http://blogs.najah.edu/author/odeh-odeh An-Najah Blogs :: Odeh J. Odeh en-us Thu, 18 Apr 2024 12:26:54 IDT Thu, 18 Apr 2024 12:26:54 IDT [email protected] [email protected] http://blogs.najah.edu/staff/odeh-odeh/article/Language-1-in-the-Teaching-and-Learning-of-English-Language-and-LiteraturePublished Articles This paper revisits the pros and cons of using translation more exactly the mother tongue in the teaching and learning of a foreign language and literature and concludes the use of L1 if used properly and judiciously is a needful and worthy pedagogical ally in the teaching and learning of English as language and literature across all levels from basic school through university http://blogs.najah.edu/staff/odeh-odeh/article/English-language-1-and-2--instructional-design-Published Articles These are two English foundation courses for al-Quds Open University and Arab Students meant to improve the overall English proficiency of these students in an integrated fashion to prepare them for their later courses in their different specializations The instructional design of these two textbooks has been guided by distance education techniques and methodshttp://blogs.najah.edu/staff/odeh-odeh/article/ldquoFor-the-Arab-University-Student-English-or-Comparative-LiteraturerdquoPublished Articles It 1s the vogue today when contemplating the question of English literature for overseas students to talk more of approaches methods and techniques than of policies objectives and aims Drawing on my experience of teaching English literature to Arab university students my argument is that a functional vision - directed teaching of English or any other foreign literature in the-Arab World needs both a national value theory to be erected upon and guided by and a pedagogy that can in large measure fulfill the goals and objectives peculiar to such a theoryhttp://blogs.najah.edu/staff/odeh-odeh/article/quotTeaching-English-LiteraturePublished ArticlesIf we all agree and we must that methods follow aims and techniques depend on objectives then a discussion of approach becomes like trying to place the carriage before the horse I will therefore discuss this issue of chronology versus genre in the teaching of literature as a detail of a pattern that has been a painful obsession with me for the last six years of my career as a university teacher of English literature That sorrowfully enough Arab university English departments do not seem to have a studied policy or a calculated goal in a national ideological sense to the teaching of British or American literature to Arab students - is the pattern The question of why at this particular moment in history the Arab student as a member of a nation with its plentiful share of dilemmas and confusions quests and apirations should study a foreign literature is never raised The evasion of such a nationally portentous question is so puzzling that it assumes the proportions of a wilfully collective exercise in make-believe Genre or chronology then? Each has its appropriate stage in a scrupulously thought out strategy for teaching English or any foreign literature For as Raymond Chapman observes The value of new methods depends on starting from the right place And as it seems we are yet to Warde Fowlers incisive statement still rings true It is men not methods which really tell in education http://blogs.najah.edu/staff/odeh-odeh/article/ldquoTime-as-Future-Past--for-James--Joycersquos-Bloom-and-Attahir--Wattarrsquos-Bou-ndash-Larwah--in-Ulysses-and-Azzilzal-ldquoPublished Articles The dialectic between man and time-history has been the most urgent the most central theme of twentieth century literature and no other literary genre can be said to have succeeded in knitting it so completely and indissolubly - into the flesh and texture of its structure as has the novel of the twentieth century Indeed dialectic becomes structure and structure dialectic with some novelists In contrast with its treatment in pre-modern novels the preoccupation with this theme on the part of imaginative novelists of the present century has been conscious and deliberate agonizing and fascinating compelling and unique A radical synthesis constituting an emotionally satisfying emblem of things ultimate has been worked out between the privateindividualsubjective and the collectivepublicobjective areas of human experience between Raleighs private dream and public nightmare of human life between Santayanas vast cosmic flood of cyclic movements and sudden precipitations and the private babbling - inchoate-near oblivion little rivulet of images emotions and words Of course it is not the purpose of this paper to discuss this epistemological problem of timehistory philosophically or theologically much less scientifically but as it has been an obsession of two twentieth-century novels although it is granted that new psychology and new philosophy new interpretations of theology and new scientific attitudes to temporality have certainly impinged an the artists understanding and conceptualization of time This is Vicos man a finite principle of possibility of knowing and of willing which tends to the infinite biding time within Vieos corsoricorso movement of history 11 to infinity As faith to craft is the mark of great men Joyce despite himself as Noon notes could not but decipher the runes of time past through the fictional glass of his proclaimedly lost Catholic faith and Wattar somehow could not would not transfer the prophetic messianism of his ideology to his work of art http://blogs.najah.edu/staff/odeh-odeh/article/The-Dialectics-of-the-ldquoWait-ldquo-Motif-in--Beckett-and-Aqel-Published Articles It might very well seem preposterous to compare one of few most innovative of contemporary Western dramatists and the leading exponent of the Theatre of the Absurd with his keen sense of theatre his supreme mastery of craft and profound and gnawing awareness of ontological dilemmas with a Palestinian playwright still in a sense or two feeling his way into dramatic construction but doing so firmly and bravely and with no equally flattering consicousness of ontological perplexities Moreover that our playwright has been influenced by Beckett is out of the question Yet intriguing are the affinities one finds between the works of both: a devotion to the wait motif and its dramatization in a metatheatre peopled by metafictional characters Such convergencies in choice of motif treatment and theme are perhaps only a measure not only of the fundamental homogeneity of the literary intelligence common to all national elites but also of the essential sameness of the condition of universal man Beckett and Aqels characters strive in their different ways to retrieve to a hopeless world its forfeited possibility of tragedy to bridge a disorienting rift between mancharacter and universe and within a dialectic of self and role of character and actor try to make illusion a reality apparent nonsense a meaning absurdity a purpose A few affinities of formespecially the expressionistic juxtaposition aside the plays of both playwrights belong to a tradition of exile - willed or imposed the experience of a lost country as Williams in the context of Beckett puts it - lost differently in the case of each - and with it a lost identity a self torn apart and a quest for Deliverancehttp://blogs.najah.edu/staff/odeh-odeh/article/ldquoThomas-Hardy--Fateh-Mudarres--and-the-Exploration-of-the-Psychology-of-Choice-ldquo-Published Articles Of all Arab writers whose works of literature Im acquainted with Fateh Mudarres a contemporary Syrian painter and author of short stories is the one who in vision attitude towards and treatment of subject most notably the central role given to physical nature and attitude to religion comes closest to that half-Victorian and half- modernist novelist Thomas Hardy Within the two media of the short story and novel both portray a world where it seems ever the destiny of Good to be ground by Evil where social injustice is rife and feudalism economic as well as moral is still the fashion and in brief where spiritual melancholy darkness and death reign supreme An ancient and a lasting theme indeed http://blogs.najah.edu/staff/odeh-odeh/article/Fighting-for-the-Powerless-to-Be-Born--A-Study-in-Contemporary-British-Drama-Published Articles This studydissertation is an examination of a new trend in contemporary British theatre specifically from 1968-1980 and a distilling of the issues central to this new trend issues that are national and yet can not be more universal The study also explicates the theory of art that inspires and guides the writers of this new trend eg Brenton Hare Barker Edgar Bond McGrath Arden and Griffiths and evaluates their view of the function of drama and the dramatist in society and their concept of theatre which undoubtedly informs the structure of their writing in plays that by critical consensus are regarded as their best