Jasmina Murad – författare

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, Free University of Berlin (John-F.-Kennedy-Institute), course: The Subaltern Speaks: Minority Literature in the U.S., language: English, abstract: In this paper I focus on two considerable U.S. authors: Toni Morrison and Ana Castillo. The fact that these writers - who do not share the same ethnic background - both deploy the literary mode of magical realism in their works has engaged my interest to analyze and compare their novels Beloved and So Far from God. The purpose of this paper is not only to probe into the nature of magical realism in the two novels, but also to examine this narrative form as a socio-cultural practice which is connected to a special Weltanschauung. To enter this vast territory, it will be useful to situate the term magical realism in a theoretical and cultural framework which happens in the following chapter. Subsequently, I will expose how Morrison and Castillo employ magical realism in Beloved and So Far from God, and, in particular, I try to identify its function and the role it plays in terms of Morrison's and Castillo's cultural and historical background. In the conclusion I will expose the parallels which can be drawn between the novels, coming up with the thesis that for these parallels, there are two underlying main functions of magical realism.

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, Free University of Berlin (Institute for English Linguistics), course: Second Language Acquisition, language: English, abstract: One of the central questions that SLA has tried to answer is why learners of a non-native language (L2) evince such a high degree of interindividual variation in their final attainment relative to the L2 components and skills they have acquired. In order to offer a satisfactory response to this key issue, SLA researchers have posited the existence of a set of individual factors of a very different nature, such as aptitude, motivation, attitude, personality, and intelligence, among others, that might explain such variation. However, one of the most obvious potential explanations for the lack of success of L2 learners compared to L1 learners is that the acquisition of a foreign language begins at a later age than that of the mother tongue does. Thus, it has been prevalently assumed that age itself is a predictor of second language proficiency. This paper focuses on research which has been carried out on maturational constraints for SLA and hereby tries to find answers to various questions concerning age as a factor in SLA.