Haitham M. Talafha

Hashemite University | HU · Department of English Language and Literature

The female protagonists in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Fadia Faqir’s My Name Is Salma (2007) face similar themes and explore the effects of adultery on women. Despite their different temporal, geographical, and cultural contexts, the novels fight oppression and marginalization. The authors carefully and delicately place the...

This study examines the archetypal stages of human responses to fear and anxiety during pandemics and epidemics in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” Amir Tag Elsir’s Ebola 76, and COVID-19. Pandemics and epidemics elicit a range of psychosocial response mechanisms in individuals due to innate and unmanageable feelings of fear and unc...

This article examines the absurdity of wars and grounds their intersecting contours of enormous death (physical and psychological), destruction, and trauma notwithstanding their location, grounds, pretext, or repercussions. It underlines the scathing critiques of their constituencies in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and Ahmed Saadawi’s...

This paper examines the function of the mosque in Leila Aboulela’s fiction, focusing mainly on Minaret. To realize this goal, the study elucidates the forms of materialism that burden the world of Minaret, demonstrating how this world is pulled between two conflicting material ideologies that paralyze Najwa, the protagonist. The eventual malfunctio...

This paper aims at foregrounding the reciprocity and (meta)physical unity between the self and humanity in Walt Whitman’s “The Sleepers,” which shapes up Whitman’s ontological and spiritual experience of humanity. Importantly, Whitman’s views about what humanity should look like and the way it must be conceptualized are premised upon his microcosmi...

This study analyzes the centrality of peace and place in Wendell Berry’s environmental poetry. It harbors on their intersection in order to construct a feasible argument about Berry’s vision of sustainability as constituted by peace and place. It further links the theoretical premises of ecocomposition to practice through critically analyzing Wende...

This study investigates the stylistic features that mark the creation of powerlessness, and ultimately “otherness,” in fiction. To this end, this study focuses on two fictional characters: Jelka Sepic in John Steinbeck’s “The Murder” and the old man in Gabriel García Márquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.” Most of the clauses associated wit...

In “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade,” Edgar Allan Poe presents his criticism of the Orientalist discourse of his time, explaining ultimately the conditions that empowered and sustained this discourse for a long time. This authorial standpoint is traced and reconstructed in the process of three stages. First, Poe introduces an Orientali...