Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination

Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination PDF Author: Martin McKinsey
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 0838642012
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination: Yeats, Cavafy, Walcott follows the careers of three major poets of the European and North American periphery as they engage one of the master tropes of Western civilization. As colonial subjects, they inherited an Anglicized version of Hellenism whose borders might easily have excluded them as civilizational "others." The book describes the diverse strategies they used--from Bloomian kenosis to Afro-Caribbean "signifyin(g)"--to make Hellenism their own. Their use of Greek material, the book argues, is closely tied to their need as members of colonial minorities--Irish Protestant, Greek-Egyptian, and "part-white and Methodist"--to define themselves against mainstream metropolitan culture on the one hand, and nationalist constructions of the post-colonial homeland on the other. Their Hellenisms participate in the dialectic of local and global, as the poets at once indigenize the Universal Greek, and re-deploy him to hybridize national culture. The result is a triangulated dynamic that challenges established notions of the postcolonial. Among works discussed are Tennyson's "Ulysses," Yeats's "No Second Troy," C.P. Cavafy's "Waiting for the Barbarians," and Walcott's Omeros. Martin McKinsey is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire.

Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination

Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination PDF Author: Martin McKinsey
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 0838642012
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination: Yeats, Cavafy, Walcott follows the careers of three major poets of the European and North American periphery as they engage one of the master tropes of Western civilization. As colonial subjects, they inherited an Anglicized version of Hellenism whose borders might easily have excluded them as civilizational "others." The book describes the diverse strategies they used--from Bloomian kenosis to Afro-Caribbean "signifyin(g)"--to make Hellenism their own. Their use of Greek material, the book argues, is closely tied to their need as members of colonial minorities--Irish Protestant, Greek-Egyptian, and "part-white and Methodist"--to define themselves against mainstream metropolitan culture on the one hand, and nationalist constructions of the post-colonial homeland on the other. Their Hellenisms participate in the dialectic of local and global, as the poets at once indigenize the Universal Greek, and re-deploy him to hybridize national culture. The result is a triangulated dynamic that challenges established notions of the postcolonial. Among works discussed are Tennyson's "Ulysses," Yeats's "No Second Troy," C.P. Cavafy's "Waiting for the Barbarians," and Walcott's Omeros. Martin McKinsey is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire.

Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology

Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology PDF Author: Pui-lan Kwok
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
ISBN: 9780664228835
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
The burgeoning field of postcolonial studies argues that most theology has been formed in dominant cultures, laden intrinsically with imperializing structures. An essential task facing theology is thus to "decolonize" the mind and free Christianity from colonizing bias and structures. Here, in this truly groundbreaking study, highly respected feminist theologian Kwok Pui-lan offers the first full-length theological treatment of what it means to do postcolonial feminist theology. She explains her methodological basis and explores several specific topics, including Christology, pluralism, and creation.

Specters of Cavafy

Specters of Cavafy PDF Author: Maria Boletsi
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472904493
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
The Greek Alexandrian poet C. P. Cavafy (1863–1933) has been recognized as a central figure in European modernism and world literature. His poetry explored the conditions for animating the past and making lost worlds or people haunt the present. Yet he also described himself as “a poet of the future generations.” Indeed, his writings address concerns and desires that permeate the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. How does poetry concerned with the past, memory, loss, and death, carry futurity? How does it haunt, and how is it haunted by, future presents? Specters of Cavafy broaches these questions by proposing spectral poetics as a novel approach to Cavafy’s work. Drawing from theorizations of specters and haunting, it develops spectrality as a lens for revisiting Cavafy’s poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, as well as his poetry’s bearing on our present. By examining Cavafy’s spectral poetics, the book’s first part shows how conjurations work in his writings, and how the spectral permeates the entanglement of modernity and haunting, and of irony and affect. The second part traces the afterlives of specific poems in the Western imagination since the 1990s, in Egypt’s history of debt and colonization, and in Greece during the country’s recent debt crisis. Beyond its original contribution to Cavafy studies, the book proposes tools and modes of reading that are broadly applicable in literary and cultural studies.

Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism

Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism PDF Author: Hala Halim
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823252272
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 564

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Book Description
Interrogating how Alexandria became enshrined as the exemplary cosmopolitan space in the Middle East, this book mounts a radical critique of Eurocentric conceptions of cosmopolitanism. The dominant account of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism elevates things European in the city’s culture and simultaneously places things Egyptian under the sign of decline. The book goes beyond this civilization/barbarism binary to trace other modes of intercultural solidarity. Halim presents a comparative study of literary representations, addressing poetry, fiction, guidebooks, and operettas, among other genres. She reappraises three writers—C. P. Cavafy, E. M. Forster, and Lawrence Durrell—who she maintains have been cast as the canon of Alexandria. Attending to issues of genre, gender, ethnicity, and class, she refutes the view that these writers’ representations are largely congruent and uncovers a variety of positions ranging from Orientalist to anticolonial. The book then turns to Bernard de Zogheb, a virtually unpublished writer, and elicits his camp parodies of elite Levantine mores in operettas, one of which centers on Cavafy. Drawing on Arabic critical and historical texts, as well as contemporary writers’ and filmmakers’ engagement with the canonical triumvirate, Halim orchestrates an Egyptian dialogue with the European representations.

Derek Walcott's Encounter with Homer

Derek Walcott's Encounter with Homer PDF Author: Rachel D. Friedman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192523465
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Derek Walcott's Encounter with Homer puts Derek Walcott's epic poem Omeros in conversation with Homer, especially the Odyssey, to show how reading them against each other changes our understanding of the poems of both poets. It explores Walcott's conscious use of the Odyssey and the Homeric persona of Omeros to explore his own deepening relationship with his craft and his identity as a Caribbean poet. Walcott's ability to serve as the vessel of history for his people and their landscapes rests on his transformation into (and self-perception as) Homer's contemporary and equal. Central to the project of Omeros is thus an account of his shift from a diachronic to synchronic relationship with Homer: over the course of the poem his poetic persona, the "Poet", and Homer come to occupy the same temporality and creative space. By locating the poems of Walcott and Homer in a zone of vibrant and unexpected encounter, Rachel Friedman demonstrates how they can be seen as mutually informing texts, each made richer in the presence of the other. The argument follows two intertwined thematic threads. The first focuses on the poems' landscapes and seascapes and the ways in which Omeros reworks the Odyssey's affective geography. While the Odyssey represents the sea as a dangerous space and valorizes life on land, Walcott reverses this trajectory from sea to land, bearing witness to the painful histories carried in the St Lucian soil and relocating homecoming to the space of the Caribbean Sea, a space which accommodates diasporic histories and the imagining of fluid forms of emplacement. The second thread focuses on Walcott's poetic persona: his journey in and out of the poem and his positioning of himself as a "tribal poet" like Homer. Central to the project of Omeros is the Poet's account of the processes by which he becomes the poet who can adequately give voice to the histories of his people and the archipelago they inhabit.

Communication Images in Derek Walcott's Poetry

Communication Images in Derek Walcott's Poetry PDF Author: Sadia Gill
Publisher: Vernon Press
ISBN: 1622732707
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
This book investigates the potential purpose of recurrent communication images in the poetry of Derek Walcott. The recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1992, Walcott is one of the most important postcolonial poets of the 20th century. His poetry delves into the dynamics of Caribbean marginalization and seeks to safeguard the paradigms characteristic of his island home. Several major studies have examined themes in his poetry but the images of communication in his poetics have not been explored. This book examines Walcott's poetry expressions that the poet brings into play in order to demonstrate the relevance of the Caribbean in the contemporary world--firstly through a study of communication imagery, and secondly through an examination of the conclusions he reaches through these means. The quantitative chart demonstrates that Walcott is especially reliant upon images of communication from the 1980s. Extensive textual analysis indicates that the place and contextual meaning of communication imagery, for example, page mirrors the historical plight of the Caribbean region; likewise, line expresses an identity deficit. Finally, this book validates that Walcott's extensive use of communication imagery in his poetry contributes to a fluid notion of self that embraces multiculturalism while maintaining the imaginary intact.

Modernism and Homer

Modernism and Homer PDF Author: Leah Culligan Flack
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107108039
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
A comparative study exploring the particular importance of Homer in the emergence, development, and promotion of modernist writing.

Cavafy's Hellenistic Antiquities

Cavafy's Hellenistic Antiquities PDF Author: Takis Kayalis
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031349024
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This book reinterprets C. P. Cavafy’s historical and archaeological poetics by correlating his work to major cultural, political and sexualized receptions of antiquity that marked the turn of the 20th century. Focusing on selected poems which stage readings of Hellenistic and late ancient texts and material objects, this study probes the poet's personal library and archive to trace his scholarly sources and scrutinize their contribution to his creative practice. A new understanding of Cavafy's historicism emerges by comparing his poetics to a broad array of discourses and intellectual pursuits of his time; these range from antiquarianism, physiognomy and Egyptomania to cultural appropriations of the classics which sought to legitimate British colonial rule as well as homoerotic desire. As this volume demonstrates, Cavafy embraced antiquarianism as an empathetic and passionate way of relating to the past and shaped it into a method that allowed his poetry to render modern meanings to Hellenistic antiquities.

How to Do Things with Affects

How to Do Things with Affects PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900439771X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
How to Do Things with Affects develops affect as a highly productive concept for both cultural analysis and the reading of aesthetic forms. Shifting the focus from individual experiences and the human interiority of personal emotions and feelings toward the agency of cultural objects, social arrangements, and aesthetic matter, the book examines how affects operate and are triggered by aesthetic forms, media events, and cultural practices. Transgressing disciplinary boundaries and emphasizing close reading, the collected essays explore manifold affective transmissions and resonances enacted by modernist literary works, contemporary visual arts, horror and documentary films, museum displays, and animated pornography, with a special focus on how they impact on political events, media strategies, and social situations. Contributors: Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, Maria Boletsi, Eugenie Brinkema, Pietro Conte, Anne Fleig, Bernd Herzogenrath, Tomáš Jirsa, Matthias Lüthjohann, Susanna Paasonen, Christina Riley, Jan Slaby, Eliza Steinbock, Christiane Voss.

Homer

Homer PDF Author: Jonathan S. Burgess
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857726242
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
What reader could fail to be enthralled by the Iliad and the Odyssey, those greatest heroic epics of antiquity? Yet the author of those immortal text remains, in the end, an enigma. The central paradox of 'Homer' is that- while recognized as producing poetry of incomparable genius- even in the ancien world nobody knew who he was. As a result, the myth-maker became the subject of myth. For the satirist Lucian (c.125-180 CE) he ws a captive Babylonian. Other traditions have Homer born in Smyrna, or on the island of Chios, or portray him as a blind and wandering minstrel. In his new and authoritative introduction, Jonathan S. Burgess addresses fundamental questions of provenance and authorship. Besides conveying why these epics have been cherished down the ages, he discusses their historical sources and the possible impact on the Iliad and Odyssey of Indo-European, Near Eastern and folktale influences. Tracing their transmission through the ancient, medieval and modern periods, the author further examines questions of theory and reception.