Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul

Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul
Author: I. Coovadia
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2009-06-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230622461

This book traces the ways in which problems of imaginative authority and authorship structure the fiction and non-fiction of V.S. Naipaul and resonate in postcolonial literature. Imraan Coovadia argues that the post-colonial societies Naipaul studies in novels such asA Bend in the RiverandGuerillasare defined by the fragility of their authority. Coovadia demonstrates through close reading, how Naipaul, born in Trinidad to an Indian family and resident of the United Kingdom,asserts hisimaginative authority over many different situations across the globe through a complex literary rhetoric.

V.S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing, and Caribbean Thought

V.S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing, and Caribbean Thought
Author: William Ghosh
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2020-11-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192605305

V.S. Naipaul was one of the most influential and controversial writers of the twentieth century. His writings on colonialism and its aftermath, on migration and landscape, and on cultural loss and creativity, were both admired and criticised by a wide global audience. But what of his relationship to the region of his birth? Born in Trinidad, of Indian ancestry, and spending his professional life in England, Naipaul could be dismissive of his Caribbean background. He presented himself as a citizen of nowhere, or else, of the globalized, postcolonial world. However, this obscures his intense competition, fierce disagreements and close collaboration with other Caribbean intellectuals, both as a schoolchild in colonial Trinidad, and as an internationally celebrated author. V.S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing, and Caribbean Thought looks again at Naipaul's relationship with his birthplace. It shows that that the decolonising Caribbean was the crucible in which Naipaul's style and outlook were formed. Moreover, understanding Naipaul's place in the history of the region's politics and letters sheds new light on the work of celebrated contemporaries, Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming and Maryse Condè, Elsa Goveia and Eric Williams, Sylvia Wynter and C.L.R. James. Literary criticism, intellectual biography, and an essay in the history of ideas, this book offers a new account of Caribbean thought in the decades after independence. It reveals a literary culture of creative vibrancy, in an era of unprecedented change.

Handbook of British Travel Writing

Handbook of British Travel Writing
Author: Barbara Schaff
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 628
Release: 2020-09-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110498979

This handbook offers a systematic exploration of current key topics in travel writing studies. It addresses the history, impact, and unique discursive variety of British travel writing by covering some of the most celebrated and canonical authors of the genre as well as lesser known ones in more than thirty close-reading chapters. Combining theoretically informed, astute literary criticism of single texts with the analysis of the circumstances of their production and reception, these chapters offer excellent possibilities for understanding the complexity and cultural relevance of British travel writing.

The First Naipaul World Epics

The First Naipaul World Epics
Author:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2021-07-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9354352650

The plethora of commentary from highly respected voices in a broad cross-section of academic disciplines, which V. S. Naipaul's death on 11 August 2018 elicited, ranged so widely, both cognitively and emotionally, that if a student of literature, unfamiliar with the Naipaulian era, read it all, they would have failed to make sense of the divergences. Allegations included that he 'was a cruel man', 'a scarred man', 'the darkest dungeons of colonialism incarnate: self-punishing, self-loathing, world-loathing, full of nastiness and fury', 'a ventriloquist for the nastiest cliches European colonialism had devised to rule the world with arrogance and confidence' and so on. On the other hand, writers referred to Naipaul as a 'brilliant writer's writer', one 'who holds a mirror of imagination unto society to capture a certain view of reality' and one who 'has turned the genre of the travelogue into an art form'. Debates aside, many of us appreciate the value of Naipaul's writing to the deepest possible comprehension of the imperial impulse and the myriad reasons it manifested as colonialism. The First Naipaul World Epics is the first in a series of critical collections that aim to demonstrate this value. At the same time, the series seeks to help the new student through the quagmire of divergent opinions his personality and writing have generated.

Far from Mecca

Far from Mecca
Author: Aliyah Khan
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2020-04-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1978806647

Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean is the first academic work on Muslims in the English-speaking Caribbean. Khan focuses on the fiction, poetry and music of Islam in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica, combining archival research, ethnography, and literary analysis to argue for a historical continuity of Afro- and Indo-Muslim presence and cultural production in the Caribbean: from Arabic-language autobiographical and religious texts written by enslaved Sufi West Africans in nineteenth century Jamaica, to early twentieth century fictions of post-indenture South Asian Muslim indigeneity and El Dorado, to the 1990 Jamaat al-Muslimeen attempted government coup in Trinidad and its calypso music, to judicial cases of contemporary interaction between Caribbean Muslims and global terrorism. Khan argues that the Caribbean Muslim subject, the "fullaman," a performative identity that relies on gendering and racializing Islam, troubles discourses of creolization that are fundamental to postcolonial nationalisms in the Caribbean.

Civilizing War

Civilizing War
Author: Nasser Mufti
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2017-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 081013604X

Winner of the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities, awarded by the Council of Graduate Schools Honorable Mention for the 2019 Sonya Rudikoff Prize, awarded by the Northeast Victorian Studies Association Civilizing War traces the historical transformation of civil war from a civil affair into an uncivil crisis. Civil war is today synonymous with the global refugee crisis, often serving as grounds for liberal-humanitarian intervention and nationalist protectionism. In Civilizing War, Nasser Mufti situates this contemporary conjuncture in the long history of British imperialism, demonstrating how civil war has been and continues to be integral to the politics of empire. Through comparative readings of literature, criticism, historiography, and social analysis, Civilizing War shows how writers and intellectuals of Britain’s Anglophone empire articulated a “poetics of national rupture” that defined the metropolitan nation and its colonial others. Mufti’s tour de force marshals a wealth of examples as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, Benjamin Disraeli, Friedrich Engels, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, V. S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, and Michael Ondaatje to examine the variety of forms this poetics takes—metaphors, figures, tropes, puns, and plot—all of which have played a central role in Britain’s civilizing mission and its afterlife. In doing so, Civilizing War shifts the terms of Edward Said’s influential Orientalism to suggest that imperialism was not only organized around the norms of civility but also around narratives of civil war.

Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul

Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul
Author: Imraan Coovadia
Publisher:
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2009
Genre: Authority in literature
ISBN: 9781349379194

This book traces the ways in which problems of imaginative authority and authorship structure the fiction and non-fiction of V.S. Naipaul and resonate in postcolonial literature. Imraan Coovadia argues that the post-colonial societies Naipaul studies in novels such as A Bend in the River and Guerillas are defined by the fragility of their authority. Coovadia demonstrates through close reading, how Naipaul, born in Trinidad to an Indian family and resident of the United Kingdom, asserts his imaginative authority over many different situations across the globe through a complex literary rhetoric.

Swallowing a World

Swallowing a World
Author: Benjamin Bergholtz
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2024-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1496241126

Swallowing a World offers a new theorization of the maximalist novel. Though it’s typically cast as a (white, male) genre of U.S. fiction, maximalism, Benjamin Bergholtz argues, is an aesthetic response to globalization and a global phenomenon in its own right. Bergholtz considers a selection of massive and meandering novels that crisscross from London and Lusaka to Kingston, Kabul, and Kashmir and that represent, formally reproduce, and ultimately invite reflection on the effects of globalization. Each chapter takes up a maximalist novel that simultaneously maps and formally mimics a cornerstone of globalization, such as the postcolonial culture industry (Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children), the rebirth of fundamentalism (Zadie Smith’s White Teeth), the transnational commodification of violence (Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings), the obstruction of knowledge by narrative (Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know), and globalization’s gendered, asymmetrical growth (Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift). By reframing analysis of maximalism around globalization, Swallowing a World not only reimagines one of the most perplexing genres of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries but also sheds light on some of the most perplexing political problems of our precarious present.

Tracing the (Post)Apartheid Novel beyond 2000

Tracing the (Post)Apartheid Novel beyond 2000
Author: Danyela Dimakatso Demir
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2023-12-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1003815391

This anthology comprises of interviews with contemporary South African authors, offering vignettes of their lives and summaries of their works. In curating this book, Danyela Demir and Olivier Moreillon step beyond pure literary theory and analysis. They welcome the authors to speak and assess the literary panorama in which they live and co-create. However, Demir and Moreillon also trace concepts and terms that describe the current South African literature, such as post-transitional literature and literature beyond 2000. By adopting a world-literary approach to (post)apartheid literature, this book contributes to debates on contemporary South African writing. In addition, Tracing the (Post)Apartheid Novel Beyond 2000 seeks to raise awareness of the imbalance in both critical and public attention between literary ‘big names’, such as André P. Brink, J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and Zakes Mda, who are popular worldwide, and the younger and newer generation of South African writers, who go largely unnoticed. Print edition not for sale in Sub Saharan Africa.

Relocations

Relocations
Author: Imraan Coovadia
Publisher: Juta and Company (Pty) Ltd
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2016-06-30
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1775820793

Between 2009 and 2012, the Gordon Institute for the Performing and Creative Arts in Cape Town held the Great Texts/Big Questions public lecture series which became a celebrated part of Cape Town’s cultural landscape, demonstrating current intellectual and creative thinking in South Africa. These lectures gave audiences a chance to engage with transformative texts and questions, to hear thought leaders speak on the ideas, the books, the art, and the films that matter to them and to us. Relocations: Reading Culture in South Africa brings together a selection of these lectures by world-renowned artists, writers and thinkers in the form of essays, for the benefit of a wider readership, with a contemporary design which plays with words. The authors range from novelists André Brink and Imraan Coovadia (one of the collection’s editors), to poets Gabeba Baderoon and Rustum Kozain, to artist William Kentridge and social activist Zackie Achmat. The topics are as wide as Don Quixote, Marx and Lincoln, trout fishing, Hamlet, the 19th-century Russian writer Gogol and Nabokov’s novel Lolita. Today’s readers are increasingly interested in finding new ways to understand and live with great texts and the world of ideas. Books like this demonstrate that thinking about these texts does not have to be an inaccessibly academic pursuit.