Ex-centric Writing

Ex-centric Writing PDF Author: Annalisa Pes
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443869082
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
The concern with identity and belonging, with place/dis-placement is a major feature of postcolonial literature and the theme of alienation cannot but be “topical” in the literatures of the countries that have experienced the cultural shock and bereavement, and the physical and psychic trauma of colonial invasion. The purpose of this volume is to qualify the difference one is faced with when a postcolonial ex-centric text is addressed, by collecting essays concerned with writers from Southern Africa, the Caribbean, Australia, the Indian subcontinent and Asian diaspora(s). While giving contextual specifics their due, it shows how the theme of alienation, when perceived through the anamorphic lens of madness, is magnified and charged with an excruciatingly questioning and destabilizing power, laying bare political as well as existential and moral urges. From the ex-centric, broadly exilic position, it is the ideology and practice of colonialism that demand to be rubricated as psychopathology. More broadly, as these essays highlight, in fiction the mad character’s ex-centric vision is a continuous warning against the temptation to believe in those discourses that pass themselves off as reflecting the given, “natural”, order of things.

Ex-centric Writing

Ex-centric Writing PDF Author: Annalisa Pes
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443869082
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
The concern with identity and belonging, with place/dis-placement is a major feature of postcolonial literature and the theme of alienation cannot but be “topical” in the literatures of the countries that have experienced the cultural shock and bereavement, and the physical and psychic trauma of colonial invasion. The purpose of this volume is to qualify the difference one is faced with when a postcolonial ex-centric text is addressed, by collecting essays concerned with writers from Southern Africa, the Caribbean, Australia, the Indian subcontinent and Asian diaspora(s). While giving contextual specifics their due, it shows how the theme of alienation, when perceived through the anamorphic lens of madness, is magnified and charged with an excruciatingly questioning and destabilizing power, laying bare political as well as existential and moral urges. From the ex-centric, broadly exilic position, it is the ideology and practice of colonialism that demand to be rubricated as psychopathology. More broadly, as these essays highlight, in fiction the mad character’s ex-centric vision is a continuous warning against the temptation to believe in those discourses that pass themselves off as reflecting the given, “natural”, order of things.

A Narratology of Drama

A Narratology of Drama PDF Author: Christine Schwanecke
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110724111
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
This volume argues against Gérard Genette’s theory that there is an “insurmountable opposition” between drama and narrative and shows that the two forms of storytelling have been productively intertwined throughout literary history. Building on the idea that plays often incorporate elements from other genres, especially narrative ones, the present study theorises drama as a fundamentally narrative genre. Guided by the question of how drama tells stories, the first part of the study delineates the general characteristics of dramatic narration and zooms in on the use of narrative forms in drama. The second part proposes a history of dramatic storytelling from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century that transcends conventional genre boundaries. Close readings of exemplary British plays provide an overview of the dominant narrative modes in each period and point to their impact in the broader cultural and historical context of the plays. Finally, the volume argues that throughout history, highly narrative plays have had a performative power that reached well beyond the stage: dramatic storytelling not only reflects socio-political realities, but also largely shapes them.

Confluence Narratives

Confluence Narratives PDF Author: Antonio Luciano de Andrade Tosta
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611487560
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Confluence Narratives: Ethnicity, History and Nation-Making in the Americas explores how a collection of contemporary novels calls attention to the impact of ethnicity on national identities in the Americas. These historical narratives portray the cultural encounters—the conflicts and alliances, peaceful borrowings and violent seizures—that have characterized the history of the American continents since the colonial period. In the second half of the twentieth century, North and South American readers have witnessed a steady output of novels that revisit moments of cultural confluence as a means of revising national histories. Confluence Narratives proposes that these historical novels, published in such places as Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, and Canada, make up a key literary genre in the Americas. The genre links the various parts of the hemisphere together through three common historical experiences: colonization, slavery, and immigration. Luciano Tosta demonstrates how numerous texts from the United States, Canada, Spanish America, the Caribbean, and Brazil fall into the genre. The book focuses on four case studies from ethnic groups in the Americas: Amerindians, Afro-descendants, Jewish Americans, and Japanese Americans. Tosta uses the experience of the American nations as a springboard to problematize the concept of the contemporary nation, an identity marked by border-crossings and other experiences of deterritorialization. Based on the exploration of “confluence narratives,” Tosta argues that the “contemporary” nation is not as contemporary as one may think. Informed by postcolonial theory and transnational and ethnic studies, this book offers an important comparative study for and of inter-American literature. Its analysis of the representation of cultural encounters within distinctive national histories underscores the complex nature of ‘otherness’ in the Americas, as well as the inherently transcultural aspect of a trans-continental American identity.

Ex-Centric Migrations

Ex-Centric Migrations PDF Author: Hakim Abderrezak
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253020786
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
“Plunges the reader into a tour de force across radically divergent artistic responses to Mediterranean migration.” —Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies Ex-Centric Migrations examines cinematic, literary, and musical representations of migrants and migratory trends in the western Mediterranean. Focusing primarily on clandestine sea-crossings, Hakim Abderrezak shows that despite labor and linguistic ties with the colonizer, migrants from the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) no longer systematically target France as a destination, but instead aspire toward other European countries, notably Spain and Italy. In addition, the author investigates other migratory patterns that entail the repatriation of émigrés. His analysis reveals that the films, novels, and songs of Mediterranean artists run contrary to mass media coverage and conservative political discourse, bringing a nuanced vision and expert analysis to the sensationalism and biased reportage of such events as the Mediterranean maritime tragedies. “Ex-Centric Migrations is crucial reading for scholars and students of contemporary Maghrebi, French, and Spanish literatures and cultures. It breaks new ground by encompassing the literature, film, and music of ‘return migration’ and examining the trajectories of Maghrebi migration outside France.” —H-France “Hakim Abderrezak convincingly illustrates how politically committed artistic practices serve to humanize the challenges of human migration, and in the process dramatically improves our understanding of the complex cultural, economic, political, and social realities that shape 21st-century existence.” —Dominic Thomas, author of Africa and France: Postcolonial Cultures, Migration, and Racism

Ex-centric Narratives

Ex-centric Narratives PDF Author: Smatie Yemenedzi-Malathouni
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781936320318
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
With the peripheral having now become the centre of contemporary culture, this volume examines cultural and literary diversities that have emerged from the reciprocal traffic of ideas and influences between cultures, politics, aesthetics and disciplines, with an emphasis on identity as a site of crisis, fragmentation as well as re-evaluation of cultural practices and beliefs. All essays in the proposed volume address the concepts of de-centrism and ex-centrism within a globalized context, where borders between the canonical and the other are being contested. Within this context, individual cultures and individual writers and artists are viewed by the authors in the volume as participants in an intercultural and multiple exchange of experiences as well as perspectives, in their attempt to move beyond boundaries.

Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing

Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing PDF Author: Donna McCormack
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501310895
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
"Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing is a critically engaged exploration of power and its relation to ethics and bodies. By revisiting and revising Judith Butler's and Homi Bhabha's queer and postcolonial theories of literary performance, McCormack expands current understandings of the performative workings of power through an embodied, multisensory ethics. That remembering is an embodied act which necessitates an undoing of one's sense of self captures how colonial and familial histories silenced by hegemonic structures may only emerge through opaque bodily sensations. These non-institutionalised forms of witnessing serve both to reconfigure theories of performativity, by re-situating the act of witnessing as integral to the workings of power, and to interrogate the current emphasis on speech in trauma studies, by analysing the multifarious, communal and public ways in which memories emerge. In Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing the body is reinstated as central to both the workings of and the challenges to colonial discourses"--

The Postmodern in Latin and Latino American Cultural Narratives

The Postmodern in Latin and Latino American Cultural Narratives PDF Author: Claudia Ferman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317946766
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
This volume of new and reprinted articles, many translated here into English for the first time, examines the conditions, characteristics, and implications of the debate on Latin American Postmodernism, presenting an up-to-date rendering of its crucial issues. Special considerations are given to the theoretical aspects, such as ideological, political, literary-critical, and cultural implications. The scope of this debate embraces such matters as the problematic modernization of Latin America, cultural and political reformulation in the face of the media explosion, new critical perspectives facing the collapse of utopian ideologies, and new literary production: women's writing, and testimonio. Contributors include John Beverly, Antonio Ben'tez-Rojo and Antonio Vera-Le-n, Celeste Olalquiaga, Arturo Arias, Santiago Col s, Nelly Richard, Jesoes Mart'n-Barbero, Iumna Maria Simon, and Vinicius Dantas. The collection also contains some of the editor's personal interviews with scholars involved in this debate who live and work in Latin America: Roger Bartra and Jorge Juanes (Mexico), and Nicol s Casullo (Argentina).

Greek Modernism and Beyond

Greek Modernism and Beyond PDF Author: Δημήτρης Τζιόβας
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780847685776
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Although it is one of the most dynamic and controversial areas of Greek culture, Greek modernism has received little scholarly attention as a literary and cultural phenomenon. A wide variety of competing, often clashing discourses and approaches characterize the study of Greek modernism. In this landmark volume, scholars from three continents provide a framework in which developments in prose, poetry, and drama can be studied together. The contributors seek to redefine the contours of Greek modernism, to reassess its impact on Greek culture, to explore the fringes of the movement. Special attention is paid to the role of the avant-garde in Greece and the emergence of postmodern trends in Greek culture. Greek Modernism and Beyond is valuable reading for students and scholars of Greek and European literature.

Renegotiating Masculinities in European Digital Spheres

Renegotiating Masculinities in European Digital Spheres PDF Author: Inês Amaral
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040256236
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
This book explores, from a feminist and intersectional perspective, how masculinities have been (re)negotiated in today’s European digital sphere. By considering new gender-based European trends and scenarios – for example, #metoo, gender ideology, and cultural backlash – the book addresses masculinities in a time of social, political, economic, and cultural transformations in Europe. Bringing together research focused on online media representations of what it means to be and behave “like a man” in today’s Europe, and the way audiences have reacted to those representations, the analysis contributes to a comprehensive reflection on the stereotypes that underlie discourses in online media and how audiences co-opt, confront, criticize, renegotiate, and seek to promote gender alternatives that challenge gender (in)equity. This timely volume will be of interest to all scholars and students of media studies, digital and new media, gender and masculinity, feminism, digital cultures, critical cultural studies, European cultural studies, and sociology.

Identity, Diaspora and Return in American Literature

Identity, Diaspora and Return in American Literature PDF Author: Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317818202
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
This volume combines literary analysis and theoretical approaches to mobility, diasporic identities and the construction of space to explore the different ways in which the notion of return shapes contemporary ethnic writing such as fiction, ethnography, memoir, and film. Through a wide variety of ethnic experiences ranging from the Transatlantic, Asian American, Latino/a and Caribbean alongside their corresponding forms of displacement - political exile, war trauma, and economic migration - the essays in this collection connect the intimate experience of the returning subject to multiple locations, historical experiences, inter-subjective relations, and cultural interactions. They challenge the idea of the narrative of return as a journey back to the untouched roots and home that the ethnic subject left behind. Their diacritical approach combines, on the one hand, a sensitivity to the context and structural elements of modern diaspora; and on the other, an analysis of the individual psychological processes inherent to the experience of displacement and return such as nostalgia, memory and belonging. In the narratives of return analyzed in this volume, space and identity are never static or easily definable; rather, they are in-process and subject to change as they are always entangled in the historical and inter-subjective relations ensuing from displacement and mobility. This book will interest students and scholars who wish to further explore the role of American literature within current debates on globalization, migration, and ethnicity.