Coterminous Worlds

Coterminous Worlds PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004434763
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
The present collection of essays endeavours to furnish informed responses to central questions posed by the editors: Is the fact that the marvellous coexists with the factual and never resolves itself into the supernatural an indication that the whole literary project of 'magical realism' is an instrumental and representational form which can be regarded as particularly suitable for reconciling dichotomies and oppositions otherwise experienced as intolerable? Was 'magical realism' an explosive process in cultural dynamics, taking place at intersections of heterogeneous cultures most favourable to the efflorescence of this type of literature? The authors of the various essays - on Patrick White and David Malouf, Ben Okri, Syl Cheney-Coker, Robert Kroetsch, Gwendolyn MacEwan, Jack Hodgins, Salman Rushdie, Janet Frame, Wilson Harris and others - provide a dynamic focus on the reality at stake beneath the surface representations of 'magical realism' in post-colonial literatures.

Coterminous Worlds

Coterminous Worlds PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004434763
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Get Book

Book Description
The present collection of essays endeavours to furnish informed responses to central questions posed by the editors: Is the fact that the marvellous coexists with the factual and never resolves itself into the supernatural an indication that the whole literary project of 'magical realism' is an instrumental and representational form which can be regarded as particularly suitable for reconciling dichotomies and oppositions otherwise experienced as intolerable? Was 'magical realism' an explosive process in cultural dynamics, taking place at intersections of heterogeneous cultures most favourable to the efflorescence of this type of literature? The authors of the various essays - on Patrick White and David Malouf, Ben Okri, Syl Cheney-Coker, Robert Kroetsch, Gwendolyn MacEwan, Jack Hodgins, Salman Rushdie, Janet Frame, Wilson Harris and others - provide a dynamic focus on the reality at stake beneath the surface representations of 'magical realism' in post-colonial literatures.

The Unharnessed World

The Unharnessed World PDF Author: Cindy Gabrielle
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443879762
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Though New Zealand author Janet Frame (1924–2004) lived at a time of growing dissatisfaction with European cultural models, and though her (auto-)biography, fiction and letters all testify to the fact that a direct encounter between herself and Buddhism occurred, her work has, so far, never been examined from the vantage point of its indebtedness to Buddhism. It is of the utmost significance, however, that a Buddhist navigation of Frame’s texts should shed fresh light on large segments of the Framean corpus which have tended to remain obdurately mysterious. This includes passages centering on such themes as the existence of a non-dual world or a character’s sudden embrace of a non-ego-like self. Of equal significance is the conclusion one then draws that this unharnessed world which human beings are often unable to embrace has always been right under their nose, for, whenever the aspect of the intellect that filters perceptions into mutually excluding categories fails to function, he or she finds a place of subjective arrival in, and sees, this supposedly unknowable ‘beyond’. Thus, possibly against the grain of mainstream criticism, this study argues that Janet Frame constantly seeks ways through which the infinite and the Other can be approached, though not corrupted, by the perceiving self, and that she found in the Buddhist epistemology a pathway towards evoking such alterity.

De-Coca-colonization

De-Coca-colonization PDF Author: Steven Flusty
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415945387
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze

Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze PDF Author: Lorna Burns
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441156216
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze maps a new intellectual and literary history of postcolonial Caribbean writing and thought spanning from the 1930s surrealist movement to the present, crossing the region's language blocs, and focused on the interconnected principles of creativity and commemoration. Exploring the work of René Ménil, Édouard Glissant, Wilson Harris, Derek Walcott, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Pauline Melville, Robert Antoni and Nalo Hopkinson, this study reveals the explicit and implicit engagement with Deleuzian thought at work in contemporary Caribbean writing. Uniting for the first time two major schools of contemporary thought - postcolonialism and post-continental philosophy - this study establishes a new and innovative critical discourse for Caribbean studies and postcolonial theory beyond the oppositional dialectic of colonizer and colonized. Drawing from Deleuze's writings on Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza, this study interrogates the postcolonial tropes of newness, becoming, relationality and a philosophical concept of immanence that lie at the heart of a little-observed dialogue between contemporary Caribbean writers and Deleuze.

Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children"

Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie's Author: Neil ten Kortenaar
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773571507
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Many non-Indian readers find the historical and cultural references in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children demanding. In his close reading of the novel, Neil ten Kortenaar offers post-colonial literary strategies for understanding Midnight's Children that also challenge some of the prevailing interpretations of the novel. Using hybridity, mimicry, national allegory, and cosmopolitanism, all key critical concepts of postcolonial theory, ten Kortenaar reads Midnight's Children as an allegory of history, as a Bildungsroman and psychological study of a burgeoning national consciousness, and as a representation of the nation. He shows that the hybridity of Rushdie's fictional India is not created by different elements forming a whole but by the relationship among them. Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children also makes an original argument about how nation-states are imagined and how national consciousness is formed in the citizen. The protagonist, Saleem Sinai, heroically identifies himself with the state, but this identification is beaten out of him until, in the end, he sees himself as the Common Man at the mercy of the state. Ten Kortenaar reveals Rushdie's India to be more self-conscious than many communal identities based on language: it is an India haunted by a dark twin called Pakistan; a nation in the way England is a nation but imagined against England. Mistrusting the openness of Tagore's Hindu India, it is both cosmopolitan and a specific subjective location.

Memories of the Classical Underworld in Irish and Caribbean Literature

Memories of the Classical Underworld in Irish and Caribbean Literature PDF Author: Madeleine Scherer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110675153
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Classical Memories is an intervention into the field of adaptation studies, taking the example of classical reception to show that adaptation is a process that can be driven by and produce intertextual memories. I see ‘classical memories’ as a memory-driven type of adaptation that draws on and reproduces schematic and otherwise de-contextualised conceptions of antiquity and its cultural ‘exports’ in, broadly speaking, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These memory-driven adaptations differ, often in significant ways, from more traditional adaptations that seek to either continue or deconstruct a long-running tradition that can be traced back to antiquity as well as its canonical points of reception in later ages. When investigating such a popular and widespread set of narratives, characters, and images like those that remain of Graeco-Roman antiquity, terms like ‘adaptation’ and ‘reception’ could and should be nuanced further to allow us to understand the complex interactions between modern works and classical antiquity in more detail, particularly when it pertains to postcolonial or post-digital classical reception. In Classical Memories, I propose that understanding certain types of adaptations as intertextual memories allows us to do just that.

The Postsecular Restoration and the Making of Literary Conservatism

The Postsecular Restoration and the Making of Literary Conservatism PDF Author: Corrinne Harol
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009273485
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Corrinne Harol reveals how secularization catalysed conservative writers to respond and thereby contribute impactfully to literary history.

Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific

Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific PDF Author: Susan Y. Najita
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134211716
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
In Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific, Susan Y. Najita proposes that the traumatic history of contact and colonization has become a crucial means by which indigenous peoples of Oceania are reclaiming their cultures, languages, ways of knowing, and political independence. In particular, she examines how contemporary writers from Hawai‘i, Samoa, and Aotearoa/New Zealand remember, re-tell, and deploy this violent history in their work. As Pacific peoples negotiate their paths towards sovereignty and chart their postcolonial futures, these writers play an invaluable role in invoking and commenting upon the various uses of the histories of colonial resistance, allowing themselves and their readers to imagine new futures by exorcising the past. Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific is a valuable addition to the fields of Pacific and Postcolonial Studies and also contributes to struggles for cultural decolonization in Oceania: contemporary writers’ critical engagement with colonialism and indigenous culture, Najita argues, provides a powerful tool for navigating a decolonized future.

Book Presence in a Digital Age

Book Presence in a Digital Age PDF Author: Kiene Brillenburg Wurth
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501321196
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Contrary to the apocalyptic pronouncements of paper media's imminent demise in the digital age, there has been a veritable surge of creative reimaginings of books as bearers of the literary. From typographic experiments (Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts) to accordion books (Anne Carson's Nox), from cut ups (Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes) to collages (Graham Rawle's Woman's World), from erasures (Mary Ruefle's A Little White Shadow) to mixups (Simon Morris's The Interpretations of Dreams), print literature has gone through anything but a slow, inevitable death. In fact, it has re-invented itself materially. Starting from this idea of media plurality, Book Presence in a Digital Age explores the resilience of print literatures, book art, and zines in the late age of print from a contemporary perspective, while incorporating longer-term views on media archeology and media change. Even as it focuses on the materiality of books and literary writing in the present, Book Presence also takes into consideration earlier 20th-century "moments" of media transition, developing the concepts of presence and materiality as analytical tools to perform literary criticism in a digital age. Bringing together leading scholars, artists, and publishers, Book Presence in a Digital Age offers a variety of perspectives on the past, present, and future of the book as medium, the complex relationship of materiality to virtuality, and of the analog to the digital.

Imagining Religious Toleration

Imagining Religious Toleration PDF Author: Alison Conway
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487513976
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Formerly a site of study reserved for intellectual historians and political philosophers, scholarship on religious toleration, from the perspective of literary scholars, is fairly limited. Largely ignored and understudied techniques employed by writers to influence cultural understandings of tolerance are rich for exploration. In investigating texts ranging from early modern to Romantic, Alison Conway, David Alvarez, and their contributors shed light on what literature can say about toleration, and how it can produce and manage feelings of tolerance and intolerance. Beginning with an overview of the historical debates surrounding the terms "toleration" and "tolerance," this book moves on to discuss the specific contributions that literature and literary modes have made to cultural history, studying the literary techniques that philosophers, theologians, and political theorists used to frame the questions central to the idea and practice of religious toleration. Tracing the rhetoric employed by a wide range of authors, the contributors delve into topics such as conversion as an instrument of power in Shakespeare; the relationship between religious toleration and the rise of Enlightenment satire; and the ways in which writing can act as a call for tolerance.