Maryse Conde and the Space of Literature

Maryse Conde and the Space of Literature
Author: Eva Sansavior
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2017-12-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351193252

"The Guadeloupean writer and critic Maryse Conde has for the last twenty-five years divided her time between her native Guadeloupe and the United States. If the author's work has attracted much critical attention in the United States, it is the fictional works that have been the focus of this attention with these predominantly read in the light of political themes such as identity and resistance. In these intelligent and sensitive readings, Eva Sansavior argues in favour of adopting a broader thematic and generic approach to the author's work. Sansavior accounts for the multiple and oblique uses of literature in the Conde's literary and critical work tracking its complex interactions with tradition, reception, politics and autobiography and also the singular possibilities that these interactions present for re-imagining the ideas of politics, literature, identity and, ultimately, the nature of critical practice itself."

The Belle Créole

The Belle Créole
Author: Maryse Condé
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2020-04-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0813944236

Possessing one of the most vital voices in international letters, Maryse Condé added to an already acclaimed career the New Academy Prize in Literature in 2018. The twelfth novel by this celebrated author revolves around an enigmatic crime and the young man at its center. Dieudonné Sabrina, a gardener, aged twenty-two and black, is accused of murdering his employer--and lover--Loraine, a wealthy white woman descended from plantation owners. His only refuge is a sailboat, La Belle Créole, a relic of times gone by. Condé follows Dieudonné’s desperate wanderings through the city of Port-Mahault the night of his acquittal, the narrative unfolding through a series of multivoiced flashbacks set against a forbidding backdrop of social disintegration and tumultuous labor strikes in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Guadeloupe. Twenty-four hours later, Dieudonné’s fate becomes suggestively intertwined with that of the French island itself, though the future of both remains uncertain in the end. Echoes of Faulkner and Lawrence, and even Shakespeare’s Othello, resonate in this tale, yet the drama’s uniquely modern dynamics set it apart from any model in its exploration of love and hate, politics and stereotype, and the attempt to find connections with others across barriers. Through her vividly and intimately drawn characters, Condé paints a rich portrait of a contemporary society grappling with the heritage of slavery, racism, and colonization.

The Space of Literature

The Space of Literature
Author: Maurice Blanchot
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2015-11
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0803278772

Maurice Blanchot, the eminent literary and cultural critic, has had a vast influence on contemporary French writers--among them Jean Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida. From the 1930s through the present day, his writings have been shaping the international literary consciousness. The Space of Literature, first published in France in 1955, is central to the development of Blanchot's thought. In it he reflects on literature and the unique demand it makes upon our attention. Thus he explores the process of reading as well as the nature of artistic creativity, all the while considering the relation of the literary work to time, to history, and to death. This book consists not so much in the application of a critical method or the demonstration of a theory of literature as in a patiently deliberate meditation upon the literary experience, informed most notably by studies of Mallarmé, Kafka, Rilke, and Hölderlin. Blanchot's discussions of those writers are among the finest in any language.

Victoire

Victoire
Author: Maryse Condé
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2010-01-19
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1439100586

From the winner of the New Academy Prize in Literature (the alternative to the Nobel Prize) and critically acclaimed author of the classic historical novel Segu, Maryse Condé has pieced together the life of her maternal grandmother to create a moving and profound novel. Maryse Condé’s personal journey of discovery and revelation becomes ours as we learn of Victoire, her white-skinned mestiza grandmother who worked as a cook for the Walbergs, a family of white Creoles, in the French Antilles. Using her formidable skills as a storyteller, Condé describes her grandmother as having “Australian whiteness for the color of her skin...She jarred with my world of women in Italian straw bonnets and men necktied in three-piece linen suits, all of them a very black shade of black. She appeared to me doubly strange.” Victoire was spurred by Condé’s desire to learn of her family history, resolving to begin her quest by researching the life of her grandmother. While uncovering the circumstances of Victoire’s unique life story, Condé also comes to grips with a haunting question: How could her own mother, a black militant, have been raised in the Walberg’s home, a household of whites? Creating a work that takes you into a time and place populated with unforgettable characters that inspire and amaze, Condé’s blending of memoir and imagination, detective work and storytelling artistry, is a literary gem that you won’t soon forget.

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.

Yale French Studies, Number 140

Yale French Studies, Number 140
Author: Madeleine Dobie
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2022-01-04
Genre:
ISBN: 0300259409

A diverse, interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring what makes Maryse Condé a writer for our times In 2018, the New Academy selected Guadeloupean writer, scholar, and teacher of literature Maryse Condé as the recipient of the 2018 Alternative Nobel Prize in Literature. This volume of Yale French Studies examines Condé's work and legacy, exploring why a diverse group of journalists, critics, and lay readers selected her as the writer most deserving of the prize. Varied in their themes, forms, and disciplinary groundings, the essays consider how Condé's novels, plays, essays, and memoirs have engaged with many of the urgent social, economic, and political issues of the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries, often anticipating and catalyzing public debates. Written by scholars from Africa, the Antilles, South America, France, and the United States, the essays consider Condé's unique voice and the ways in which her writing speaks to readers all over the world, making her "a writer for our times."

Eating Well, Reading Well

Eating Well, Reading Well
Author: Nicole Jenette Simek
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2008
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9042023279

While rejecting a conception of literature as moral philosophy, or a device for imparting particular morals to the reader through exemplary characters and plots, Maryse Conde has displayed throughout her writing career a strong valorization of literature as ethical critique. This study examines her singular approach to literary commitment as a critical reworking of aesthetic models and modes of interpretation. Focusing on four dominant problematics in Conde's work'history and globalization in La Belle Creole and Moi, Tituba sorciere...noire de Salem, intertextuality and reception in La migration des c'urs and Celanire cou-coupe, trauma and subjectivity in En attendant le bonheur and Desirada, community and ethics in Traversee de la mangrove and Histoire de la femme cannibale'this analysis proposes to elucidate how, and to what ends, Conde engages, and alters, approaches to reading, staging the problematic, yet pragmatic, need to read well. This hermeneutic imperative foregrounds the need to engage with texts, to cannibalize texts while recognizing their fundamental opacity and inexhaustibility, their resistance to the reader's interpretive habits.Nicole Simek is an Assistant Professor of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Whitman College. Specializing in French Caribbean literature, Simek's research interests include the intersection of politics and literature in Caribbean fiction, trauma theory, and sociological approaches to literature.Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. Interpreting through ExampleChapter 1. Reading History: The Example of the Past after GlobalizationChapter 2. Rusing with the Canon: Insolent Imitation, Parodic IntertextualityChapter 3. Writing Violence: Collective Traumas, Singular PastsChapter 4. The Cannibal Reader: Digesting the Other, Interpreting CommunityConclusion. Comme un Indien Tupinamba...BibliographyIndex

The Story of the Cannibal Woman

The Story of the Cannibal Woman
Author: Maryse Condé
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2008-04-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0743271297

One dark night in Cape Town, Roselie's husband goes out for a pack of cigarettes and never comes back. Not only is she left with unanswered questions about his violent death but she is also left without any means of support. At the urging of her housekeeper and best friend, the new widow decides to take advantage of the strange gifts she has always possessed and embarks on a career as a clairvoyant. As Roselie builds a new life for herself and seeks the truth about her husband's murder, acclaimed Caribbean author Maryse Conde crafts a deft exploration of post-apartheid South Africa and a smart, gripping thriller.The Story of the Cannibal Womanis both contemporary and international, following the lives of an interracial, intercultural couple in New York City, Tokyo, and Capetown. Maryse Conde is known for vibrantly lyrical language and fearless, inventive storytelling -- she uses both to stunning effect in this magnificently original novel.

Of Morsels and Marvels

Of Morsels and Marvels
Author: Maryse Condé
Publisher: Africa List
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780857426932

For many, cooking is simply the mechanical act of reproducing standard recipes. To Maryse Cond , however, cooking implies creativity and personal invention, on par with the complexity of writing a story. A cook, she explains, uses spices and flavors the same way an author chooses the music and meaning of words. In Of Morsels and Marvels, Cond takes us on a literary journey around places she has travelled to in India, Indonesia, and South Africa. She highlights the tastes and culinary traditions that are fascinating examples of a living museum. Such places, Cond explains, provide important insights into lesser-known aspects of contemporary life. One anecdote illustrates what becomes of the standard Antillean dishes of fish stew and goat curry by two Antilleans who own a restaurant in Sydney, Australia. Cuisine changes not only according to the individual cook but also adapts to foreign skies under which it is created. The author also recounts personal memories of her lifelong relationship with cooking, such as when Ad lia, her family's servant, wrongly blames little Maryse for mixing raisins with fish and using her imagination in the kitchen. Blending travel with gastronomy, this enchanting volume from the winner of the 2018 Alternative Nobel Prize will delight all who marvel at the wonders of the kitchen or seek to taste the world.