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Since the turn of the twenty-first century, popular Malay television fiction has been thriving and gaining popularity. Through staggering online reruns, this sheer popularity broadens the expanse of multifaceted issues. This paper contextualizes popular TV fiction within a space of imperfection, focusing on audience responses to Julia, Adam & Hawa, and About Dhia. Using the lens of democratic habits of mind according to Mezirow: “respect for others, self-respect, willingness to accept responsibility for the common good, willingness to welcome diversity and to approach others with openness,” this paper reveals two of the many emerging themes, namely, forgiveness and repentance, which can intensify possibilities for acknowledging human faults, vulnerability, and imperfection between the private/public and self/society. By considering reactions of some of the many popular TV fiction audience, this paper presents unfolding, interactive twenty-first-century insights into what it means to pursue an imperfect duty, whose responsibility could be understood in the sense of forgiveness and repentance.

After experiencing the American war in Iraq as a machine gunner in the U.S. Army, Kevin Powers deliberates on war and the risks surrounding the lives of all those involved in his debut novel, The Yellow Birds . This paper aims to uncover the survival psychology that underlies the behaviour of the two main characters in the novel, Private John Bartle and Private Daniel Murphy as well as other minor characters. Survival psychology expounds unpredictable and threatening situations where people’s lives are at stake. They either choose to fight, flight or freeze in reaction to these horrible experiences, that is, they either take action, surrender or eventually die. In the context of war, soldiers frequently face such deadly situations. The reactions of the characters to the circumstances of war and their success and/or failure to cope with its dangers are indicative of their survival mechanism. The novel is examined according to the three major periods of impact in survival psychology, specifically, pre-impact, impact and post-impact periods. Bartle overcomes the psychological consequences of his war experience years after leaving the army, but Murphy loses his faculties in the chasms of war and consequently dies. The psychological survival of those who overcome these risks physically is not guaranteed. Such terrifying experiences of death may make these people vulnerable and exposed to psychological repercussions such as psychosis.

John Updike, one of America’s eminent 20 th century novelists, provides his own fictionalized presentation of the Muslim other within the American socio-cultural context in his 22 nd novel, Terrorist. This novel is abundant with binary representations of Muslims whose acts and interactions with fellow Christian and Jewish Americans are scripted by their respective religious values. Updike’s exemplifications of Islam and Muslims within the American context are investigated through the problematizing of Muslims’ socio-cultural imperfections within the lens of orientalism and psychology of (im)perfection. I mperfectionalism as used in this paper refers to the inconsistent, unreliable and unpredictable characteristics that define the Muslim Other in comparison to mainstream American society. Using themes of ‘religious differences,’ ‘differences between religions,’ ‘social differences,’ ‘gendered and exotic differences’ and ‘optimized differences,’ Updike’s Muslim characters are presented as flawed and faulty in their beliefs and conviction. In addition, Updike’s representation of Islam rests on its blemishes including its disregard for self-improvement and modernity. D esigns of orientalism and imperfection as seen in this novel frame the Muslim other as the imperfect version of the perfect non-Muslim American. Keywords: 9/11; Muslims; American novel; differentiation; imperfectionality

This paper is based on three selected novels entitled Does My Head Look Big In This? (2005), Ten Things I Hate About Me (2006), and Where The Streets Had A Name (2008) written by Randa Abdel-Fattah (1979), a Palestinian-Egyptian Australian Muslim diasporic writer. In this article, we examine the manifestations of grafting eco-diasporic identity by Abdel-Fattah in order to address how identity graft is operated by interacting with ideology, culture and nature in the contexts of the host land and the homeland as represented in the three selected novels. Using Colin Richards’ theory of graft as a framework, we explore identity contestations of Muslim young adults in the novels from an ecocritical and diasporic perspectives. In the novel Does My Head Look Big In This?, the images of Amal’s sense of being marginalised in the semiosphere of the host land and the sense of self-respect of her Muslim rootedness and heritage of the homeland semiosphere frame the fractured graft of identity. The character of Jamilah, in Ten Things I Hate About Me displays genuine manifestations of the collective emblem of the grafted identity. Finally, the symbol of the iconic jar of the homeland soil and its potentiality of regenerating Hayaat’s identity in Where the Streets Had A Name exhibits the ecological semiosphere in which the grafted identity is shaped. The current discussion, therefore, offers fresh insights into allowing a new horizon for identity grafting in Abdel-Fattah’s works as well as other writers within the tradition of Muslim Diasporic Literature.

This paper focuses on the manifestations of the American gaze post-9/11 as portrayed in the fictional narrative, Rebounding, by Jamilah Kolocotronis . Kolocotronis, a Caucasian American Muslim revert whose novels in the Echoes Series highlight the American Muslim revert’s personal, interpersonal and multicultural complexities of living in post-9/11 America. Those complexities are made obvious through the American gaze post-9/11 as intentional views, behaviors and actions made by certain members of the non-Muslim American majority towards white and non-white Muslims minority, due to affiliation with Islam. By using the post-9/11 counter-terrorism perspective on national security, this article problematise s the American gaze post-9/11 by explicating how the protagonist Joshua Adams’ material support to a Muslim fellow in Pakistan has brought serious repercussions on his personal and public life. Efforts are also devoted to delineate the transition of the American gaze post-9/11 from the private level, i.e., Joshua’s clash with his father Sam, to the public level, through Joshua’s incarceration by the Homeland Security agents. The findings reveal that the American post-9/11 gaze move beyond the realm of race and nationality into the space of religiosity. It positions Joshua in the grip of atonality, robbing him of his faith, selfhood, and citizenship on both private and public levels . Kolocotronis’ Rebounding expounds how the severity of the post-9/11 American gaze fails to fully establish a sharp distinction between innocent Americans and terrorists. An essential feature of civic engagement which is neglected in post-9/11America as illustrated in this novel is the recognition of the American Muslim revert's public service, virtues and achievements, which demonstrates the premises of separation and association with forces of terrorism. Keywords: American gaze; American Muslim Reversion Narrative; 9/11; war on terror; Rebounding

This paper explores the ecoethical vision and ecological awareness in the selected poems of Pablo Neruda, a Nobel Prize winning poet of Latin American descent who was well known as a political poet. The structural and thematic analysis of the study will focus on the concept of ‘Ethics’ as one of the components of ecopoetry, which is the new brand of nature poetry and one of the components of ecocriticism which investigates the human-nature relationship. The objective of this paper is to highlight the significance of ecoethical consideration of Pablo Neruda towards wilderness. The study utilizes the theoretical frameworks of ecocriticism and ecopoetry to illuminate Neruda’s call for reverence of the wilderness, flora and fauna, in the land, the sea and the sky through an ethical consideration of interdependence and interconnectedness of human and nonhuman. This paper problematizes Neruda’s attitude towards nature to obtain new insights into his ethical stand towards the natural world. The discussion focuses on the poems which reflect the sense of ethics and represent the significant role of humility in shaping our sense of accountability towards the wilderness, while revealing Neruda’s ideology and relationship with the non-human world.

On September 11, 2001, the world was stunned into silence as four hijacked airplanes crashed into two of America’s iconic landmarks, namely the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. For the first time, perhaps since the Vietnam War, the entire United States of America was engulfed in a mutual sense of loss and inconsolable grief. 2996 people, a vast number of them unarmed civilians including all the passengers aboard the four hijacked airplanes, lost their lives in what was perceived by many to be the worst terrorist attack of the twenty-first century. Occurrence of such a colossal tragedy has led to producing a large corpus of textual representation of the event including countless novels such as Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2012). This study focuses on analysing The Submission by Amy Waldman using the theory of Psychoanalysis to explore the concept of psychological trauma and the effects of PTSD (Posttraumatic Stress Disorder) on female characters affected by the tragedy of 9/11. The analysis, which is mostly based on Wilson and Keane (2004) and Caruth (2001) psychoanalysis theories, seeks to explore Waldman’s perception of the process of healing from the devastating tragedy and psychological trauma of the female characters of the story. It is believed that Waldman’s novel does not only portray the trauma of the characters but also presents the path of recovery and overcoming the PTSD of those who were emotionally wounded by the tragedy of 9/11. Keywords: American authoress; Amy Waldman; The Submission; trauma; posttraumatic stress disorder DOI: http://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2017-2301-04