Noraini Md Yusof

Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia | ukm · School of Language ​​and Linguistics Studies (SOLLS)

The absence of psychogeographical awareness is a critical factor contributing to the lackadaisical attitudes towards the place and its environment. As a result, it enables an individual to fully experience a location, both physically and intellectually, while also gaining a feeling of self-discovery and self-realisation. The purpose of this study w...

Travellers’ enthusiasm can drive them to explore new locations, especially those that are unknown and foreign to their eyes. Nor Faridah Abdul Manaf's anthology of poetry, The Art of Naming (2006) reflects the people and locations that played a significant role in crafting her poems. Using the role of a flâneur, which is closely related to the theo...

The main intention of this paper is to interrogate the strategies of fear deployed in Malaysian and American haunted house films. Haunted houses have been known to exist in real life which trigger the impulses of fear in the viewers when they watch such horror films. There are a few elements which constitute a haunted house that is also related to...

This paper attempts to provide an alternative perspective of Abdullah Hussain’s Interlok (2010) by examining the original version of the novel published in 1971. Exploring the controversy through claims made by the general public, academics and experts through the Internet, we argue that those who found the novel racist in essence are themselves gu...

The terms ‘ethnicity’ and ‘race’ bear social and political importance in a multicultural society. Introduced in Malaysia by the British back in the colonial era, these terms have been influencing the politics of the state and everyday life of the grassroots. Since the early days of independence, Malaysia has been witnessing ethnic conflict and righ...

In this article, we attempt to unravel the family-based haunted house film patterns in both Malaysia and America. Certain types of tropes and attributes have been used by horror filmmakers over the years to define the family motif-pattern of haunted houses in the media. Some of these elements have undergone change over time but most of them still a...

This paper outlines details of a local-culture matrix that maps the cultural content of a supplementary, local-culture-based three-year reading programme in English for secondary schools in Terengganu, Malaysia. The reading programme, called "Your Language My Culture" (YLMC), is designed by a group of researchers from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia...

p>Recent interest in multimodality recognizes the integration of text and image in meaning-making as representing reality. It has also been argued that with the use of digital communication, the meanings of visual and verbal data can be easily manipulated rendering them unreliable. As such, a close and critical reading of the text is required to di...

Kee Thuan Chye in all four of his selected plays has appropriated and reimagined history by giving it a flair of contemporaneity in order to draw a parallel with the current socio-political climate. He is a firm believer of freedom of expression and racial equality. His plays become his didactic tool to express his dismay and frustration towards th...

Since the European colonization of the East, stereotypical depictions of their perceived Orient as exotically backward and Muslim women as submissive and lecherous have been appearing as major themes in Western visual discourses. These representations, manifested to justify Western presence in the East, pervade even after the tragic events of 9/11....

influence on popular culture and video games is far reaching. There exists a deep familiarity with Lovecraftian tropes in South East Asia, but most of these tropes have been transmitted not through the originating texts, but through expansions and adaptation of Lovecraft's monsters in popular culture. These influences draw not just from Lovecraft's...

This is a policy paper for the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Assembly related to Resolution on Protecting the Rights of Older Persons and Enhancing Their Quality of Life verified by Datuk Roosme Hamzah (Secretary of Dewan Rakyat, Parliamen Malaysia).

This is a policy paper for the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Assembly related to Resolution on Protecting the Rights of Older Persons and Enhancing Their Quality of Life verified by Datuk Roosme Hamzah (Secretary of Dewan Rakyat, Parliamen Malaysia).

As a very controversial issue in Islam, polygamy allows Muslim men to marry up to four wives. It has been told that the Quran encourages polygamy; thus, it is a part of Islamic Sharia. Many Muslim men practice it at their whim and they contend that they do so to follow the Sunnah. Amongst Muslim countries, Malaysia is one of those countries where p...

The world we live is fraught with visual images. These images are central to how we communicate and represent in our lives. They are of significance in the imagination and construction of cultural identities. Visual communication is more ubiquitous than ever before because images have the ability to quickly influence viewers both cognitively and em...

As Malaysia is a multiracial country, Prime Minister Najib has introduced the concept of 1Malaysia to protect each ethnic group and to bring unity to the country. To inform people about the importance of unity, media has been employed to publicize the concept by distributing images of 1Malaysia logo. 1Malaysia is being fetishized now so much so tha...

Portrayals of women in the mass media have always been a source of contention amongst scholars. Right from the emergence of the mass media, women have been stereotypically portrayed as an inferior being whose primary domain was home and who was viewed as a sexual object. In spite of feminists’ efforts to stop women’s denigration in the media over t...

In the aftermath of the tragedies of 9/11, the West began to represent the East in a darker way. The western mass media, and the art and literary markets are riddled with visual discourses that consolidate the stereotypical representation of the Orient. One of these visual discourses which strengthen the stereotypes is the portrayals of Eastern wom...

As an upshot of 9/11, the literary market in the West saw a proliferation in writings by and about Muslim women. Many of these works are memoirs which focus on Islam, a patriarchal society, and the state's oppression on women. These Muslim women memoirists take the western readers into a journey of unseen and unheard events of their private lives w...

This paper examines the decolonization process in Najib Al-Kailani's novel, Nābulyūn fī al-Azhar (Napoleon in Al-Azhar-1980). The study explores the ways the colonized react to the colonizers in order regain liberty, freedom, and sovereignty of their land. Decolonization is the reverse process of colonization by which colonies become independent of...

This paper discusses the incorporation of images beside text in contemporary pedagogy at higher education. This is due to the visual turn which prioritizes the visual, and the changes in technology which innovate information distribution. The interest on images and text is evident in the e-poetry created by three learners of a creative writing clas...

In this paper, we intend to examine two contemporary American novels, Lorraine Adams’ Harbor (2004) and John Updike’s Terrorist (2006) with the aim of investigating the Islamophobic irony in their descriptions of characters, views and incidents that are relevant to the Middle East. Our analysis of these novels is framed based on the modes of irony...

More than a decade after the US-led intervention of Afghanistan, traditional and tribal customs still play a significant role in the everyday lives of people, especially women. History has proven that women have been playing a significant role in shaping the course of Afghanistan but unfortunately, they are always subjected to different degrees of...

In this paper, we intend to analyse an American novel, John Updike’s Terrorist (2006), with the aim of examining its critical standpoint of the American women’ marriages to Muslim migrants. This essay explores the reasons which lead Updike to refuse this social hybridity and how that refusal disseminates biased attitude against the Muslim Americans...

The influx of memoirs by and about Iranian women has saturated the post-9/11 Western literary market. These memoirs, which emerged after 9/11 and the President Bush's 'Axis of Evil' speech addressed to Iran, North Korea and Iraq, are written to quench the curiosity of the Western readers. However many of these memoirists have adopted Western Orient...

Much ink has been spilled on the history of veiling, reveiling, and unveiling in various parts of the Muslim world, particularly in Iran. However, little mention is given in most scholarly works as to how it affects women and its ramifications in society. By examining the history of veiling in Iran and the study of veiling as represented in Marjane...

The National Higher Education Strategic Plan of Malaysia focuses on graduates who are innovative and knowledgeable to meet the standards and challenges of 21st century. This paper, then, explores how an innovation practice has taken place in a course entitled "Gender Identities: Malaysian Perspectives" where students scrutinize gender across Facebo...

Traditional education of literature would do injustice to both students and the discipline in this age of globalization. This is the era when teachers should use critical pedagogy to teach any genre of literature. Nowadays, a great number of memoirs form the Middle East perpetuate Islamophobia; yet some of them are taught at schools in the West. Pe...

The Western literary market is saturated with the Middle Eastern women memoirs since 9/11. What caused this saturation lies in the curiosity of the West to know about the Middle Easterners after 9/11 and the following President Bush's 'Axis of Evil' speech addressed to Iran, North Korea and Iraq, followed by launching his 'war on terror' project. T...

This essay is motivated by the issue of terrorism as mirrored in early twenty-first century Arabic fiction, particularly after the 9/11 attacks and the US occupation of Iraq. We examine the interpretations of terrorism in Hussein al-Saqqaf’s Qissat Irhabi (2007) with the aim of exploring the treatment of recent history and also uncovering the ideol...

The main purpose of this article is to present the hidden features of Post Ttraumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD) in one of the major works of Harold Pinter, English playwright and 2005 Nobel Prize winner for literature. The selected play is Ashes to Ashes which was written in 1996. This play has been analyzed from the perspective of Trauma Theory whic...

This paper examines the perspectives of young Malaysians in their re-interpretations of two significant historical aspects of Malaysia, namely events in SejarahMelayu and in the country's struggle for independence. Dismantling the poetic narrative is a pre-requisite to their practice of re-visioning the nation's past prior to transforming the narra...

In this action research, we relate literature with everyday realities. Students have the perception that literature is something remote and unconnected to their lives. By determining the awareness and sensitivity of students about current news relating to gender issues, which is the focus of the course “Gender Identities: Malaysian Perspectives,” t...

Travel writing in this region is a construct of a land that is imagined, owned and domesticated. A re-reading of Western representations of Malaya/Malaysia will disclose the ways colonialist discourse perpetuates and sustains colonialist ideology. Many students encounter problems reading and discerning the ideology operating in the discourse. An in...

We contend that the issues of Human Rights are central in the plays of Harold Pinter, English playwright and Nobel Prize winner for literature in 2005. By focusing on two of his early plays both published in 1957, The Room and The Birthday Party, we show features of human rights concerns which have been neglected in previous research on Pinter. Whi...

Marital satisfaction is an important aspect to study because it is a global evaluation of the state of one's marriage and a reflection of marital happiness and functioning. This study aimed to ascertain the differences in marital satisfaction based on demographic variables. Subjects for this study were 423 married couples. The instrument used was E...

This paper explicates the contemporary voices of Malaysian women projected towards raising awareness on violence to the public through Young Women Speak Out, an anthology of short stories and poems written by victims of violence and sexual abuse. This collection is published in 2007 by All Women's Action Society (AWAM), an independent feminist orga...

This paper is based on an action research done in an undergraduate class on science fiction. The course, SKBS 2193 Science as Narrative, is part of the BA Literature in English programme at the National University of Malaysia. The objectives of the course are to develop students' communication and critical thinking skills through discussions of dif...

This paper examines the memories of a woman who was displaced and dispossessed of her home. Writing in retrospect of her childhood in Palestine, Ibtisam Barakat, in her memoir Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood, depicts with humor and resilience the love, attachment, struggle, and fear of the motherland she has left behind and of the new home...

This article links Jungian literary criticism on archetypes with contemporary postcolonial theories on colonial discourse in travel writing (David Spurr) and the worlding of a colonized land (Gayatri Spivak) in order to understand the pattern of images in European travel writing that created the fiction of Malaya. This fiction is created through a...

The repercussions of September 11, 2001, and the US occupation of Iraq, 2003, provide the backdrop in a number of American and Arab fiction. This book compares two novels each from the American and Arab literary traditions to examine their use of history as an intertext. John Updike’s Terrorist (2006), Lorraine Adams’ Harbor (2004), Hussein al-Saqq...

Issues pertaining to sexual misbehaviour among adolescents have continued to make headlines in the Malaysian media. In response to this, the Malaysian government decided to introduce sex education in the schools beginning January 2011. However, with resounding pessimistic views from conservatives that the introduction of sex education in schools co...

Research methodology is a compulsory course for all 3rd year students for the Literature in English Programme at University Kebangsaan Malaysia. The course is conducted over 14 weeks at 3 h week-1 which takes students through the rigours of finding a suitable topic and writing up the research proposal. In the following semester when they continue w...

This paper addresses from a New Historicist viewpoint the changing constructs of the identity of Melaka as evident in literary re-visionings of the 16 th century Melaka-Portuguese encounters. The deconstructive nature of New Historicism allows us to disclose that the diverse discourses present Melaka in duality; in some texts Melaka is a great empi...

This paper is intended to examine the amplifications of the Jewish fundamentalism in Arabic fiction, mainly in Hussein al-Saqqaf's Qissat Irhabi (2007), and also Islamic fundamentalism in American fiction, particularly in John Updike's Terrorist (2006). The comparison is supposed to shed light on the Judeophobic traits that prevail in the Arab cult...

In this paper, we analyse John Updike's Terrorist (2006) and Mohammad Ismail's Desert of Death and Peace (2005) with the aim of examining the use of allusion in the depiction of 9/11 acts and the US occupation of Iraq. The comparison of the two novels, selected from two different literary traditions, enables us to explore American and Arab viewpoin...

In this paper, we intend to analyse the representations of Arabs in recent American fiction with the aim of examining the US perception of the Arabs after 9/11. Arab characters in Lorraine Adams' Harbor (2004) will be compared to the traditional images of the Arabs and Muslims in Western literature. The analysis will be based on Edward Said's Orien...

Malaysian women are turning to virtual space as a means to be heard. In this study, the we explore a blog called The Madness of MokcikNab, written by a Malay woman blogger who shows the different subjectivities of a mother, daughter, wife and career woman in Malaysia. Talking to cybercitizens, many of whom will remain as friends that she would neve...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the sustaining effects of colonialism perpetuated in one of Malaysia"s premier schools, The Malay College Kuala Kangsar (MCKK), as discerned through Kam Raslan"s Confessions of an Old Boy: The Dato" Hamid Adventures (2007). By highlighting that culture is a learned behaviour and man-made, this paper argues th...

This paper has been published in 2011 as a chapter in a book entitled “Gender, multiculturalism and re-visioning”, pp.43-58. Serdang: Universiti Putra Malaysia Press.

This paper discusses the integration of e-learning in creative writing. The online approach to the teaching of creative writing takes into account today's Malaysian youth and their fascination with computer technology. It is this appeal of innovation in electronics and knowledge that leads an educator to design an on-line approach to a creative wri...

This paper discusses issues relating to constructions of identity by examining representations of the self through personal ruminations of selected Malaysian bloggers. The blog is a recent product of cyber culture which functions as a medium for the presentation of self; this virtual space offers freedom to the blogger to express issues that reflec...