South African Literature's Russian Soul

South African Literature's Russian Soul
Author: Jeanne-Marie Jackson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2015-10-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1472593006

How do great moments in literary traditions arise from times of intense social and political upheaval? South African Literature's Russian Soul charts the interplay of narrative innovation and political isolation in two of the world's most renowned non-European literatures. In this book, Jeanne-Marie Jackson demonstrates how Russian writing's “Golden Age” in the troubled nineteenth-century has served as a model for South African writers both during and after apartheid. Exploring these two isolated literary cultures alongside each other, the book challenges the limits of "global" methodologies in contemporary literary studies and outdated models of center-periphery relations to argue for a more locally involved scale of literary enquiry with more truly global horizons.

African Literatures as World Literature

African Literatures as World Literature
Author: Alexander Fyfe
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2022-11-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501379976

The enormous success of writers such as Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie demonstrates that African literatures are now an international phenomenon. But the apparent global legibility of a small number of (mostly Anglophone) writers in the diaspora raises the question of how literary producers from the continent, both past and present, have situated their work in relation to the world and the kinds of material networks to which this corresponds. This collection shows how literatures from across the African continent engage with conceptualizations of 'the world' in relation to local social and political issues. Focusing on a wide variety of geographic, historical and linguistic contexts, the essays in this volume seek answers to the following questions: What are the topographies of 'the world' in different literary texts and traditions? What are that world's limits, boundaries and possibilities? How do literary modes and forms such as realism, narrative poetry or the political essay affect the presentation of worldliness? What are the material networks of circulation that allow African literatures to become world literature? African literatures, it emerges, do important theoretical work that speaks to the very core of world literary studies today.

At Penpoint

At Penpoint
Author: Monica Popescu
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2020-08-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1478012153

In At Penpoint Monica Popescu traces the development of African literature during the second half of the twentieth century to address the intertwined effects of the Cold War and decolonization on literary history. Popescu draws on archival materials from the Soviet-sponsored Afro-Asian Writers Association and the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom alongside considerations of canonical literary works by Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Ousmane Sembène, Pepetela, Nadine Gordimer, and others. She outlines how the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union played out in the aesthetic and political debates among African writers and intellectuals. These writers decolonized aesthetic canons even as superpowers attempted to shape African cultural production in ways that would advance their ideological and geopolitical goals. Placing African literature at the crossroads of postcolonial theory and studies of the Cold War, Popescu provides a new reassessment of African literature, aesthetics, and knowledge production.

A Companion to African Literatures

A Companion to African Literatures
Author: Olakunle George
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 512
Release: 2021-03-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1119058171

Rediscover the diversity of modern African literatures with this authoritative resource edited by a leader in the field How have African literatures unfolded in their rich diversity in our modern era of decolonization, nationalisms, and extensive transnational movement of peoples? How have African writers engaged urgent questions regarding race, nation, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality? And how do African literary genres interrelate with traditional oral forms or audio-visual and digital media? A Companion to African Literatures addresses these issues and many more. Consisting of essays by distinguished scholars and emerging leaders in the field, this book offers rigorous, deeply engaging discussions of African literatures on the continent and in diaspora. It covers the four main geographical regions (East and Central Africa, North Africa, Southern Africa, and West Africa), presenting ample material to learn from and think with. A Companion To African Literatures is divided into five parts. The first four cover different regions of the continent, while the fifth part considers conceptual issues and newer directions of inquiry. Chapters focus on literatures in European languages officially used in Africa -- English, French, and Portuguese -- as well as homegrown African languages: Afrikaans, Amharic, Arabic, Swahili, and Yoruba. With its lineup of lucid and authoritative analyses, readers will find in A Companion to African Literatures a distinctive, rewarding academic resource. Perfect for undergraduate and graduate students in literary studies programs with an African focus, A Companion to African Literatures will also earn a place in the libraries of teachers, researchers, and professors who wish to strengthen their background in the study of African literatures.

The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee

The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee
Author: Lucy Valerie Graham
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2023-08-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350152064

J. M. Coetzee – novelist, essayist, public intellectual, and Nobel Laureate in Literature (2003) – is widely recognized as one of the towering literary figures of the last half century. With chapters written by leading and emerging scholars from across the world, The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee offers the most comprehensive available exploration of the variety, range and significance of his work. The volume covers a wealth of topics, including: · The full span of Coetzee's work from his poetry to his essays and major fiction, including Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace and the Jesus novels · Biographical details and archival approaches · Coetzee's sources and influences, including engagements with Modernism, South African, Australian, Russian and Latin American literatures · Interdisciplinary perspectives, including on visual cultures, music, philosophy, computational systems and translation. The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee provides indispensable scholarly perspectives, covers emerging debates and maps the future direction of Coetzee studies.

Transnational Russian Studies

Transnational Russian Studies
Author: Andy Byford
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2020-02-07
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1789624940

This book focuses on how Russia has perpetually redefined Russianness in reaction to the wider world. Treating culture as an expanding field, it offers original case studies in Russia’s imperial entanglements; the life of things ‘Russian’, including the language, beyond the nation’s boundaries, and Russia’s positioning in the globalized world.

A Soviet Journey

A Soviet Journey
Author: Alex La Guma
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2017-04-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1498536034

In 1978, the South African activist and novelist Alex La Guma (1925–1985) published A Soviet Journey, a memoir of his travels in the Soviet Union. Today it stands as one of the longest and most substantive first-hand accounts of the USSR by an African writer. La Guma’s book is consequently a rare and important document of the anti-apartheid struggle and the Cold War period, depicting the Soviet model from an African perspective and the specific meaning it held for those envisioning a future South Africa. For many members of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party, the Soviet Union represented a political system that had achieved political and economic justice through socialism—a point of view that has since been lost with the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. This new edition of A Soviet Journey—the first since 1978—restores this vision to the historical record, highlighting how activist-intellectuals like La Guma looked to the Soviet Union as a paradigm of self-determination, decolonization, and postcolonial development. The introduction by Christopher J. Lee discusses these elements of La Guma’s text, in addition to situating La Guma more broadly within the intercontinental spaces of the Black Atlantic and an emergent Third World. Presenting a more expansive view of African literature and its global intellectual engagements, A Soviet Journey will be of interest to readers of African fiction and non-fiction, South African history, postcolonial Cold War studies, and radical political thought.

Revolution and Non-violence in Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela

Revolution and Non-violence in Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela
Author: Imraan Coovadia
Publisher:
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2020
Genre: History
ISBN: 0198863691

Explores the writings and revolutionary thought of three connected figures--Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela--on the subject of violence and non-violence and the way they resisted revolutionary thinking in favour of an alternative model of civic transformation.

Futures of Comparative Literature

Futures of Comparative Literature
Author: Ursula K Heise
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2017-03-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351853023

Futures of Comparative Literature is a cutting edge report on the state of the discipline in Comparative Literature. Offering a broad spectrum of viewpoints from all career stages, a variety of different institutions, and many language backgrounds, this collection is fully global and diverse. The book includes previously unpublished interviews with key figures in the discipline as well as a range of different essays – short pieces on key topics and longer, in-depth pieces. It is divided into seven sections: Futures of Comparative Literature; Theories, Histories, Methods; Worlds; Areas and Regions; Languages, Vernaculars, Translations; Media; Beyond the Human; and contains over 50 essays on topics such as: Queer Reading; Human Rights; Fundamentalism; Untranslatability; Big Data; Environmental Humanities. It also includes current facts and figures from the American Comparative Literature Association as well as a very useful general introduction, situating and introducing the material. Curated by an expert editorial team, this book captures what is at stake in the study of Comparative Literature today.

Losing the Plot

Losing the Plot
Author: Leon de Kock
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2016-09-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 186814965X

In Losing the Plot, well-known scholar and writer Leon de Kock offers a lively and wide-ranging analysis of postapartheid South African writing which, he contends, has morphed into a far more flexible and multifaceted entity than its predecessor. If postapartheid literature’s founding moment was the ‘transition’ to democracy, writing over the ensuing years has viewed the Mandelan project with increasing doubt. Instead, authors from all quarters are seen to be reporting, in different ways and from divergent points of view, on what is perceived to be a pathological public sphere in which the plot – the mapping and making of social betterment – appears to have been lost. The compulsion to detect forensically the actual causes of such loss of direction has resulted in the prominence of creative nonfiction. A significant adjunct in the rise of this is the new media, which sets up a ‘wounded’ space within which a ‘cult of commiseration’ compulsively and repeatedly plays out the facts of the day on people’s screens. This, De Kock argues, is reproduced in much postapartheid writing. And, although fictional forms persist in genres such as crime fiction, with their tendency to overplot, more serious fiction underplots, yielding to the imprint of real conditions to determine the narrative construction.