- After Globalization by Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman
In lively and unflinching prose, Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman argue that contemporary thought about the world is disabled by a fatal flaw: the inability to think “an after” to globalization. After establishing seven theses (on education, morality, history, future, capitalism, nation, and common sense) that challenge the false promises that sustain this time-limit, After Globalization examines four popular thinkers (Thomas Friedman, Richard Florida, Paul Krugman and Naomi Klein) and how their work is dulled by these promises. Cazdyn and Szeman then speak to students from around the globe who are both unconvinced and uninterested in these promises and who understand the world very differently than the way it is popularly represented. After Globalization argues that a true capacity to think an after to globalization is the very beginning of politics today.
-The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan by Eric Cazdyn
In Japan, perhaps uniquely, the history of capitalism coincides neatly with the history of film. What links these two histories and what their relationship reveals about film culture and everyday life in Japan, is the subject of this original and provocative work. Looking at a hundred-year history of film and capitalism, The Flash of Capital theorizes a cultural history that illuminates the spaces where film and the nation transcend their customary borders, where culture and capital crisscross-and in doing so, develops a new way of understanding historical change and transformation in modern Japan and beyond. Eric Cazdyn focuses on three key moments of historical contradiction: colonialism, post-war reconstruction, and globalization. In great classics of Japanese film, in documentaries, works of science fiction, animation, and pornography he brings to light cinematic attempts to come to terms with the tensions inherent in each historical moment-tensions between colonizer and colonized, between the individual and the collective, and between the national and the transnational. Through a close reading of cinema within its political context, Cazdyn shows how formal inventions in the realms of acting, film history and theory, thematics, documentary filmmaking, and adaptation articulate a struggle to solve implacable historical problems. Richly illustrated, this innovative work of cultural history and criticism will be of interest to those concerned with Japanese film history, the culture and political economy of Japan, and anyone seeking explanations of historical change that challenge conventional distinctions between the aesthetic and the geopolitical
-Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution
This book explores Hegel’s response to the French Revolutionary Terror and its impact on Germany. Like many of his contemporaries, Hegel was struck by the seeming parallel between the political upheaval in France and the upheaval in German philosophy inaugurated by the Protestant Reformation and brought to a climax by German Idealism. Many thinkers reasoned that a political revolution would be unnecessary in Germany, because this intellectual “revolution” had preempted it. Having already been through its own cataclysm, Germany would be able to extract the energy of the Revolution and channel its radicalism into thought. Hegel comes close to making such an argument too. But he also offers a powerful analysis of how this kind of secondhand history gets generated in the first place, and shows what is stake. This is what makes him uniquely interesting among his contemporaries: he demonstrates how a fantasy can be simultaneously deconstructed and enjoyed.
Mourning Sickness provides a new reading of Hegel in the light of contemporary theories of historical trauma. It explores the ways in which major historical events are experienced vicariously, and the fantasies we use to make sense of them. Comay brings Hegel into relation with the most burning contemporary discussions around catastrophe, witness, memory, and the role of culture in shaping political experience.
- Christopher Okigbo: Christopher Okigbo (1932-1967) by Uzoma Esonwanne and by Hazard Adams
Barbara Havercroft
VIES EN RÉCITS : FORMES LITTÉRAIRES ET MÉDIATIQUES DE LA BIOGRAPHIE ET DE L’AUTOBIOGRAPHIE
Depuis plus de 30 ans, des centaines de livres et des milliers d’articles sur la biographie et l’autobiographie ont vu le jour dans de nombreux pays, accompagnés d’un nombre considérable de textes dits ” personnels ” ainsi que d’autres types de manifestations relevant de l’auto/biographique qui se retrouvent tant au cinéma que sur les pages virtuelles d’Internet.
Loin de se cantonner à la seule sphère universitaire, cet engouement semble caractériser toute la culture occidentale contemporaine, où prolifèrent récits de soi, témoignages oraux, écrits et visuels, blogs et pages personnelles sur le web, émissions de téléréalité, et ainsi de suite. Si le statut du sujet de l’auto/biographie reste peu problématisé dans les réalisations visant le grand public, il en va autrement dans des oeuvres significatives récentes, qu’elles soient littéraires ou cinématographiques.
On y assiste bel et bien au retour du sujet, mais pas naïvement, car en tant que construction discursive et horizon fuyant il n’est doté ni de contours solides, ni de certitude métaphysique. Et ce sujet vacillant semble aujourd’hui s’inscrire dans des pratiques auto/biographiques on ne peut plus hétérogènes, hétérodoxes, qui se démarquent des configurations canoniques des sous-genres personnels. Les textes rassemblés ici s’intéressent à ces modes hétérodoxes de mise en récit de la vie privée, qu’il s’agisse de la sienne propre ou de celle d’un autre.
Multipliant les exemples puisés aussi bien dans la littérature que dans l’historiographie et dans les médias contemporains, ils entendent se situer au plus près des nouvelles pratiques de l’écriture biographique et autobiographique.
Le Roman Français de l’Extrême Contemporain
Peut-on encore parler du roman français au singulier aujourd’hui ? Une recherche attentive sur les esthétiques principales ou singulières du roman dit de l’extrême contemporain permet de constater qu’aucune école ou aucun groupe ne domine l’univers romanesque, et qu’aucun mouvement n’impose profondément sa marque sur la scène littéraire. Cela ne signifie pas pour autant qu’il ne reste que des oeuvres disparates et qu’il soit impossible d’organiser une cohérence en arrêtant des corpus. Dans de tels cas, c’est moins chercher du côté de certaines pratiques transversales. Dans cet ouvrage collectif, le point de départ ne consiste pas à se demander si le roman conserve une pertinence en tant que témoin privilégié de la littérature aujourd’hui – cela semble relever de l’évidence -, mais plutôt à identifier ce qui lui confère cette légitimité. Cet ouvrage vise aussi à appréhender la notion de contemporanité à partir de la littérature, du roman. Plus globalement, sans tenter d’offrir un vaste panorama du roman français d’aujourd’hui, son objectif consiste à mieux saisir la pertinence du roman grâce à un ensemble d’études conçues à partir d’axes précis (les idées, le réel, le jeu, le soi) sur les possibles du roman, qu’il adopte une forme fragmentée ou théâtralisée, qu’il préconise un savant collage ou un métadiscours narrativisé, qu’il puise abondamment dans l’autobiographie ou l’essai. Le postulat au fondement de cet ouvraghe défend l’idée qu’il existe des romans français importants ou singuliers à notre époque et que nous devons les découvrir et mieux les comprendre. Avec des textes de René Audet, Yves Baudelle, Bruno Blanckeman, Florance de Chalonge, Jean-Michel Devésa, Robert Dion, Catherine Douzou, Valérie Dusaillant-Fernandes, Frances Fortier, Bertrand Gervais, Barbara Havercroft, Liesbeth Korthals Altes, Andrée Mercier, Pascal Michelucci, Warren Motte, Élisabeth Nardout-Lafarge, Joëlle Papillon, Pascal Riendau, Catherine Rodgers, Gianfranco Rubino, Gill Rye, Ralph Sarkonak et Dominique Viart
Eva-Lynn Jagoe
- The End of the World as They Knew It: Writing Experiences of the Argentine South
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
- Postcolonial Literature & the Impact of Literacy: Reading and Writing in African and Caribbean Fiction
Examining images of literacy in African and West Indian novels, Neil ten Kortenaar looks at how postcolonial authors have thought about the act of writing itself. Writing arrived in many parts of Africa as part of colonization in the twentieth century, and with it a whole world of book-learning and paper-pushing; of school and bureaucracy; newspapers, textbooks and letters; candles, hurricane lamps and electricity; pens, paper, typewriters and printed type; and orthography developed for formerly oral languages. Writing only penetrated many layers of West Indian society in the same era. The range of writers is wide, and includes Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and V. S. Naipaul. The chapters rely on close reading of canonical novels, but discuss general themes and trends in African and Caribbean literature. Ten Kortenaar’s sensitive and penetrating treatment of these themes makes this an important contribution to the growing field of postcolonial literary studies.
-Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children”
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.
-Socialist Realism without Shores
“Socialist Realism without Shores” offers an international perspective on the aesthetics of socialist realism – an aesthetic that, contrary to expectations, survived the death of its originators and the demise of its original domain. This expanded edition of a special issue of the “South Atlantic Quarterly” brings together scholars from various parts of the globe to discuss socialist realism as it appears across genres in art, architecture, film, and literature and across geographic divides – from the ‘centre,’ Russia, to various points at the ‘periphery’ – China, Germany, France, Poland, remote republics of the former USSR, and the United States.The contributors argue that socialist realism has never been a monolithic art form and demonstrate, among other things, that its literature could accommodate psychoanalytic criticism; that its art and architecture could affect the aesthetic dictates of Moscow that made ‘Soviet’ art paradoxically heterogeneous; and that its aesthetics could accommodate both high art and crafted kitsch. “Socialist Realism without Shores” also addresses the critical discourse provoked by socialist realism – Stalinist aesthetics, ‘anthropological’ readings; ideology critique and censorship; and the sublimely ironic approaches adapted from sots art, the Soviet version of postmodernism. The contributors include: Antoine Baudin, Svetlana Boym, Greg Castillo, Katerina Clark, Evgeny Dobrenko, Boris Groys, Hans Gunther, Julia Hell, Leonid Heller, Mikhail Iampolski, Thomas Lahusen, Regine Robin, Yuri Slezkine, Lily Wiatrowski Phillips, Xudong Zhang, and Sergei Zimovets.
- How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Russia
“A gripping, unsettling, and highly original book that turns the making of a Soviet socialist-realist classic–Azhaev’s Far from Moscow–into a detective story, and sheds as strange and ambiguous a light on the Stalin era, from gulag to Writers’ Union, as one could hope for. Lahusen is a disarmingly low-key scholarly virtuoso who performs simultaneously as an archive-based historian, an interpreter of texts (including Azhaev’s own self-organized archive), and a gently relentless biographer whose stalking of his prey is reminiscent of Nabokov. The final chilling paragraph typically economical and understated, is a reminder that the author/investigator, too, is a collaborator in the multiple reworkings of Azhaev’s text, and of his life, that How Life Writes the Book has so finely analyzed.”–Sheila Fitzpatrick, University of Chicago.
- Late Soviet Culture from Perestroika to Novostroika
-Genèses de soi by Julie LeBlanc
Combinant les apports de la génétique textuelle et les théories de l’écriture au féminin, Julie LeBlanc consacre cet essai à la genèse de certaines œuvres de Marie-Claire Blais, Nicole Brossard, Annie Ernaux, Madeleine Monette et Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska. Pour réaliser ce travail, elle a pu consulter les archives de ces écrivaines, qui ont donné accès à des manuscrits et à des journaux d’écriture, des documents pour la plupart inédits. Première partie : La genèse d’un journal 1. Autotextes, avant-textes, intertextes : le journal diffusé de Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska comme avant-texte du journal publié 2. Écriture et réécriture au féminin : les journaux de Nicole Brossard Deuxième partie : Le journal d’une genèse 3. Les carnets d’écriture de Marie-Claire Blais 4. Le journal d’écriture comme laboratoire de l’œuvre : Passion simple et Se perdre d’Annie Ernaux. Troisième partie : le roman-journal, simulation d’une écriture autobiographique au féminin 5. Le statut du référent dans les récits autobiographiques : œuvres de fiction et de non-fiction 6. De la réalité autobiographique à la fiction de l’imaginé :Le double suspect de Madeleine Monette.
- Enonciation et inscription du sujet by Julie LeBlanc
-Balzac – Semiotique Du Personnage Romanesque-l’exemple D’eugenie Grandet by Roland Le Huenen
-Paratextes Balzaciens: La Comedie Humaine En Ses Marges by Roland Le Huenen
-The Neo-Primitivist Turn: Critical Reflections on Alterity, Culture, and Modernity
In recent years the concept of ‘the primitive’ has been the subject of strong criticism; it has been examined, unpacked, and shown to signify little more than a construction or projection necessary for establishing the modernity of the West. The term ‘primitive’ continues, however, to appear in contemporary critical and cultural discourse, begging the question: Why does primitivism keep reappearing even after it has been uncovered as a modern myth?
In The Neo-primitivist Turn, Victor Li argues that this contentious term was never completely banished and that it has in fact reappeared under new theoretical guises. An idealized conception of ‘the primitive,’ he contends, has come to function as the ultimate sign of alterity. Li focuses on the works of theorists like Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, Marianna Torgovnick, Marshall Sahlins, and Jürgen Habermas in order to demonstrate that primitivism continues to be a powerful presence even in those works normally regarded as critical of the concept. Providing close readings of the ways in which the premodern or primitive is strategically deployed in contemporary critical writings, Li’s interdisciplinary study is a timely and forceful intervention into current debates on the politics and ethics of otherness, the problems of cultural relativism, and the vicissitudes of modernity.
Yue Meng
-Shanghai and the Edges of Empires
Even before the romanticized golden era of Shanghai in the 1930s, the famed Asian city was remarkable for its uniqueness and East-meets-West cosmopolitanism. Meng Yue analyzes a century-long shift of urbanity from China’s heartland to its shore. During the period between the decline of Jiangnan cities such as Suzhou and Yangzhou and Shanghai’s early twentieth-century rise, the overlapping cultural edges of a failing Chinese royal order and the encroachment of Western imperialists converged. Simultaneously appropriating and resisting imposing forces, Shanghai opened itself to unruly, subversive practices, becoming a crucible of creativity and modernism.
Calling into question conventional ways of conceptualizing modernity, colonialism, and intercultural relations, Meng Yue examines such cultural practices as the work of the commercial press, street theater, and literary arts, and shows that what appear to be minor cultural changes often signal the presence of larger political and economic developments. Engaging theories of modernity and postcolonial and global cultural studies, Meng Yue reveals the paradoxical interdependence between imperial and imperialist histories and the retranslation of culture that characterized the most notable result of China’s urban relocation—the emergence of the international city of Shanghai.
-Figuring the Feminine: The Rhetoric of Female Embodiment in Medieval Hispanic Literature
Figuring the Feminine examines the female body as a means of articulating questions of literary authority and practice within the cultural spheres of the Iberian Peninsula (both Romance and Semitic) as well as in the larger Latinate literary culture. It demonstrates the centrality in medieval literary culture of the gendering of rhetorical and hermeneutical acts involved in the creation of texts and meaning, and the importance of the medieval Iberian textual tradition in this process, a complex multicultural tradition that is often overlooked in medieval literary scholarship. This study adopts an innovative methodology informed by current theories of the body and gender to approach Hispanic literature from a femininst perspective.
Jill Ross offers new readings of medieval Hispanic texts (Latin, Castilian, and Hebrew) including Prudentius’ Peristephanon, Gonzalo de Berceo’s Milagros de Nuestra Señora, Shem Tov of Carrión’s Battle Between the Pen and the Scissors, and several others. She highlights ways in which these texts contribute to the understanding of gender in medieval poetics and foreground questions of literary and cultural import. Figuring the Feminine argues that the bodies of women are crucial to the working out of such questions as the unsettling shift from orality to literacy, textual instability, cultural dissonance, and the resistance to cultural and religious hegemony.
Atsuko Sakaki
-Recontextualizing Texts: Narrative Performance in Modern Japanese Fiction
Offering the first systematic examination of five modern Japanese fictional narratives, all of them available in English translations, Atsuko Sakaki explores Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro and The Three-Cornered World; Ibuse Masuji’s Black Rain; Mori Ogai’s Wild Geese; and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s Quicksand. Her close reading of each text reveals a hitherto unexplored area of communication between narrator and audience, as well as between “implied author” and “implied reader.” By using this approach, the author situates each of these works not in its historical, cultural, or economic contexts but in the situation the text itself produces.
-Obsessions with the Sino-Japanese Polarity in Japanese Literature
-Kafka’s Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing
In 1916, Kafka wrote of The Sugar Baron, a dime-store colonial adventure story, “[it] affects me so deeply that I feel it is about myself, or as if it were the book of rules for my life.” John Zilcosky reveals that this perhaps surprising statement — made by the Prague-bound poet of modern isolation–is part of a network of remarks that exemplify Kafka’s ongoing preoccupation with popular travel writing, exoticism, and colonial fantasy. Taking this biographical peculiarity as a starting point, Kafka’s Travelselegantly re-reads Kafka’s major works (Amerika, The Trial, In the Penal Colony, The Castle) through the lens of fin-de-siècle travel culture. The book offers a lucid, readable introduction into Kafka’s life and work, and sophisticated analysis of Kafka’s major writings in relation to contemporary literary theory.
-Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey
Interest in travel writing has grown rapidly within the disciplines of postcolonial and cultural studies; however, recent scholarship has failed to place travel writing within the larger literary tradition. Writing Travel assembles a superb collection of essays that demonstrate how travel attempts to reconfigure the world and, in so doing, to become a metaphor for imagination, subjectivity, and representation itself.
Examining a broad range of texts and travellers from across the world, the contributors discuss canonical authors such as Homer, Goethe, and Baudelaire, alongside lesser known writers such as Theodor Herzl, Hans Erich Nossack, and William Gibson. This theoretically rich volume draws connections between travel and narrative, and provides powerful insights into the relationship between travel and the spoken act of storytelling, as well as the more ambivalent act of story writing.
An engaging collection of essays by first-rate scholars, Writing Travel is an illuminating exploration of the history of travel writing, its influence on other literary genres, and the origins of narrative.