Postcolonial Parabola

Postcolonial Parabola PDF Author: Jay Rajiva
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501325345
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
"An innovative study of literary representations of postcolonial trauma, exploring how they both expand and limit the reader's experience of trauma"--

Postcolonial Parabola

Postcolonial Parabola PDF Author: Jay Rajiva
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501325345
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Get Book

Book Description
"An innovative study of literary representations of postcolonial trauma, exploring how they both expand and limit the reader's experience of trauma"--

Postcolonial Parabola

Postcolonial Parabola PDF Author: Jay Rajiva
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501325353
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma interrogates the relationship between the literary representation of postcolonial trauma and the embodied experience of reading. As the conditions from which postcolonial literatures have emerged require a break from “proper” ways to represent trauma, postcolonial writers expand and complicate the practice of reading itself. Though postcolonial literature's capacity to represent trauma has received considerable scrutiny in recent years, Postcolonial Parabola is innovative in its consideration of the postcolonial text as a literary object. Working within a phenomenological framework that ties together disparate postcolonial periods, Jay Rajiva explores how narrative structure shapes the experience of reading the postcolonial literatures of South Africa, India, and Sri Lanka. He argues that these texts enmesh the reader in an asymptotic tactility: though readers might approach the disclosure of trauma, they cannot arrive at it. Awareness of the asymptotic nature of reading such works is crucial to a meaningful, ethical engagement with literary representations of postcolonial trauma.

Toward an Animist Reading of Postcolonial Trauma Literature

Toward an Animist Reading of Postcolonial Trauma Literature PDF Author: Jay Rajiva
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429657439
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
This book uses the conceptual framework of animism, the belief in the spiritual qualities of nonhuman matter, to analyze representations of trauma in postcolonial fiction from Nigeria and India. Toward an Animist Reading of Postcolonial Trauma Literature initiates a conversation between contemporary trauma literatures of Nigeria and India on animism. As postcolonial nations move farther away from the event of decolonization in real time, the experience of trauma take place within and is generated by an increasingly precarious environment of resource scarcity, over-accelerated industrialization, and ecological crisis. These factors combine to create mixed environments marked by constantly changing interactions between human and nonhuman matter. Examining novels by authors such as Chinua Achebe, Jhumpa Lahiri, Nnedi Okorafor, and Arundhati Roy, the book considers how animist beliefs shape the aesthetic representation of trauma in postcolonial literature, paying special attention to complex metaphor and narrative structure. These literary texts challenge the conventional wisdom that working through trauma involves achieving physical and psychic integrity in a stable environment. Instead, a type of provisional but substantive healing emerges in an animist relationship between human trauma victims and nonhuman matter. In this context, animism becomes a pivotal way to reframe the process of working through trauma. Offering a rich framework for analyzing trauma in postcolonial literature, this book will be of interest to scholars of postcolonial literature, Nigerian literature and South Asian literature.

Postcolonial Disaster

Postcolonial Disaster PDF Author: Pallavi Rastogi
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810141744
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
Postcolonial Disaster studies literary fiction about crises of epic proportions in contemporary South Asia and Southern Africa: the oceanic disaster in Sri Lanka, the economic disaster in Zimbabwe, the medical disaster in South Africa and Botswana, and the geopolitical disaster in India and Pakistan. Pallavi Rastogi argues that postcolonial fiction about catastrophe is underpinned by a Disaster Unconscious, a buried but mobile agenda that forces disastrous events to narrate themselves. She writes that in disaster fiction, a literary Story and its real-life Event are in constant dialectic tension. In recent disasters, Story and Event are tied together as the urgency to circulate information and rebuild in the aftermath of the disaster dictates the flow of the narrative. As the Story acquires temporal distance from the Event, such as the seventy-three years since the partition of India in 1947, it plays more with form and theme, to expand beyond a tale about an all-consuming tragedy. Story and Event are in a constant dance with each other, and the Disaster Unconscious plays the tune to which they move. Rastogi creates a narratology for postcolonial disaster fiction and brings concepts from Disaster Studies into the realm of literary analysis.

Postcolonial Satire

Postcolonial Satire PDF Author: Amy L. Friedman
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498571972
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
Postcolonial Satire: Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire positions postcolonial South Asian satiric fiction in both the cutting-edge territory of political resistance writing and the ancient tradition of Menippean satire. Postcolonial Satire aims to disrupt the relationship between postcolonial literature and magic realism, by discussing the work of writers such as G. V. Desani, Aubrey Menen, Salman Rushdie, and Irwin Allan Sealy as one movement into the entirely subversive realm of satire. Indian fiction, and the fiction of other colonized cultures, can be re-construed through the lens of satire as openly critical of a broad spectrum of political and cultural issues. Employing the strengths of postcolonial theory and criticism, Postcolonial Satire expands upon the postcolonial works of these authors by analyzing them as satire, rather than magical realism with satirical elements.

Rwanda After Genocide

Rwanda After Genocide PDF Author: Caroline Williamson Sinalo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108688349
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
In the 1994 Rwanda genocide, around 1 million people were brutally murdered in just thirteen weeks. This book offers an in-depth study of posttraumatic growth in the testimonies of the men and women who survived, highlighting the ways in which they were able to build a new, and often enhanced, way of life. In so doing, Caroline Williamson Sinalo advocates a new reading of trauma: one that recognises not just the negative, but also the positive responses to traumatic experiences. Through an analysis of testimonies recorded in Kinyarwanda by the Genocide Archive of Rwanda, the book focuses particularly on the relationship between posttraumatic growth and gender and examines it within the wider frames of colonialism and traditional cultural practices. Offering a striking alternative to dominant paradigms on trauma, the book reveals that, notwithstanding the countless tales of horror, pain, and loss in Rwanda, there are also stories of strength, recovery, and growth.

Transmitting Memories in Rwanda

Transmitting Memories in Rwanda PDF Author: Claver Irakoze
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004525203
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
This book recounts the personal life story of Claver Irakoze who survived the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi as a child. Now a parent of young children, the narrative focuses on issues surrounding childhood, parenting and the transmission of memories between generations.

Ethics and Literary Practice

Ethics and Literary Practice PDF Author: Adam Zachary Newton
Publisher: MDPI
ISBN: 3039285041
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This volume draws together a diverse array of scholars from across the humanities to formulate and address the question of “ethics and literary practice” for a new decade. In taking up a conjunction whose terms remain productively open to question, fifteen essays survey a range of approaches and topics including genre and disciplinary rhetoric, emergence theory and literary signification, the ethics of alterity, of attention, and of aesthetics, the decolonial and the paracritical, neorealism and contingency, analogy and affect, scripture and national literature. From Seamus Heaney to Hannah Arendt, Teresa Brennan to Stanley Cavell, Ronit Matalon to Édouard Glissant, Uwe Timm to Katherena Vermette, Notes for Echo Lake to the Gospel of St. Matthew, these contributions demonstrate how broadly and fruitfully ramifying its organizing inquiry can be. Bringing such multifarious perspectives to the topic feels only more urgent as language, meaning, and expression enter the crucible of a “post-truth” era.

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma PDF Author: Colin Davis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351025201
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 599

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Book Description
Literary trauma studies is a rapidly developing field which examines how literature deals with the personal and cultural aspects of trauma and engages with such historical and current phenomena as the Holocaust and other genocides, 9/11, climate catastrophe or the still unsettled legacy of colonialism. The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma is a comprehensive guide to the history and theory of trauma studies, including key concepts, consideration of critical perspectives and discussion of future developments. It also explores different genres and media, such as poetry, life-writing, graphic narratives, photography and post-apocalyptic fiction, and analyses how literature engages with particular traumatic situations and events, such as the Holocaust, the Occupation of France, the Rwandan genocide, Hurricane Katrina and transgenerational nuclear trauma. Forty essays from top thinkers in the field demonstrate the range and vitality of trauma studies as it has been used to further the understanding of literature and other cultural forms across the world. Chapter 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Global Failure and World Literature

Global Failure and World Literature PDF Author: Karen Borg Cardona
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111133990
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
While the contemporary era has witnessed a series of spectacular failures with severe and widespread global consequences, failure is still broadly understood on an individual level, while its broader causes and consequences receive little attention. This book reconceptualises failure as a method for characterising and critiquing systems and institutions on both a global and a local level. It defines global failure as comprising global inequality, economic crisis, and ecological disaster, and as a condition which informs and is informed by localised failure. It examines the negotiation between global and local failure in narratives of failed quests by four contemporary authors: Cormac McCarthy, Julia Kristeva, Michael Ondaatje, and Basma Abdel Aziz. As a genre, the quest narrative is associated with the idea of hard-won success. The failed quest narrative, or the narrative of the failed quest, is therefore the ideal vehicle through which to examine the socio-political and institutional conditions of failure. Primarily a contribution to the field of world literature, this book is also relevant to those with an interest in the contemporary novel, failure studies, and the quest narrative.