How does language function as both an apparatus for meaning-making and a mechanism of suppression, shaping what remains unsaid, misremembered, or erased? This paper examines the role of language in the construction of narrative, the mediation of trauma, and the constraints of self-representation in Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin (2000). By embedding multiple textual modes—memoir, intertextual fiction, and historical documentation—Atwood's novel enacts a sustained critique of linguistic structure as agent of both expression and erasure. Engaging with Cathy Caruth's theorization of trauma as an epistemological rupture, Leigh Gilmore's discourse on the crisis of testimony in autobiographical writing, and Fredric Jameson's notion of the political unconscious, this paper places The Blind Assassin within a broader inquiry into the politics of representation. While much existing scholarship focuses on the novel's narrative complexity and feminist critique, less attention has been given to how its layered structures interrogate language's inability to fully account for trauma. The fragmented narration of Atwood's protagonist, Iris Chase, constructs a palimpsestic self—one that is simultaneously self-authoring and self-effacing. Through her perspective, language emerges as a force through which historical and ideological frameworks shape subjectivity. With its recursive structure and polyvocal composition, The Blind Assassin exposes the inadequacies of language in bearing witness to trauma, illustrating how narrative encodes and conceals histories of violence, complicity, and repression. This paper positions the novel within a critical discourse that examines the intersections of language, gender, and narrative form, advancing a reading practice attuned to the inherent limitations of linguistic representation in capturing subjugated experience. In foregrounding the novel's structural fractures, this study engages with an overlooked dimension of scholarship, advocating for a radical narrative methodology that deconstructs the entanglement of language with power, trauma, and memory.

Language does not simply describe the world; it shapes what can be known, contested, and resisted. This paper examines how language functions under conditions of constraint, asking: How do we develop new languages amidst censorship? The strategic use of language has historically been shaped by opposing forces: it has been instrumentalized to uphold power, as seen in Heidegger's philosophical reinvention of language within a fascist system, but it has also been subversively repurposed to challenge domination. I explore how thinkers across disciplines—Franz Fanon, Theador Adorno, Richard Rorty, and Maria Lugones—navigated language's entanglement with power. Fanon leveraged psychiatric discourse to expose colonial violence while operating within its institutional frameworks. Adorno's dense, self-consciously difficult writing functioned as both critique and intellectual refuge under ideological repression. Rorty's pragmatist approach to vocabularies revealed how shifts in language generate new political possibilities. Lugones theorized communication across oppressive epistemic systems, offering a model of resistance that emerges through relationality rather than dominant conceptual categories. Taken together, these figures reveal that language is not neutral—it is a contested terrain where meaning is disciplined, negotiated, and reconfigured. Bringing these perspectives into dialogue, I argue that understanding language as both a mechanism of control and a tool of resistance requires methodological pluralism. By drawing from philosophy, psychoanalysis, critical theory, and feminist epistemology we can begin to develop new forms of language that can be strategically deployed under constraint. This paper ultimately asks: What forms of resistance are possible when even transgression is absorbed into networks of power? In examining how language is policed, repurposed, and reimagined, I consider what it means to speak so that we are heard—before we are silenced.

With philology training and English literature as a basis, this paper explores the function of language by looking at etymology and the use of verb tense. By utilizing a philological framework on top of a literary lens, I conclude that the meaning of simple words like “could,” “would,” and “should” also have an impact on works. Specifically, this paper compares Euripides Greek of Medea with Toni Morrison's English in Beloved. By tracing the linguistic and structural parallels between these texts, this paper explores how grammatical mood creates a narrative that adds nuance of the infanticide that takes place in both works. I analyze how the infanticide of each work unfolds not through the perspective of the mothers but through other characters. In Beloved, it is the slave catcher, schoolteacher, Baby Suggs, and Stamp Paid that unveil Sethe's actions. In Medea it is Nurse and Chorus that unveil how Medea killed her children. These messengers utilize the optative mood and conditional sentences that force the audience into the position of witness which forces these mothers to grapple with their memories and ultimately their actions. I use Christina Sharpe's In the Wake: On Blackness and Being to formulate my theoretical lens. Sharpe defines “the wake” as a continuous state Black people inhabit because of USA enslavement. The conditional moods force these mothers to face their past actions. Sethe deals with her actions from enslavement while Medea grapples with Jason's betrayal. By utilizing Sarpe's "wake work," I highlight how both women inhabit “the wake” even though they are, quite literally, millennia apart.

What does it mean to write outside the phallocentric tradition? Can language act as a site of resistance, disorienting rather than stabilizing, and transforming instead of containing? This paper explores Hélène Cixous's concept of écriture féminine as an intervention into dominant linguistic and philosophical paradigms. Cixous illustrates how logocentric discourse constrains thought, silencing expressions that defy linearity and rigid categorization. Drawing on The Laugh of the Medusa, this paper demonstrates how the radical indeterminacy of feminine writing offers a subversive methodology that prioritizes fluidity, embodiment, and multiplicity over closure and abstraction. Cixous advocates that writing oneself is essential for reclaiming women's sovereignty over their historically confiscated bodies. This expressive act serves as both an epistemological and ontological disruption, challenging structuralist binaries and the totalizing nature of Western metaphysics. Using mythical and literary figures, such as Medusa, to contest patriarchal narratives, Cixous reclaims female sexuality and creativity. Her poetic style dissolves the boundaries between theory and literature, embodying the fluidity she promotes. By deconstructing the mind-body dichotomy, she repositions writing as both an act of creation and liberation. Ultimately, this paper situates écriture féminine within broader philosophical inquiries on language and discourse. Rejecting the demand for a codified style, Cixous envisions writing as a space of continuous becoming—a means to embrace the radical potential of expression. To write as she envisions is to soar in language, to confront constraints, and to embrace writing as a perpetual act of transformation.