Author: Lorna Burns
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350211486
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
Postcolonial studies took shape in response to the nationalist and decolonization movements of the twentieth century. Today, a resurgent interest in world literature reflects an increased awareness of globalization. These twin projects are torn between a criticism that finds in the text the trace of capitalist modernity and one that accounts for the revolutionary potential of literature to challenge our global present. Postcolonialism After World Literature exposes what is at stake in this critical choice through a line of philosophical enquiry – Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Rancière – that poses an alternative to the materialist strand of world literary criticism pioneered by Pascale Casanova and Franco Moretti. Engaging with these theorists and others, Lorna Burns contests world-systems theory as the basis for thinking about contemporary postcolonial and world literatures, and proposes a renewed framework that promotes literature's capacity to provoke dissent; to imagine new forms of belonging and relation for both national and world citizens; and to stage the shared equality of all. Moving between theory and the novels of Roberto Bolaño, J. M. Coetzee, Kamel Daoud, Dany Laferrière, Pauline Melville, Arundhati Roy and Kamila Shamsie, Postcolonialism After World Literature presents the case for rethinking world literature in light of the legacies of postcolonialism, and for reshaping postcolonial studies in an era of world literature. Lorna Burns is Lecturer in Postcolonial Literatures at the University of St Andrews, UK. She is the author of Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze (Bloomsbury, 2012).
Author: Pheng Cheah
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822374536
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 408
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Book Description
In What Is a World? Pheng Cheah, a leading theorist of cosmopolitanism, offers the first critical consideration of world literature’s cosmopolitan vocation. Addressing the failure of recent theories of world literature to inquire about the meaning of world, Cheah articulates a normative theory of literature’s world-making power by creatively synthesizing four philosophical accounts of the world as a temporal process: idealism, Marxist materialism, phenomenology, and deconstruction. Literature opens worlds, he provocatively suggests, because it is a force of receptivity. Cheah compellingly argues for postcolonial literature’s exemplarity as world literature through readings of narrative fiction by Michelle Cliff, Amitav Ghosh, Nuruddin Farah, Ninotchka Rosca, and Timothy Mo that show how these texts open up new possibilities for remaking the world by negotiating with the inhuman force that gives time and deploying alternative temporalities to resist capitalist globalization.
Author: Baidik Bhattacharya
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429885482
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
This book explores the debates surrounding two dynamic fields – postcolonial studies and world literature. Contrary to many dominant narratives in critical theory, it asserts that as an analytical framework the idea of world literature is dead: the nineteenth-century ideal of world literature had always and already been embedded in colonial histories; and also because whatever promise that ideal held out has been exhausted by postcolonial Anglophone literature. Through fresh and incisive readings of the postcolonial canon and some of its most prominent authors like Rudyard Kipling, V.S. Naipaul, J.M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, the volume discusses how these Anglophone writings have used the banal and ordinary ideal of world literature to fashion out their own trajectories. Ambitious in scope, this book challenges many of the existing theoretical and literary frameworks and offers a radical reimagination of the fields. The volume, written in an accessible and lively prose, will be indispensable for scholars and researchers of literature, critical theory, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and comparative literature.
Author: Elke Sturm-Trigonakis
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3662617854
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
This volume approaches literary representations of post and neocolonialism by combining their readings with respective theoretical configurations. The aim is to cast light upon common characteristics of contemporary texts from around the world that deal with processes of colonization. Based on the epistemic discourses of postimperialism/postcolonialism, globalization, and world literature, the volume’s chapters bring together international scholars from various disciplines in the Humanities, including Comparative Cultural Studies, Slavic, Romance, German, and African Studies. The main concern of the contributions is to conceptualize an autonomous category of a world literature of the colonial, going well beyond established classifications according to single languages or center-periphery dichotomies.
Author: J. Daniel Elam
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823289826
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth recovers a genealogy of anticolonial thought that advocated collective inexpertise, unknowing, and unrecognizability. Early-twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world they knew they would likely not live to see. Written in exile, in abjection, or in the face of death, anticolonial thought could not afford to base its politics on the hope of eventual success, mastery, or national sovereignty. J. Daniel Elam shows how anticolonial thinkers theorized inconsequential practices of egalitarianism in the service of an impossibility: a world without colonialism. Framed by a suggestive reading of the surprising affinities between Frantz Fanon’s political writings and Erich Auerbach’s philological project, World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth foregrounds anticolonial theories of reading and critique in the writing of Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh. These anticolonial activists theorized reading not as a way to cultivate mastery and expertise but as a way, rather, to disavow mastery altogether. To become or remain an inexpert reader, divesting oneself of authorial claims, was to fundamentally challenge the logic of the British Empire and European fascism, which prized self-mastery, authority, and national sovereignty. Bringing together the histories of comparative literature and anticolonial thought, Elam demonstrates how these early-twentieth-century theories of reading force us to reconsider the commitments of humanistic critique and egalitarian politics in the still-colonial present.
Author: Pieter Vanhove
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000415473
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 152
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Book Description
This book makes the case that the idea of a "world" in the cultural and philosophical sense is not an exclusively Western phenomenon. During the Cold War and in the wake of decolonization a plethora of historical attempts were made to reinvent the notions of world literature, world art, and philosophical universality from an anticolonial perspective. Contributing to recent debates on world literature, the postcolonial, and translatability, the book presents a series of interdisciplinary and multilingual case studies spanning Europe, the United States, and China. The case studies illustrate how individual anti-imperialist writers and artists set out to remake the conception of the world in their own image by offering a different perspective centered on questions of race, gender, sexuality, global inequality, and class. The book also discusses how international cultural organizations like the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau, UNESCO, and PEN International attempted to shape this debate across Cold War divides.
Author: Lorna Burns
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350053031
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
Postcolonial studies took shape in response to the nationalist and decolonization movements of the twentieth century. Today, a resurgent interest in world literature reflects an increased awareness of globalization. These twin projects are torn between a criticism that finds in the text the trace of capitalist modernity and one that accounts for the revolutionary potential of literature to challenge our global present. Postcolonialism After World Literature exposes what is at stake in this critical choice through a line of philosophical enquiry – Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Rancière – that poses an alternative to the materialist strand of world literary criticism pioneered by Pascale Casanova and Franco Moretti. Engaging with these theorists and others, Lorna Burns contests world-systems theory as the basis for thinking about contemporary postcolonial and world literatures, and proposes a renewed framework that promotes literature's capacity to provoke dissent; to imagine new forms of belonging and relation for both national and world citizens; and to stage the shared equality of all. Moving between theory and the novels of Roberto Bolaño, J. M. Coetzee, Kamel Daoud, Dany Laferrière, Pauline Melville, Arundhati Roy and Kamila Shamsie, Postcolonialism After World Literature presents the case for rethinking world literature in light of the legacies of postcolonialism, and for reshaping postcolonial studies in an era of world literature. Lorna Burns is Lecturer in Postcolonial Literatures at the University of St Andrews, UK. She is the author of Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze (Bloomsbury, 2012).
Author: Bashir Abu-Manneh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110868162X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235
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Book Description
By the time of his death in 2003, Edward Said was one of the most famous literary critics of the twentieth century. Said's work has been hugely influential far beyond academia. As a prominent advocate for the Palestinian cause and noted cultural critic, Said redefined the role of the public intellectual. This volume explores the problems and opportunities afforded by Said's work: its productive and generative capacities as well as its in-built limitations. After Said captures the essence of Said's intellectual and political contribution and his extensive impact on postcolonial studies. It examines his legacy by critically elaborating his core concepts and arguments. Among the issues it tackles are humanism, Orientalism, culture and imperialism, exile and the contrapuntal, realism and postcolonial modernism, world literature, Islamophobia, and capitalism and the political economy of empire. It is an excellent resource for students, graduates and instructors studying postcolonial literary theory and the works of Said.
Author: Rossen Djagalov
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228002028
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
Would there have been a Third World without the Second? Perhaps, but it would have looked very different. From Internationalism to Postcolonialism recounts the story of two Cold War-era cultural formations that claimed to represent the Third World project in literature and cinema, and offers a compelling genealogy of contemporary postcolonial studies.
Author: E. Dawson Varughese
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113726523X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
With the backdrop of new global powers, this volume interrogates the state of writing in English. Strongly interdisciplinary, it challenges the prevailing orthodoxy of postcolonial literary theory. An insistence on fieldwork and linguistics makes this book scene-changing in its approach to understanding and reading emerging literature in English.
