol of entering adulthood and during that time young men are expected to embody the official ideology which revolves around heteronormativity and strict gender norms. In this context, the focus of this paper is the embodied experiences of those young conscripts who do not embody the (hetero)masculine ideal, because they are either non heterosexual or do not fit into the strict regime of gender. Drawing on ethnographic data, and policy documents, this paper shows how the idea of the (hetero)masculine ideal has been translated into practice through the dispositif of the sarbazi and how some young Iranian non heterosexual men try to resist conscription while others try to find ways to carve out a liminal heterotopic space during their military service.

From Religious Eulogy to War Anthem

This article looks to two songs, “Layla Said” and “Mammad, You Weren't There to See,” to examine the politics of representation, race, religion, and nationalism in late twentieth-century Iran. “Layla Said,” a religious eulogy sung by Jahanbakhsh Kurdizadeh, would serve as inspiration for the most popular song of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) in terms of melody, rhythm, and lyrics. Kurdizadeh, a visibly Black Iranian, is not popularly remembered as the source of the eulogy, an omission that compounds many of the politics of Black representation in Iran. Through an investigation of film, aural recordings, photographs, and more, this article follows the many mutations of the eulogy-turned-anthem to identify the various ways ethnography and documentary works frame blackness in Iran. Kurdizadeh's life and marginalized legacy highlights the tacit erasure of blackness on the national stage in Iran.

International Law in Public Debate

Public debates in the language of international law have occurred across the 20th and 21st centuries and have produced a popular form of international law that matters for international practice. This book analyses the people who used international law and how they used it in debates over Australia's participation in the 2003 Iraq War, the Vietnam War and the First World War. It examines texts such as newspapers, parliamentary debates, public protests and other expressions of public opinion. It argues that these interventions produced a form of international law that shares a vocabulary and grammar with the expert forms of that language and distinct competences in order to be persuasive. This longer history also illustrates a move from the use of international legal language as part of collective justifications to the use of international law as an autonomous justification for state action.

Winds of War: Epistemic and effective control in political discourse on war

This paper explores two key domains of speaker’s stance in discourse: epistemic and effective stance (Marín-Arrese 2011, 2015, 2021). The framework draws on Langacker’s (2009, 2013) distinction between the effective and the epistemic level in the grammar, and the systematic opposition thereof between striving for control of relations at the level of reality and control of conceptions of reality. Epistemic strategies pertain to the epistemic legitimisation of assertions, by providing epistemic support and epistemic justification for the proposition (Boye 2012). Effective control is aimed at the legitimisation of actions and plans of action. The joint deployment of epistemic and effective stance acts effects a strategy of combined control over hearers/readers’ acceptance of conceptions of reality and of plans of action. This paper studies the strategic use of these resources in the discourse of war and presents a case study on their use by two politicians, President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, in political speeches and statements during the build-up to the second Iraq war. Results indicate significant qualitative and quantitative differences in the preferred stance strategies in the discourse of the two politicians.