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Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia was written in answer to Queries proposed by Francois Marbois, who sought information about American states. This book consists of 23 queries, which range in subject from nature of Virginia to human institutions. Marbois asked 22 questions and Jefferson rearranged them into a new sequence. This means that the book is carefully plotted and structured to manifest the author’s plan for establishing an agrarian republic in the new land. Jefferson finds nature not arbitrary or pointless but orderly and constant. His social and political theories for a new republic are based on these natural principles. For Jefferson, American nature and land are a kind of ground where his social, economic, and political theories are formed and cultivated. The American land, therefore, becomes the ideological landscape to which farmers are central. Jefferson’s farmer whom he sets as the American character is independent and democratic. His agrarian republic is an embodiment of what Leo Marx calls the middle landscape or pastoralism. Jefferson projects order, harmony, and composure he finds in this landscape into the self-image of America, and then integral national self. Confronting social disintegration posed by social and cultural heterogeneity, Jefferson wants his republic to be homogeneous, egalitarian, and, most of all, conflict-free. This state, he believes, can keep the republic orderly, stable, and unified. Thus, to keep his republic safe, he tries to erase the heterogeneity such as slavery, immigrants, native Americans, and manufacturing, which leads to monoculturalism.

This paper focusses on the concept of Ijtihād in Islam, its appearance and the qualifications for a mujtahid. Ijtihād means a judgement through reasoned deduction by scholars (ʿUlamāʾ) and lawyers (Fuqahāʾ) with adequate knowledge of Islam in order to obtain the answers to certain matters. According to some of Muslim traditionalists and western scholars, the door of Ijtihād in Islam has been closed since the ninth or tenth century due to their misconception of Ijtihād despite its intermittent activities. With the introduction of western laws to Islamic countries in the nineteenth century, Islamic law had to be in harmony with Ijtihād to resolve various secular issues. In order to be a Mujtahid, a scholar was required to have the power of discernment, because it was a foundation of the Islamic legal sources like Ijtihād or Ijmāʿ.

This paper peers through the window at “The Sisters” to explore what the title means and how the young boy’s relationship with Father Flynn develops, keeping in mind the story’s functions as a prelude to the entire collection of James Joyce's Dubliners. The title seems at odds with the relationship between the boy and the priest, which stands out as a memorable feature of the story. However, the boy’s gaze up to the window is significant in that the boy’s narration draws the reader’s attention towards the revealing of the secret at the window in the same way “The Sisters” serves as a window to the general paralysis of Dubliners. Joyce’s narrative technique interrelates with the thematic concerns as the window motifs manifest the paralysis theme. “The Sisters” deploys the general theme of paralysis by employing a boy’s memory, combining the “main” male narration with the “marginal” female narration. As Joyce subtly reveals the deadly secret of paralysis screened from the boy’s ears, he succeeds in keeping the reader’s attention until the end, at which point the sisters offer an epiphany. The window motif acts on two levels regarding the first-person narrative. The boy undergoes a process of initiation as a hero and, as a story-teller, he shares the writer’s own concern with storytelling. The balance is maintained between two pairs, male and female, while there is also a parallel to the way the title and the story interact. “The Sisters” is placed before and after the story of the dead priest, so that the narrative form takes precedence over content on this border. In that way, the reader’s attention returns to “The Sisters” as a gnomon.