YorkSpace

YorkSpace is York University's Institutional Repository. It supports York University's Senate Policy on Open Access by providing York community members with a place to preserve their research online in an institutional context.

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    Broken Worlds, Broken Forms: Societal Disruption and Narrative Rupture in The English Patient and Green Grass, Running Water
    (2026-03-05) Bashir, Sumayya
    This essay argues that Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water treat historical violence not as a mere theme but as a structuring force, showing how each author's departure from linear chronology reflects the cultural position from which they write. Ondaatje, writing as a Sri Lankan immigrant, renders the devastation of total war through a narrative oscillating between past and present, mirroring the fractured relationship to time and identity that displacement produces. King, by contrast, structures his novel through recursion, interruption, and circular return, drawing on Indigenous conceptions of temporality in which past, present, and future coexist rather than proceed sequentially, resisting the colonial logic of linear progress. Reading these formal strategies together, the essay contends that narrative disruption in both novels functions as historiographic critique: structure itself enacts how historical violence reorganizes a people's experience of time, revealing that each novel's formal innovation is inseparable from its author's cultural and historical position.
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    Misreading Innocence: Desdemona and the Failure of Patriarchal Logic in Othello
    (2026-03-09) Arora, Kurangi
    This essay examines Shakespeare’s Othello through the tension between Desdemona’s apparent transgression and her actual innocence. Drawing on scholarship concerning early modern marriage, gender hierarchy, and patriarchal authority, it argues that Desdemona’s independence, choice of husband, public speech, and movement beyond domestic expectations are repeatedly interpreted by the men around her as signs of sexual immorality. Through the play’s language and dramatic structure, Shakespeare constructs Desdemona as a figure who is treated as “readable,” with her behaviour reduced to a series of supposedly legible or understandable signs of chastity or guilt. Othello’s attempts to interpret Desdemona through metaphors of writing and reading, as well as his reliance on the handkerchief as material evidence, demonstrate how patriarchal authority transforms suspicion into certainty. Yet the audience’s knowledge of Desdemona’s innocence exposes the ultimate failure of this interpretive system. Her direct pleas of innocence contrast with the increasingly elaborate and fragmented language through which Othello constructs her guilt, while the handkerchief’s manipulated meaning reveals the instability of supposedly objective evidence. Eventually, Desdemona’s innocence exposes what Lena Cowen Orlin identifies as the “predictive incapacity of patriarchalism”: a system that attempts to understand and control women through predetermined signs but cannot accurately account for their actual behaviour. Shakespeare therefore presents patriarchal authority as not only restrictive but internally unstable and tragically destructive.
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    The Domestic Dungeon: Representing the Carceral in Pamela
    (2026-03-27) Verano, Bianca
    This essay argues that Samuel Richardson’s Pamela represents carcerality not only through Pamela’s physical confinement within Mr. B’s household, but through the formal structures that govern her ability to testify to her experience of confinement. Mr. B’s combined authority as head of the household and justice of the peace collapses domestic and legal power into a single figure, foreclosing Pamela’s access to legal recourse and transforming her letters into a constrained substitute for legal testimony. Yet because those letters are written under conditions of surveillance, the epistolary form becomes implicated in the novel’s carceral structure. This dynamic produces a form of conditional realism: Pamela’s suffering may be real, but the narrative through which it is represented cannot emerge independently of the coercive conditions that govern its production. This instability is reinforced by the marriage between Pamela and Mr. B, which converts her unresolved injury into a change in social status, ultimately replacing public vindication with marital resolution. By tracing this movement from legal exclusion, to constrained testimony, to status conversion, the novel’s treatment of Pamela’s incarceration destabilizes the presumed realism of the epistolary novel.
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    Autonomous care decisions: what can Article 12 of the CRPD offer to older disabled adults and their supporters?
    (Taylor & Francis, 2023-04-09) Lai, Poland
    This article offers the author’s personal reflections on the meaning of article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRP D) by drawing from the author’s experience as a carersupporter. Being recognised as someone who can make decisions is a fundamental human right. For many persons with disabilities, denial of such right is a fact of life. This article explores the issue of exercise of legal capacity as it affects older adults who live with significant cognitive and physical changes. The author highlights some of the complexities when professionals and carers such as family members have tremendous influences over older disabled adults’ decisions about care. It is argued that the State has an obligation to establish appropriate support measures for carers so that they possess the necessary capabilities and strengths to provide decision-making support to older disabled adults who accept such support in care settings.