/library/oar/handle/123456789/3206 2026-08-09T22:58:21Z 2026-08-09T22:58:21Z Ellis, Clare Udras /library/oar/handle/123456789/135973 2025-05-30T14:05:29Z 2020-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: “Pursued by time” : the chronolibidinal aesthetics of Katherine Mansfield Authors: Ellis, Clare Udras Abstract: Despite the ever-growing body of scholarship on the short stories of Katherine Mansfield, her treatment of temporal experience has not been sufficiently explored, possibly because, as a woman writer, she is considered to have been most concerned with describing feminine experiences unbound from a so-called “masculine” concern with temporality. However, a new reading of her fiction which draws attention to her practice of chronolibidinal aesthetics highlights the significance of the human experience of exposure to the radical temporality of life as a motif in her fiction, making possible a renewed understanding of Mansfield as a modernist writer of time.

2020-01-01T00:00:00Z Xerri, Daniel Vella Briffa, Patricia /library/oar/handle/123456789/112890 2023-09-05T06:05:08Z 2018-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Teacher involvement in high-stakes language testing Authors: Xerri, Daniel; Vella Briffa, Patricia Abstract: Over the past few years, High-Stakes testing has grown in importance in a number of international contexts. In some cases, it is used as the primary means of assessing students and evaluating teacher performance. As a powerful educational driver, High-Stakes testing is sometimes seen as divorced from the reality of the classroom, so much so that “the pressures of assessment systems…pay little heed to consistency or coherence between teachers’ visions of desirable education and those articulated in High-Stakes examinations” (Atkin 2007, p. 57). These pressures not only affect classroom practices but they also disempower teachers. In fact, Reich and Bally (2010) argue that High-Stakes testing makes teachers “increasingly feel that they are at the mercy of forces beyond their control” (p. 181). This has led to accusations that High-Stakes testing engenders social and educational inequality (Au 2008), and that it is mechanistic and reductive (Allen 2012). High-Stakes tests have been branded “oppressive” because they “undermine quality teaching and learning, and…make students vulnerable in the classroom to a narrowly focused curriculum in which teachers teach to the test” (Grant 2004, p. 6). High-Stakes tests have the power to change teachers’ instructional practices (Hoffman et al. 2001) and to influence the way they respond to students’ learning needs (Flores and Clark 2003; Pennington 2004). Partly for these reasons, Nichols’ (2007) review questions whether High-Stakes tests enhance student learning. [Excerpt from the Introduction by Daniel Xerri and Patricia Vella Briffa]

2018-01-01T00:00:00Z Borg Parnis, Roberta /library/oar/handle/123456789/71889 2021-03-23T07:07:00Z 2021-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Colonialism and its impact on women in Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not Authors: Borg Parnis, Roberta Abstract: The colonial predicament enslaves many Africans who struggle against the confines imposed on them by Western colonialists. They become alienated from what had formerly demarcated their role in society and are even made to perceive themselves as outsiders on their very own land. The effect of colonialism on African women is even worse as their position is further aggravated by patriarchy. Thus, this paper reflects on how the patriarchal situation together with living under the jackboot of colonialism put the African women in a rather precarious state. It also examines Frantz Fanon’s ideas about the inherent connection between colonialism and violence, while tracing the harrowing reality of African women’s lives in the different fictitious characters portrayed by the contemporary African female writer Tsitsi Dangarembga (1959 -) in her novels Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not. This paper explores how this female author depicts the socio-political and economic effects on fictionalized women and how they challenge colonial authority in their moments of agency. In so doing, Dangarembga deals with the perils of colonialism for the individual while apprehending the potential of the literary narrative to function as a means of challenging pervasive female representations.

2021-01-01T00:00:00Z Sant Balzan, Janice /library/oar/handle/123456789/71888 2021-03-23T07:06:53Z 2021-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Seamus Heaney’s Sonnet in the ‘new age of anxiety’ Authors: Sant Balzan, Janice Abstract: Around one-third of the sonnets Seamus Heaney published over his entire poetic career are found in the collection District and Circle (2006). Heaney maintained that this collection was distinct from his previous ones because it described a world that, in his view, was characterised by ‘a new age of anxiety’. Such anxiety manifests itself repeatedly in poems that tend toward fragmentation and incompletion. And thus the question that immediately suggests itself relates to the adequacy of the sonnet form to tackle such a subject. For the sonnet as a form tends towards resolution and its architectural structure is inclined towards completion. By referring closely to a sonnet sequence from his 2006 collection, this article seeks to assess the ways in which Heaney makes of the sonnet form an apposite vehicle to reflect on the anxiety-ridden world of the twenty-first century.

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