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The Present Age - Coggle Diagram

- - - - 1993: PM Major signed a declaration affirming the right of self-determination for the people of Ulster. In 1994 Sinn Fein (IRA political wing) announced a ceasefire.
  - - - 2010: PM Cameron from the new Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition. He faced the economical crisis started in 2008 by cutting social spending, reducing employees and reducing the expenses of the NHS. He also proposed Brexit and managed to do it in 2016 after a referendum voted in favour by 52% of the population, Meanwhile, in 2014, Scotland proposed a referendum to become independent, but only 45% voted in favour, so it failed. In 2016, PM Theresa May from the Conservative Party.
  - - - 1963: President Johnson was elected and in 1964 passed the Civil Rights Act to end discrimination based on race, colour, religion and nationality. Designed a programme of healthcare for the elderly and the poor. However there were a lot of protests: by university studens, among minorities ex. American Indians, by African American civil rights movement (Martin Luther king JR), by the violent Black Panthers, by Black Muslims (Malcom X, they wanted return to African roots and separateness from the whites).
        
        Generation gap of the 50s was voiced by the Beat generation and found expression in the protest songs ex by Bob Dylan and in rock music. Students organized sit-ins, marches, teach-ins, etc.
        
        1969: election of President Nixon + success in the space race vs URSS because first USA landing on the moon. BUT Watergate scandal about illegal activities of the Republican administration led Nixon to resign.
        
        1976: President Jimmy Carter prepared the Camp David Agreements between Egypt and Israel to settle the Middle East question.
        
        1980: President Reagan adopted an economic policy called "Reaganomics" and invested many dollars for space research.
        
        1989: President Bush was involved in the Persian Gulf crisis after Iraq's president Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and was requested by the UN to retreat. USA sent military forces and stopped the war.
        
        1 more item...
- - - - Larkin
        
        educated at Oxford, was a bit of a misanthrope who didn't likeyoung people or giving interviews. He is a witty and anti-romantic poet and a jazz critic. He loved Thomas Hardy, who let him understand that common events from everyday life were fit for poetry
        
        themes (dealt with with dryness and no sentimentality): loneliness, melancholy, sense of loss (in tune with decolonization anxieties), sexual impotence, incommunicability, passing of time, nature (generally cold winter landscape), childhood, disillusionment, defeat, solitude, pessimism, boredom, love is full of obstacles, past is irrelevant to the present and old age is the decline of man
        
        structure generally present a casual and easy-going start and end up in serious reflection and philosophical questioning. Language is reflective and argumentative, objective, colloquial; later it becomes coarse and bitter. Two symbols are: the photograph (=the past) and the room (=loneliness and impossibility of escaping, human limits)
        
        Annus Mirabilis (poem): it is the year 1963 when sexual liberation happened, between the publication of Lady Chatterley's lover and the Beatles' first LP. It criticizes marriage as an institution devoid of feelings as it was before that year
    - - Hughes
    - - Roger McGough
    - - Heaney
        
        born in Ulster and since school he was very aware of the religious and cultural division of Northern Ireland. He grew up catholic and knowing Irish patriotic songs and was against Unionism with Britain. He moved to the USA and when he went back to Ireland his poetry became more political and prone to resistance. He moved to Dublin in Eire and published poetry, worked for the BBC radio and television. He became involved in the Catholic civil rights movement and in the Irish Question after IRA was involved in Northern affairs: taking as a metaphor pit bogs that were discovered containing bodies of people from 2000 years before and that had been used for rituals, he compares them to the atrocities and rituals of Irish Troubles. In 1995 he received the Nobel Prize for literature. Unionists accused him of being too Catholic and Republicans blamed him for not openly supporting the movement for independence from Britain.
        
        themes: childhood and his rural County Derry becomes a country of the mind, link between man and nature through human work (es. father ploughing and digging), work carries satisfaction and production and is never alienating, link between man/poet and his own community. Some elegiac poems show protagonists who are isolated, repressed, disenchanted and betrayed and are an alterego of the historically dispossessed and maltreated. Death is seen as a message of the forefathers that has to be picked up and decoded by the poet. Poetry split between creative freedom and social obligation
        
        use of quatrains where lines dissolve into lines even if sometimes through enjambement, alliteration, onomatopoeia, imitation of Anglo-Saxon kennings, Gaelic words and technical terms.
        
        Digging: he compares the digging and ploughing work made by his father in the fields to the writing work made by the poet through his pen
  - - - Rushdie
    - - Golding
        
        studied at Oxford, fought in WWII and in the landing in Normandy, acquired a dark perception of life and human nature and lost belief in man's and children's innocence because of war.
        
        analysis of what is permanent in human nature in relation not only to society but also to man's cosmic situation, believing man's propensity to evil is stronger than his propensity to goodness. In literature, he includes 2 narrations and 2 POVs of the same situation to let the reader accept paradox as a condition of the existence
        
        Lord of the flies: a group of boys from 6 to 12 has been left on a desert island in the Pacific after a plane crash who has killed all of the adults. Under Ralph's government, they manage to organize a rational and grown-up society, with a government and laws, shelters and food. As the plot develops, Jack starts disagreeing with Piggy and Ralph. Jack turns the society into a savage one based on hunting pigs and fear of "the beast", a monster from water. He cuts the head of a huge pig and puts it on a stake as a sort of god, covered with flies, the "Lord of the flies". Simon discovers that "the beast" is just the corpse of the pilot and is killed when, moving frantically, leads the boys to believe that he is "the beast" attacking them, so his death is necessary. Piggy is killed too. Ralph runs away and is saved by the adults (naval officers) that suddently arrive on the island. Ralph cries for the end of innocence.
        
        2 levels (individuals+human nature symbols): Ralph is handsom and cheerful and stands for reason, democracy and civilization, he goes from leader to victim. Jack us the antagonist, he is savage, violent and instinctive, he stands for dictatorship, he becomes obsessed with killing, first pigs and then humans. Piggy is Ralph's supporter, he is fat, short-sighted and asthmatic, he is rational and believes either adults will come to save them or they will manage to build a rational society, his death represents the triumph of irrationality. Simon stands for intelligence and sensitivity, he is the only to actually come close to "the beast" and see the truth.
        
        symbols: fire (=rescue, destruction), a white conch (=democracy and order, authority) which is blown by Ralph to see how many of the boys survived the plane crash, skull of a female pig (=sacrificial victim, forces of evil), Piggy's glasses used to make fire (=power, rationality), children's painted faces and "Lord of the flies" (=savagery). The title of the book is a direct translation from the Bible of the name Beelzebub (=Satan).
        
        2 phases: 1 childlike pov of Ralph, 2 adult pov of the naval officer. Language blends abstract, symbolic and concrete
        
        demonstrates how social characteristics (rationality, irrationality, democracy, tiranny, etc.), can cause destruction if not properly governed and the need for restraints to avoid becoming savages. When authoritarianism usurps democracy, society is destroyed.
    - - Lessing
        
        born in Iran from British parents and brought up in Zimbabwe, Africa. Joinde the Communist party and went to live in England, after WWII became disillusioned with communism and left the movement. In London she wrote The Grass is singing. The Golden notebook is a narrative experiment which confronts the multiple selves of the same woman of the 1950s-60s (and is about the condition of women). She was also concerned with the mental condition of people in a technological society and portrayed dreams, extra-sensory perceptions and madness. She also wrote science-fiction and science-fantasy and then went back to critical realism. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
        
        role of the writer: architect of the soul that works to strenghten good against evil, describes the world (that is one of alienation) and looks for a relationship between individuals and community, records the past in order to map the future
        
        themes: collapse of the empires, threat of war and nuclear bomb, destruction of the environment and pollution, individual free will, condition of women (politics, sex, marriage), madness as the only response to an insane world, apocalypse and utopia
        
        no formal experimentalism, realistic style but rich in symbolism, psychological introspection, autobiographical elements (especially from childhood in Africa)
        
        The grass is singing (title < line of The Waste Land): in Zimbabwe, during apartheid, the white woman Mary marries the farmer Dick Turner to achieve a social stability but finds it difficult to get used to life on the farm and to deal with the natives. Among them there is the African Moses, a houseboy. After the marital, spiritual, financial and mental disintegration of the couple, the reader discovers Mary's body stabbed to death and that the culprit is Moses, to take revenge for being sent away from the farm.
        
        Mary Turner had an abusive father and a troubled mother, she leaves home to work as a secretary and she gets married to Dick Turner, but she is unhappy and doesn't know how to talk to black labourers. She is both fascinated and afraid of Moses. Moses is insolent and not afraid of Mary, he subverts the relationship master-servant and Dick sends him away.
        
        theme: racism, institutionalized discrimination of apartheid (relationship Turner-servants = white-black during aparhteid in Africa, with hatred on both sides)
        
        3rd person omniscient, with extended flashbacks about the murder, focus on thoughts and feelings of white characters and finally of Moses, device of the newspaper article about the murder
    - - McEwan
        
        born in England, started writing in the 1970s, wrote short stories and novels about macabre aspects of life (also called "Ian macabre" because of his first gothic works like The cement garden about a private disposal of a corpse under the cement of a house). offering a view of Thatcher's England with poverty and squalor and where control is exercised in the name of freedom. Another work is The daydreamer, about a series of kids who are victim of violent parents or have lost their innocence, the protagonist Peter Fortune retreats in a world between dream and reality to escape everyday life boredom of everyday life.
        
        Black Dogs: middle-aged Jeremy lost his parents in road accident when he was 8. He was "adopted" by his parents-in-law Jule and Bernard Tremaine and began reconstructing the story of their love and marriage, faith and disillusionment with communism through their stories and memories. When hiking in France, June was attacked by two black dogs (=emodiment of evil in the universe) and managed to resist only through the divine inside of her.
        
        setting: English nursing where June is, southern France, Poland, Berlin in 1989 during the fall of the Wall. The novel is cinematic because of the shifting POVs and time shifts (the main are 1980s and 1940s)
        
        Bernard is rationalist who believes in science and progress, June is mystic and believes in divine power. Jeremy is sceptic and mediates between the two POVs.
        
        themes: science vs mysticism, rationality vs magic, meditation on existence of evil (can it be defeated by rational action?), redeeming power of love, post WWII, Holocaust, Soviet Communism, fall of Berlin Wall
        
        symbols: black dogs (=dogs originally used by Gestapo and brought to France, but suddently left behind when the Allies arrived in Normandy, so they started roaming in the wilderness becoming a threat for the inhabitants. They attack June and then disappear, but the book ends with Jeremy's vision that the dogs will eventually return to Europe)
        
        1st person narrator (Jeremy) and presentation as a memoir because Jeremy writes on his notebook: the future can only be understood when looking at the past and present and the writer's task is to present the past to understand the future (Jeremy's task in the book). Mixture of genres: memoir, philosophical novel, essay, dialogue
        
        theme of violence: in Jeremy's youth, in the relationship between his sister and her husband, in the fall of Berlin Wall and violence in concentration camps, in the black dogs. Only love can redeem from violence: Jeremy's marriage to Jenny (yet, final allusion to the dogs)
        
        Atonement: it is the title of the novel that a woman has been trying to write for years. The plot starts in the summer of her childhood when she saw strange behaviors between her little sister and their childhood friend, so she becomes convinced that he is taking advantage of her and other women and destroys their relationship by mistakenly sending him to jail for rape, she then narrates of their reunion and marriage, but in the end the reader discovers that the narrator is uncapable of distinguishing reality and fiction and Atonement refers to an attempt to be forgiven for what she did to her sister.
        
        Fabricated reality vs truth, love and reunion, mysteries, crimes, death.
  - - - existentialism: philosphy associated with Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, which developed after WWII to expressed the post war and post Holocaust uncertainties. The main thesis is: there is no purpose or order in the world, which is hostile, men cannot avoid choosing their characters and their goals which is a source of anguish, the truths about the world are revealed in moments of anxiety or dread. So, the world is absurd.
      - Beckett: born in Dublin but worked as an English teacher in Paris and there he became familiar with Existentialism and met James Joyce. He mainly wrote in French and translated into English. Began writing short stories and then turned to novels and plays, in fact he is the most important representative of the Theater of the Absurd.
        
        3 periods
        Early works: influenced by Joyce and obscure. Murphy: novel about a Dubliner that moves to London to work in a lunatic asylum and makes friends with a schizophrenic with whom he endlessly plays, he sees in Folly the only alternative to the uselessness of life but he doesn't manage to obtain joy.
        
        Middle period works: trilogy Molloy-Malone dies-The unnamable: the story of a man that has to find his mother and another man that has to capture the first one but doesn't manage to do it. The story is progressively emptied of plot, situation and characters, to focus on consciousness and pain of existence. Krapp's last tape: a man in his old age listens to old tapes he recorded when he was young and compares the liveliness of his youth with his frozen adulthood. Happy days: monologue in which a woman is progressively buried alive
        
        Waiting for Godot: written in French and then translated into English, no real plot, minimalistic stage with a tree and a road, complementary characters (the two tramps Vladimir/Didi and Estragon/Gogo, Pozzo and Lucky-in the second act Pozzo is blind and Lucky is dumb). The tramps are waiting for Godot, but at the end of the first day he sends his messenger to tell them he would come the next day, they think about separation and even suicide but htey actually never do anything, in the end they end up still waiting for Godot.
        
        no development in time, just a repetitive and meaningless present, no setting but a country road and a bare tree which divides the stage in 2 (=inner world of the characters). 2 symmetrical acts, 2 tramps and 2 couples of characters, symmetrical actions of the characters (ex. tramps take off their hat to think, while the other two have to put it on to do it)
        
        no traditional characters, they are never openly described as tramps, they are human beings concerned with existential questions about God, nature, man, the world. They are complementary: Vladimir is practical, he keeps waiting, distrusts what he remembers; Estragon is a dreamer but he is skeptical about Godot, cannot remember anything about their past. Both of them serves the other to remind him of their very existence. Pozzo (=power of the body) and Lucky (=power of the mind) are phisically linked by a rope and their relationship master-servant
        
        grotesque humour. Man's increased knowledge has only made him more aware of the uselessness of his learning, since the huniverse cannot be understood.
        
        informal language and not for the purpose of communication, dialogue is only sketched, use of paraverbal language (pauses, gaps, silences),
        
        no solution to the meaning of God
        
        Late works: dramatic minimalism that reduces characters to essential elements or to disappearing from the stage, recollection of hunting past events in a present moment of stillness.
    - - Osborne: born in London, developed a passion for acting and plays, became actor and assistant stage manager and then playwright, Became the spokesman of the Angry Young Men that were playwrights who wrote aggressive social criticism, realistic portrayal or working glass, anti-heroic characters, materialistic values.
        
        Look Back in Anger: Jimmy Porter and his wife Alison come from a working class family and don't have anything in common and this causes conflicts and lack of communication. Alison follows the advice of her best friend Helena and leaves her husband without telling him she was pregnant, meanwhile Helena has a short love affair with him, while Alison loses the child and goes back to her husband without sorting out their problems.
        
        the roots of Jimmy's anger lie in the past: father's premature death, mother coming from the middle-class is a shame for proletariats, he is angry at his wife because she is not angry at a society who doesn't leave room for young people. Jimmy is an outsider who rebels against the whole establishment (personified by his wife) but he doesn't have a clear cause to fight for, so he keeps searching for one (anti-hero: only speaks but never acts, he is well educated but has no profession). Alison is upper middle class, she is the victim even though she has the courage to leave her family. Helena is upper-class, she is honest and never accepts Jimmy's ideas. Cliff is Jimmy's friend and is a working-class uneducated man, a pleasant person.
        
        themes: critique of the establishment by young people of the 1950s who are bored with class privileges and dissatisfied with economic and intellectual stagnation in Britain.
        
        circular structure beginning and ending in the same set (Jimmy's flat) with the same characters who do the same actions (Jimmy and Cliff reading the Sunday papers and Alison and Helena performing the same actions and dressed the same), at the same time (Sunday). Language is spontaneous, crude, violent and provocative. Jimmy's vulgar slang makes us understand that the play was addressed to a wider public
  - - - expressed the angry and desperate mood of the new generation of young protesters and rebels, with the aim to reflect and denounce. The 2 main schools were the Beat Generation (Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso, who broke down the distinction between poetry and prose and experimented with graphic visual layout) and the Confessional Poets (Lowell, Sylvia Plath, whose poems are like private confessions and show private experiences, suffering, madness, family relationships)
    - - 1950s: showed tensions and contradictions of contemporary USA. 1960s-70s: experimentation, rejection of realism, questioning of social values, use of double meanings, grotesque, science fiction and surrealist techniques. 1908s: minimalism (<Warhol) with a dry and clear style accumulating trivial elements to convey disturbing meaning and dealing with familiar crisis, drugs, AIDS, homosexuality.
        
        Kerouac
        
        born in Massachusetts from French-Canadian Immigrants, prematurely lost his brother, from the Catholic faith of his parents he derived a strong spiritual dimension. In NY met the poet Allen Ginsber and other intellectuals like Burroughs and Cassady and they became known as "The Beat Generation". Kerouac loved adventure and after WWII he started a trip across America and wrote On the road, which would become the masterpiece of the Beat Generation. He became addicted to alcohol and drugs and started leading a solitary life. Lots of young people in colleges started imitating him and hitch-hiked around the country.
        
        The Beat Generation: a slang coined by Kerouac himself: "beat" was a jazz term to mean "down and out" (wandering, poor, without a job, at the bottom of the world, rejected by society,but also with beatitude). The main ideas of the Beat generation were: rebellion, bohemian living, vs traditional values and materialism and religion, alternative spirtituality through Eastern religions and drugs. This new countercultural type was called "Beatnik" (term created by a journalist. -nik<Sputnik, the first artificial Earth satellite lauched by URSS which created anxiety in USA people), they lived in dirty apartments, hitch-hiked along route 66, explored nudity and senses, used hallucinogenic drugs and alcohol, didn't wash themselves, vs dress conventions, had long hair and beards, wore worn-out jeans and t-shirts and sandals, loved underground culture (ex. Jazz, poetry, Zen Buddhism), reunited in City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco to read their works in public.
        
        described experiences and how they felt about them, used a language called "hip talk" (=street language) which was opposed to conventional language and typical of young people, was spontaneous and employed monosyllabic words
        
        On the road: diary account of Kerouac's wandering across USA with his friend Neal Cassady, in the form of a novel without a central plot and with an episodic structure. Cohesion is given by: theme of the journey (=escape from city and from one's own past), narrator Sal Paradise (=Kerouac, lives for "kicks" which are intense moments of experience and pleasure) and friend Dean Moriarty (=Neal Cassady, idolised by Sal for his cowboy style, his fortune with women and exuberant joy in living) and other groups of friends (they always want to get going and never look back, without a precise destination)
        
        spontaneous style, which described the scene how the mind remembered it (escape from the impersonality loved by Eliot)
      - Afro-American fiction: combines feminist, ethnic and psychological themes
      - contemporary novel
        
        Don DeLillo
        
        born in NY to Italian immigrants, interested in arts and jazz and cinema
        
        Falling Man (<photo of an unidentified man falling from the Twin Towers and also a performance artist that started to jump from tall buildings in the weeks after 9/11): in the morning of September 11th 2001, the towers of the World Trade Center are collapsing and Keith Neudecker is a lawyer who works in the North Tower. He is covered in blood and is working towards the house of his estranged wife Lianne and his son Justin. United by the trauma, they start to look like a family again, even though with problems. While escaping the chaos of the towers, a briefcase was given to Keith, he returns it to the owner and starts an affair with her, on the basis of their common trauma of that day. Lianne has nervous breakdowns. The last part of the book focuses on the mind of one of the 9/11 hijackers, Hammad, who struggles with doubts.
        
        circular structure around a central point and ending where it all started: the falling twin towers. Language is fragmented.
        
        setting is NY and especially the 90 floors of the towers (which are walked down by some of the characters, highliting the debris, the smoke, the dead bodies and the heat), Keith and Lianne's flat
        
        Keith likes living alone, never admits loving his wife and loves his son just for sense of duty (he does what a father thinks he should do), he lives through his intellect (in fact he plays poker to analyse other people's psychology. The only emotion he feels is towards a friend that is about to die and who he leaves behind while running away). Lianne is a freelance editor who is traumatized by 9/11 and becomes obsessed by terrorism, she is very emotional and constantly worried
        
        themes (never resolved, only described): psychological damage and how characters deal with it (facing it or escaping from it), religion, terrorism, death, meaning of life. The effect of 9/11 is not political but existential: everyone is unhooked from reality and disconnected, everything must be rethought
    - - distinctive qualities such as use of USA dialects, interplay of stage and film techniques, musicals (ex. My Fair Lady, West side story, Hair). Centred in Broadway in NY but also in off-Broadway theatres and off-off-Broadway theatres (commercialized off-Broadway theatres). It dealt with crisis of values and political issues (ex. Vietnam War) An alternative theatre was the Living Theatre.
  - - - born in Bombay into a Muslim family, sent to school in England. In 1988 he published The Satanic Verses, which was at the centre of a controversy because Muslim accused him of insulting their religion and issued a death sentence against him, which nowadays has been cancelled. He also wrote many essays such as Imaginary Homelands and Step across this line
      - Midnights children: Saleem Sinai was born at midnight on 15th August 1947, exactly when India gained independence. Now he is 31 and thinks he is about to die, so he tells the story of his life to his wife Padma. In 1915 his grandfather and doctor Adam Aziz begins treating his future wife Naseem. Adam becomes the follower of an anti-partition activist and, when he is killed, he hides his assistant Nadir Khan who secretly marries Adam's daughter Mumtaz. Nadir abandons her and Mumtaz marries Ahmed Sinai, who changes her name to Amina and she gets pregnant. A fortune teller tells her that her son will never be older or younger than his country. When her son is born, a nurse exchanges him with the son of another woman, Vanita, destining the poor child to a life of privileges and viceversa. One day young Saleem discovers he is telepathic and can hear the thoughts of the other children born at the same time as him, while the other boy has a gift for combat. All these 1001 children have magical powers. Saleem undergoes a nose operation and loses his powers but is able to detect emotions with the smell. He and his family move to Pakistan, but he gets hit on the head and loses his memory. He lives adventures in Pakistan and Bangladesh, he meets a witch that helps him recover his memory and goes back to India. He is captured and brought to a forced sterilisation camp for midnight's children. He meets Padma and they get married. He prophesies that he will die on one of the anniversaries of India's independence
        
        setting: 1915-1977. India, Bangladesh, Pakistan. From India's independence to Indira Gandhi's sterilisation campaign.
        
        Saleem Sinai is a metaphor for India
        
        themes: hope and opportunities betrayed after India's independence, personality and being an individual amidst millions of people, blending of people during life and also through the action of writing
        
        not chronogical, flashbacks and foreshadowing, 1st person narrator (Saleem), ironical and comic tone, realism and details, cinematic techniques (close up, zooming, etc.)
        
        Magical realism: theorized by the Italian Bontempelli in the first half of the 20th century, mixture of real + invented and magical events. It derives from a new taste for the irrational in Italy after Scapigliatura and especially after WWII with writers such as Dino Buzzati. It is connected to magic, nightmares, restlessness and ambiguity, mystery and allucination. Influenced by Latin American literature ex. Borges and Garcia Marquez. The best exponents are Calvino, Angela Carter, McEwan, Rushdie. Fantasy is used to represent the clash of different ideologies and cultures and to represent local and world events. It is also used to make readers active in the process of doubting truths and critically look at reality. Narrators constantly remind readers of their presence.
    - - born near Johannesburg in South Africa from a Russian father and an English mother. She started writing short stories, using a controlled and unsentimental style, showing tension between isolation and social commitment and the theme of the refusal of exile. She always lived in South Africa and opposed Apartheid, which often led to the censorship of her works. She won the nobel prize for literature.
      - She casts a clear light on the contradictions of a multiracial country such as South Africa, in terms of political trasnformation and of relationships between different-coloured groups: the whites, the Afrikaners (South African whites of European descent), the Coloureds (of mixed race ancestry, enjoyed better status than the black), the blacks.
      - The Pickup: Julie Summers has grown up in Johannesburg, but she has rejected her upper-class roots and and has moved to a formerly black part of the town and works at a café where she meets a multiracial and liberal group of friends. She meets Abdu (real name Ibrahim), an illegal Muslim immigrant. They become lovers but he has to go back home and Julie marries him to be able to follow him to his unnamed Arab country. Now Julie is the outsider int he Muslim society, although she still learns how to accept and be accepted better than in her society. Eventually, Ibrahim goes to America, leaving Julie behind.
        
        themes: identity (Abdu's blackness is complex since he is Arab and not African, so he has a strange collocation in the South Africal black-white dichotomy), different social backgrounds of characters, self-definition through difference, mixture of Western self-determination and Arabic female solidarity, questioning of traditional gender roles (ex. Julie chooses Abdu, no one is prominent between the two: Julie exploits him for exoticism, Abdu exploits her for money and social contacts), arbitrariness of South African bureaucracy, link between private and political
        
        parallelisms, chiasms, binary oppositions, novel divided in 2 parts based on 2 characters