Papers by Afzal Hossain
Scholars Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, 2022
This research has attempted an analysis of the Literary Texts included in the NCTB English for To... more This research has attempted an analysis of the Literary Texts included in the NCTB English for Today (Class II-Class VIII) Textbooks from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) which is fundamentally a sociolinguistic paradigm to find and locate the internal ideological, social, ethical, moral and political implications encoded in the texts. CDA has been adopted both as a theoretical and methodological framework to carry out the research. Literary texts like poetry, short story etc. have been used as a secondary source materials and data collected from students and teachers from 20 Government primary schools and 10 secondary schools covering 1500 students and 150 teachers as primary data for this research. The primary data has been collected through survey questionnaire and focused group discussion. The collected data has been analyzed using qualitative methods like Content analysis, Narrative analysis, Thematic analysis, Grounded theory (GT) and Interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA). Various Computerassisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) like ATLAS.ti, Dedoose (mixed methods), MAXQDA (mixed methods), NVivo and QDA MINER have been used where necessary to analyze in-depth interviews. The collected data have been analyzed using NVivo software depending on the similarities; the data have been then grouped into categories and themes. These patterned themes have emerged objectively out of the data as emergent themes. The findings from the data shows that 33% of the total student respondents do not at all read the literary texts, 33% of the teacher respondents do not teach or discuss literary texts in the classrooms and only 16% of the students read the literary texts on their own. The literary texts are totally skipped and ignored by around 8% of the student respondents and only 8% of students and teachers read and teach the literary texts effectively as intended. Other results from the data analysis show that majority of the respondents both teachers and students opine that the literary texts are highly appropriate for the respective classes. On the other hand, some students and teachers think that the texts are a little bit hard and they don't have the capacity to teach and learn. And again, the majority of the students and teachers realize that the literary texts included in the English for Today NCTB textbooks have the potential to develop good human being and are helpful for moral and ethical development.
International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation, 2021
This research analyzes how nature, human and non-human, have been represented in Guy de Maupassan... more This research analyzes how nature, human and non-human, have been represented in Guy de Maupassant’s short story The Horla through an ecocritical lens. In its fundamental form, the ecocritical theoretical framework investigates how nature, landscape, and places have been represented in a literary text and explore how human and non-human interrelations have been portrayed. In this story, Maupassant has portrayed nature as a positive, healing force and delved into the anthropocentric and anthropomorphic constructivist attitude to non-human, invisible, emergent being, in this context, the Horla. The narrator’s anthropocentric world view has denied justice toward Horla to exist, fearing he will shake the human-centred ecological hierarchy. According to the Deep Ecological philosophical position or ecosophy, all things, including spiritual being that cannot be seen, are interconnected and have their necessary position in various modalities of Nature. Denial of the existence of a new emer...
International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation (IJLLT), 2021
This research analyzes how nature, human and non-human, have been represented in Guy de Maupassan... more This research analyzes how nature, human and non-human, have been represented in Guy de Maupassant's short story The Horla through an ecocritical lens. In its fundamental form, the ecocritical theoretical framework investigates how nature, landscape, and places have been represented in a literary text and explore how human and non-human interrelations have been portrayed. In this story, Maupassant has portrayed nature as a positive, healing force and delved into the anthropocentric and anthropomorphic constructivist attitude to non-human, invisible, emergent being, in this context, the Horla. The narrator's anthropocentric world view has denied justice toward Horla to exist, fearing he will shake the human-centred ecological hierarchy. According to the Deep Ecological philosophical position or ecosophy, all things, including spiritual being that cannot be seen, are interconnected and have their necessary position in various modalities of Nature. Denial of the existence of a new emerging entity and the inability to schematize and adopt it will destroy the new being and the human race itself. The paper has deployed two major research methods; textual analysis and archival method. Apart from these two methods, discourse analysis method has also been used where deemed relevant and necessary. The paper finds that The Horla is not merely a generic horror story that has portrayed the inner psychological state of the narrator in a fantastique manner but also an expository one of human frailties and human denial of a being that deemed more intelligent and perfect than the human being, fearing to lose the anthropocentric dominance.
International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS), 2021
This paper focuses to appropriate and apply the concepts of "container-contained" and "holding an... more This paper focuses to appropriate and apply the concepts of "container-contained" and "holding and holding environment" theorized respectively by Wilfred Bion and Donald Winnicott, across the nature of Alicia's relationships with her father and husband to understand the resultant silence after her husband's murder in the novel The Silent Patient. The objective of this paper is to explore and investigate how the nature of child Alicia's relationship with her father impacted her childhood psychic development and how this leads to her husband's murder from psychoanalytic perspectives of Bion and Winnicott. The childhood development of Alicia has been traced and explored deploying various concepts developed by Freud, Bion, Winnicott and Lacan using in-depth qualitative methods like content analysis and textual analysis. The paper finds that, the nature of Alicia's relationship with her husband and the murder has interconnectedness with the nature of relationship Alicia had with her father. Alicia didn't get a containing and holding environment during childhood. The importance of this paper lies in its scope and spectrum of revisiting the reinforced focus on having a contained and safe childhood development.
This study has been carried out to explore the potential relationship between psychological resil... more This study has been carried out to explore the potential relationship between psychological resilience development and reading pandemic literature. For this purpose, open-ended, in-depth interviews of 20 participants and an online survey with a structured questionnaire have been conducted with over 125 participants. The idea of resilience has been discussed widely and incorporated vastly in various fields like Sociology, Disaster Risk Mitigation and Management, Arts and Humanities, Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, Science and Technology, including Darwinism and Economics, for, resilience indicates one of the essential traits of Nature. Human, as a part of Nature, also holds an inherent attribute of resilience. Broadly, resilience signifies the fundamental quality of mentally and emotionally coping with a crisis (pre-crisis, during crisis and postcrisis) and the capacity of bouncing back to the pre-crisis state of balance and equilibrium. Covid-19 pandemic, which has affected 210 countries and territories with extraordinary and unprecedented human suffering, has, on a positive note, given an opportunity to study the nature and properties of resilience. The present study has taken covid-19 pandemic as a backdrop to explore to what extent, how and why reading literature like a novel, short stories and other fiction about epidemics and pandemics can boost the sense of resilience among the general population (excluding health care professionals from the scope of this study) during lockdown, quarantine and social distancing days. Along with literature, visual cultural productions like movies and TV series have also been considered to link these with psychological resilience development. The qualitative research method through the application of five Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) approach-Content analysis, Narrative analysis, Thematic analysis, Grounded theory (GT) and Interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) has been adopted for this study. Primary data derived from in-depth interviews and online survey show that 58% of the total respondents think pandemic literature can help develop resilience during pandemic like Covid-19. 66% of the total respondents have either read books about pandemic or watched movies and found that these had helped them to relate the current covid-19 situations with previously occurred pandemics and made them thought that this Covid-19 crisis is not something new for humanity. The respondents felt, humans have overcome this type of pandemic earlier, and Covid-19 shall pass too, and humans will survive and thrive. The study results from the in-depth interview show that pandemic literature has made the respondents optimistic and given them something to relate to, learn from and thrive. The study results have the potential applicability in Psychological Counselling, Psychoanalysis, Bibliotherapy and Art Therapy, where carefully selected books about pandemics considering the taste and choice of the target audience can be suggested if not prescribed.
Key-words: Resilience, Psychology, Pandemic Literature, Covid-19, Coronavirus, Mental health.
International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation (IJLLT), 2021
This study intends to examine the perspective of learners from a public university regarding Engl... more This study intends to examine the perspective of learners from a public university regarding English Language Teaching (ELT) syllabus and pedagogy. The learners in this study are studying Masters (MA) in ELT at Mawlana Bhashani Science and Technology University (MBSTU). MBSTU is a public university situated in Tangail, Bangladesh. Being their direct teacher, I thought it would be interesting to find out how my students are perceiving ELT courses, in fact the process of data collection and analysis has been an important learning experience for myself, allowing me to delve into the loopholes and strengths of the current ELT curriculum. The survey questionnaire was sent to thirty of the currently enrolled MA students but fourteen responses were obtained due to the current Corona virus pandemic situation. It is worthwhile to mention that this is the first cohort of students for the MA in ELT program at MBSTU. The MA in ELT program was introduced in the university in 2019. This study was conducted using a semistructured questionnaire, and data was analyzed qualitatively. The findings from the study suggest that the students prioritize speaking English fluently and pronouncing English vocabulary correctly. The MA syllabus was highly commended by students as it focuses on pronunciation through the course of Phonetics and Phonology.
International Journal of Social Science and Human Research, 2021
This paper intends to explicate the novel 'The Queen's Gambit' by Walter Tevis with a new histori... more This paper intends to explicate the novel 'The Queen's Gambit' by Walter Tevis with a new historicist lens to explore the complex layers of politics of representation and power relations with a view to produce a close-reading of issues like contemporary (Mid-20 th century, 1950s and 1960s) socio-political and cultural context of America, Cold War, Communism, Christianity, Capitalism, Atheism, critical racial issues, western concept of beauty as well as moral values and beliefs, considering not only the literary discourse but other non-literary cultural productions and forms like visual discourse (TV, movies) and sports, in this context, Chess. The paper has adopted new historicist theoretical framework to shed light also on the biographical, historical, socio-political and cultural contexts of when the novel was written and published (Mid-1970s and published in 1983). The temporal and spatial setting of the novel, mid-20 th century and Kentucky, America have also been analyzed from the same theoretical framework. The objective of this paper is explorative and analytical in nature in its reading of the novel, by applying exegesis in the form of content analysis and textual analysis. The paper has also drawn substantially from cultural studies, research methods like close reading of visual materials and other non-literary cultural productions. Institutional analysis and ideology critique approach has been used to critically analyze how the orphanage (Methuen Home) has been portrayed and represented and what impressions it gives about the nature and operation of power dynamics and dominant ideologies within the orphanage and also in the larger context of America.
Thesis Chapters by Afzal Hossain
The dichotomy of determinism and freewill is a much explored and applied issue in the literary ... more The dichotomy of determinism and freewill is a much explored and applied issue in the literary arena. This exploration ranges from Greek literary tradition to the present-day postmodernism. The dichotomy can also be traced back to many other primeval literary discourses. Determinism or fatalism invokes an uncanny feeling of unintelligibility and unpredictability of human life controlled by some strange force. This uncanny feeling underpins the powerlessness and helplessness of human knowledge and understanding. Somehow the gravitational mass of human intelligence is less weighty than that of strange attractor. That’s why human is detracted from their initial and potential state of control and equilibrium. There is a possibility to control and maintain the complex and nonlinear equilibrium of human life by optimizing the gravitational mass of human knowledge and thus rather attract the strange attractor itself. Chaos theory serves an opportunity to approximate, predict and choose our consequence by enhancing our understanding and paradigm of life events. The application of chaos theory which has fundamentally a mathematical origin, in literary discourses, as an interdisciplinary practice will solidify and scientify our understanding and insight about the nature of dichotomous relationship between determinism and freewill. Human are existentially responsible for their own actions. Sense of responsibility requires sense of understanding. With the advent of postmodernism and post- humanism the “death of god” is pronounced and human become the center of the universe with their “will to order and power”. The universe is essentially indeterministic and fertile with the possibility of transformation toward any form. The human freewill works as shaping force on that fertile and indeterministic chaos. This paper will explore human actions as the determining factor of their consequences and not some strange force. We are not innocent of our actions and cannot evade the consequence followed. The universe is just out there charged neutrally and waiting to be charged by human freewill either with positivity or negativity. Individual is universal. We are all connected both spatially and temporally in a nonlinear dynamics. Everything affects and effects everything. The function of human intelligence is to locate the human position and momentum in those complex dynamics and thus ensuring certainty of human life with predictability. This paper is divided mainly into four parts. In the first part there is a discussion on chaos and chaos theory from different perspective ranging from theology to post-Newtonian quantum physics. In the second part there is a discussion on the appropriation and application of chaos theory with its terminology and imagery as literary theory. In the third part there is discussion on the novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy and play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard to show how coincidences, randomness and human existential responsibility are linked from the perspective of chaos theory. In this part there is an analysis about the sense of “will to war, will to power, will to overpower” of Tess, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to locate their moral laziness and existential irresponsibility which is caused due to their inadequate existing status of knowledge and understanding of human life and universe. In the fourth part there is discussion on the concept of God as “dice player” from different perspective to emphasize on the celebration of human freewill and human superiority. The paper ends with the call of psychical post- humanism in which point everyone is autonomous of his or her life in their own context with predictability and certainty. Human freewill is the only deterministic force on the indeterministic nature of the universe. Chaos is not opposite of order but chaos is the nature’s way of revealing new information and variables about human life and universe. The task of human intelligence is to schematize and internalize those new information and variables to bring a paradigmatic change from chaos to cosmos. Chaos has a preparing power that may help humanity to achieve a predictable human positionality in the universe.
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Papers by Afzal Hossain
Key-words: Resilience, Psychology, Pandemic Literature, Covid-19, Coronavirus, Mental health.
Thesis Chapters by Afzal Hossain