Postcolonial Echoes and Evocations

Postcolonial Echoes and Evocations
Author: Derek O'Regan
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2006
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9783039105786

This work is a sedulous enquiry into the intertextual practice of Maryse Condé in Moi, Tituba, sorcière... noire de Salem (1986), Traversée de la mangrove (1989) and La Migration des coeurs (1995), the texts of her oeuvre in which the practice is the most elaborate and discursively significant. Arguing that no satisfactory reading of these novels is possible without due intertextual reference and interpretation, the author analyses salient intertexts which flesh out and, in the case of Traversée de la mangrove, shed considerable new light on meaning and authorial discourse. Whether it be in respect of canonical (William Faulkner, Emily Brontë, Nathaniel Hawthorne), postcolonial (Aimé Césaire, Jacques Roumain) or other (Anne Hébert, Saint-John Perse) writers, the author explores Condé's intertextual choices not only around such themes as identity, resistance, métissage and errance, but also through the dialectics of race-culture, male-female, centre-periphery, and past-present. As both textual symbol and enactment of an increasingly creolised world, intertextuality constitutes a pervasively powerful force in Condé's writing the elucidation of which is indispensable to evaluating the significance of this unique fictional oeuvre.

Caribbeing

Caribbeing
Author: Kristian Van Haesendonck
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2014-09-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 940121168X

From wide-ranging overviews of the entire region to close readings of specific works, this volume opens a fascinating window on the literatures and cultures of the Caribbean, covering texts in the multiplicity of languages used in the wider Caribbean: Spanish, English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and the region’s many creoles. Authors and works discussed range from luminaries such as Derek Walcott to hitherto practically unknown works in Antillean creole languages. Underlying is the idea to foster the study of the Caribbean literary, artistic and visual text through a comparative lens, a firm proposal to think beyond the persisting linguistic barriers and scholarly divides in the field. As such, Caribbeing: Comparing Caribbean Literatures and Cultures brings a new approach to the Caribbean embracing the region’s linguistic multiplicity and complexity without eschewing the many theoretical challenges and obstacles such a scholarly endeavor entails. Because of its ample scope this book will appeal to scholars and students working on the Caribbean and Latin America, but also to those interested in the broader fields of postcolonial and cultural studies. “This book is much more than a book on the Caribbean: it underlines the global dimensions and relevance of Caribbean Studies in the twenty-first century. Following carefully the crossroads of literatures and cultures, it shows new routes allowing us to rethink our world(s) in a transarchipelagic mode. An eye-opener: accelerated globalization is unthinkable without the Caribbean.” (Ottmar Ette, University of Potsdam) “Rarely have the multiple flows and enduring traumas of Caribbean culture been explored from such a boldly wide-ranging and profoundly comparative set of perspectives. An indispensable work that sets a new standard for Caribbeanist scholarship.” (Maarten van Delden, Universtiy of California, Los Angeles)

Calypso Jews

Calypso Jews
Author: Sarah Phillips Casteel
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2016-01-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0231540574

In original and insightful ways, Caribbean writers have turned to Jewish experiences of exodus and reinvention, from the Sephardim expelled from Iberia in the 1490s to the "Calypso Jews" who fled Europe for Trinidad in the 1930s. Examining these historical migrations through the lens of postwar Caribbean fiction and poetry, Sarah Phillips Casteel presents the first major study of representations of Jewishness in Caribbean literature. Bridging the gap between postcolonial and Jewish studies, Calypso Jews enriches cross-cultural investigations of Caribbean creolization. Caribbean writers invoke both the 1492 expulsion and the Holocaust as part of their literary archaeology of slavery and its legacies. Despite the unequal and sometimes fraught relations between Blacks and Jews in the Caribbean before and after emancipation, Black-Jewish literary encounters reflect sympathy and identification more than antagonism and competition. Providing an alternative to U.S.-based critical narratives of Black-Jewish relations, Casteel reads Derek Walcott, Maryse Condé, Michelle Cliff, Jamaica Kincaid, Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen, and Paul Gilroy, among others, to reveal a distinctive interdiasporic literature.

Childhood, Autobiography and the Francophone Caribbean

Childhood, Autobiography and the Francophone Caribbean
Author: Louise Hardwick
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2013-04-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1846317940

This book explores a major modern turn in Francophone Caribbean literature towards récits d’enfance (narratives of childhood) and asks why this occurred post-1990.

The Brontë Sisters in Other Wor(l)ds

The Brontë Sisters in Other Wor(l)ds
Author: S. Qi
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2014-10-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137405155

Looking at the works of the Brontë sisters through a translingual, transnational, and transcultural lens, this collection is the first book-length study of the Brontës as received and reimagined in languages and cultures outside of Europe and the United States.

The Divine Manifold

The Divine Manifold
Author: Roland Faber
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 601
Release: 2014-07-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0739191403

The Divine Manifold is a postmodern enquiry in intersecting themes of the concept and reality of multiplicity in a chaosmos that does not refuse a dimension of theopoetics, but rather defines it in terms of divine polyphilia, the love of multiplicity. In an intricate play on Dante’s Divine Comedy, this book engages questions of religion and philosophy through the aporetic dynamics of love and power, locating its discussions in the midst of, and in between the spheres of a genuine philosophy of multiplicity. This philosophy originates from the poststructuralist approach of Gilles Deleuze and the process philosophical inspirations of Alfred N. Whitehead. As their chaosmos invites questions of ultimate reality, religious pluralism and multireligious engagement, a theopoetics of love will find paradoxical dissociations and harmonizations with postmodern sensitivities of language, power, knowledge and embodiment. At the intersection of poststructuralism’s and process theology’s insights in the liberating necessity of multiplicity for a postmodern cosmology, the book realizes its central claim. If there is a divine dimension of the chaosmos, it will not be found in any identification with mundane forces or supernatural powers, but on the contrary in the absolute difference of polyphilic love from creativity. Yet, the concurrent indifference of love and power—its mystical undecidability in terms of any conceptualization—will lead into existential questions of the insistence on multiplicity in a world of infinite becoming as inescapable background for its importance and creativeness, formulating an ecological and ethical impulse for a mystagogy of becoming intermezzo.

Albert Camus's "The New Mediterranean Culture"

Albert Camus's
Author: Neil Foxlee
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2010
Genre: East and West in literature
ISBN: 9783034302074

This book was shortlisted for the R.H. Gapper prize 2011. On 8 February 1937 the 23-year-old Albert Camus gave an inaugural lecture for a new Maison de la culture, or community arts centre, in Algiers. Entitled 'La nouvelle culture méditerranéenne' ('The New Mediterranean Culture'), Camus's lecture has been interpreted in radically different ways: while some critics have dismissed it as an incoherent piece of juvenilia, others see it as key to understanding his future development as a thinker, whether as the first expression of his so-called 'Mediterranean humanism' or as an early indication of what is seen as his essentially colonial mentality. These various interpretations are based on reading the text of 'The New Mediterranean Culture' in a single context, whether that of Camus's life and work as a whole, of French discourses on the Mediterranean or of colonial Algeria (and French discourses on that country). By contrast, this study argues that Camus's lecture - and in principle any historical text - needs to be seen in a multiplicity of contexts, discursive and otherwise, if readers are to understand properly what its author was doing in writing it. Using Camus's lecture as a case study, the book provides a detailed theoretical and practical justification of this 'multi-contextualist' approach.

Guilt and Shame

Guilt and Shame
Author: Jenny Chamarette
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2010
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9783039115631

As theoretical positions and as affective experiences, the twin currents of contrition - guilt and shame - permeate literary discourse and figure prominently in discussions of ethics, history, sexuality and social hierarchy. This collection of essays, on French and francophone prose, poetry, drama, visual art, cinema and thought, assesses guilt and shame in relation to structures of social morality, language and self-expression, the thinking of trauma, and the ethics of forgiveness. The authors approach their subjects via close readings and comparative study, drawing on such thinkers as Adorno, Derrida, Jankélévitch and Irigaray. Through these they consider works ranging from the medieval Roman de la rose through to Gustave Moreau's Symbolist painting, Giacometti's sculpture, the films of Marina de Van and recent sub-Saharan African writing. The collection provides an état-présent of thinking on guilt and shame in French Studies, and is the first to assemble work on this topic ranging from the thirteenth to the twenty-first century. The book contains nine contributions in English and four in French.

Mostly French

Mostly French
Author: Alistair Rolls
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2009
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9783039119578

This book, which was inspired by a conference on plural conjugations of Frenchness (La France au pluriel) held in 2007 at the Universities of Technology, Sydney and Newcastle, focuses on the concept of national belonging as it pertains to detective fiction, with particular emphasis on French and Australian detective fictions and the encounter and crossing over between them. The objective is not only to use the concepts of 'French' and 'Australian' detective fiction productively, via the analysis of French and Australian detective-fiction novels, but also to challenge and undermine the very notion of national detective fictions, which are so often assumed to be transparently meaningful. The contributors to this volume focus variously on the following areas: comparative analysis of the genesis of French and Australian detective fiction; translation of Australian (and other) novels into French; translation as a genre; Frenchness as a stereotype, its role in individual novels and its spectre in all detective fiction; and readings of individual French and Australian detective novels. Overall, this book aims to challenge assumptions about French detective fiction, its influence on other national fictions and its explicit and implicit presence in all detective fiction.

Michel Houellebecq

Michel Houellebecq
Author: John McCann
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2010
Genre: Social problems in literature
ISBN: 9783039113736

Michel Houellebecq is a French author whose profile in the English speaking world is unusually high. He is an author who has put the humour back into the Absurd, without losing any of the awareness of the bleakness of the human condition. Undoubtedly one of the most trenchant satirists of our time, he deflates the projected utopias that we imagine to protect us from the ills that beset us. He faces the reader with the incipit totalitarianism that lies in our secular and religious faiths when they promise to secure the future in this world or the next – while at the same time showing the limits of our attempts to forge an all-encompassing view of the world. More than many other novelists, his work is a reflection of the social and economic reality of life in a post-industrial society.