Papers by Kathryn Lachman
The Massachusetts Review, 2017
Abstract:Algerian writer Assia Djebar’s lecture on the publication of Camus’s final novel, Le Pre... more Abstract:Algerian writer Assia Djebar’s lecture on the publication of Camus’s final novel, Le Premier Homme, in April 1994. The unfinished manuscript of Camus’s novel was immediately recognized as his most raw and autobiographical reckoning with his Algerian identity. Djebar uses the event to speak out against the systemic oppression of the Algerians by the French, in this translation
Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound by Booksfactory.co.uk 4 Opera an... more Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound by Booksfactory.co.uk 4 Opera and the Limits of Representation in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace Conclusion Notes Works Cited Index Contents Contents I cannot reduce my thoughts about life to the music of a single voice and a single point of view-I am, after all, a novelist.-Orhan Pamuk Borrowed Forms considers the impact of musical forms on late twentieth-century literature. The book looks closely at four musical concepts that have significantly influenced the novel and critical theory: polyphony, or the art of combining multiple, interdependent voices; counterpoint, the carefully regulated setting of one voice against another; variation, the virtuosic exploration of the diverse possibilities contained within a single theme; and opera, the dramatic setting of a story to a musical score. Although these musical forms took shape in the European Renaissance and Baroque, novelists have appropriated them as literary strategies because they open up alternative ways of conceiving relations among different subjectivities, histories, and positions, and provide a dynamic means to challenge and renew literary forms. In our cultural moment, novels circulate more widely than any other literary genre, and possess an exceptional plasticity that readily accommodates multiple perspectives, languages, styles, and registers. Not surprisingly, the novel has emerged as the privileged literary vehicle for expressing plurality and difference. How the novel reflects this increasingly transnational consciousness, and more precisely, how novelists and critics deploy musical forms to respond to new ethical and aesthetic demands, are among the principal questions this book addresses.
Borrowed Forms, 2014
Chapter Four considers the status of opera in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999). In the tradition o... more Chapter Four considers the status of opera in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999). In the tradition of major modernist novels, Disgrace o ers a meditation on artistic creation and uses music in order to stage the problems of writing. The novel's protagonist, David Lurie, is an aging English professor at Cape Town University who attempts to write an opera about Lord Byron's late romance with an Italian countess. A failed a air with a student, followed by the loss of his job and a brutal attack on his daughter's farm, challenge Lurie's assumptions about justice, entitlement, violence, and representation in postapartheid South Africa. While critics have generally read the opera as an embedded narrative that sheds light on Lurie's developing ethical sensibilities, this chapter reads the opera against feminist music criticism, Coetzee's broader work, and French theory, to argue that it constitutes a far more radical disruption in the text. The opera opens a space of opacity and unreadability in the narrative, staging the problem of representing the other. Coetzee draws on opera to re-evaluate the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in contemporary South Africa-and in literature itself. I am still interested in how the voice moves the body, moves in the body.-J. M. Coetzee This nal chapter turns to J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999), a novel that commands a place in any discussion of musical forms in transnational literature through its provocative engagement with opera. The author's rst novel to be staged in post-apartheid South Africa, Disgrace calls on music to paint what one critic has called "an anxious, comfortless portrait" of a nation undergoing radical changes (Cooper, 2005, 22). The protagonist, David Lurie, a middle-aged literature professor at the University of Cape Town, falls into "disgrace" when his e orts to seduce an attractive young student mis re and he nds himself charged with sexual harassment. In his highly publicized university hearing, Lurie shows no remorse and stubbornly champions his right to act on desire. The adjudicating committee considers the case as part of a long history of racial oppression in South Africa, particularly because the student in question, Melanie Isaacs, is a woman of color. In keeping with the spirit of the national Truth and Reconciliation process, they demand his apology; his refusal to comply costs him his teaching post. In the wake of the scandal, Lurie withdraws to his daughter Lucy's modest farmstead in the Eastern Cape. Lucy's country lifestyle is the antithesis of his academic life in Cape Town. There, Lurie assists with daily chores while trying to make progress on his current project, an opera about the Romantic poet-and ruthless womanizer-Lord Byron. Ironically, although he has never written music before, Lurie expects it to come more naturally and be more p. 114
African Studies Review, 2017
University Libraries staff will review the wealth of resources available through the film databas... more University Libraries staff will review the wealth of resources available through the film database collections and how they can be integrated seamlessly into academic courses. Faculty will share specific examples of this integration and how it has benefited student learning in their course
African Studies Review, 2017
The Massachusetts Review, 2019
An essay by Charlotte Delbo's biographer, translated from the French by Kathryn Lachman
African Studies Review, 2017
The Massachusetts Review, 2019
Abstract:It was chance that took me to a writer's residence in Switzerland—one of those chanc... more Abstract:It was chance that took me to a writer's residence in Switzerland—one of those chances that turn out to be fate. I didn't yet know that when, on the cobblestones of a courtyard on Rue de Verneuil in Paris, I bumped into the friend who told me about a retreat that was "extraordinary". I asked her where it was situated. In Switzerland, she told me, near Lausanne. My interest flagged: that wasn't far from the little house in country where I used to take my children five times a year to visit their paternal grandparents. I appreciated my good fortune, being able to get them out of Paris during their school vacations, but once there I always felt like I was in exile: I had to leave behind my study and the writerly solitude where I delved into imaginary worlds and experienced life so densely, so intensely. But my friend wouldn't give up, she told me that there would be writers from all over the world. With that, the ground began to open up and shift around me: I would have to speak English, to test the uncertainty of language. I would have the euphoric sensation of losing my equilibrium, of doing everything differently, of getting rid of my baggage, the personal matters that stuck to me like glue—all by speaking another language…
New West Indian Guide, 2016
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-No... more This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported (cc-by-nc 3.0) License.
Research in African Literatures, 2015
James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New Yor... more James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1989. Print. Hallward, Peter. Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002. Print. . Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment. London: Verso, 2007. Print. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Print. Nesbitt, Nick. “The Idea of 1804.” Yale French Studies: The Haiti Issue: 1804 and NineteenthCentury French Studies 107 (2005): 6–38. Print. . “Troping Toussaint, Reading Revolution.” Research in African Literatures 35.2 (Summer 2004): 18–33. Print. . Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2008. Print.
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 2015
human rights discourse to gain worldwide recognition. Members of the Al-Hakim family have been mu... more human rights discourse to gain worldwide recognition. Members of the Al-Hakim family have been much more openly involved in Iraqi politics, from Muhsin Al-Hakim’s clear denunciation of the secularization policies implemented by the socialist Iraqi government under ʿAbd Al-Karim Qasim (1958–63) to the active involvement of his son in the exilic politics of SCIRI. The political activism of members of the Al-Hakim family continued post-2003, with SCIRI’s successor party, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), headed by Muhsin Al-Hakim’s grandson. This is a very useful, accessible and readable book providing rich and detailed information and analysis of the various trajectories of transnational Shii clerical networks in the last fifty years. For this reason, it is an important source for anyone interested in developments within contemporary Iraqi Shiism. The book is based on extensive and multi-sited research including archival research in places like Iran, various biographical sources as well as interviews with major figures and stakeholders in the networks discussed. The only point of criticism one might raise is that Corboz perhaps overestimates the significance of familial ties in the perpetuation of religio-political authority. While it is true that the descendants of Muhsin Al-Hakim and Al-Khuʾi have used their fathers’ and grandfathers’ names to advance their own position within transnational and local Iraqi Shiism, the relatively poor performance of SCIRI/ISCI in Iraqi elections or controversies around the management of the Al-Khoie Foundation after Al-Khuʾi’s death illustrate that having the name of a great Shia clerical figure alone is not enough to be recognized as a religious or political leader in contemporary Shiism.
Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound by Booksfactory.co.uk 4 Opera an... more Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound by Booksfactory.co.uk 4 Opera and the Limits of Representation in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace Conclusion Notes Works Cited Index Contents Contents I cannot reduce my thoughts about life to the music of a single voice and a single point of view-I am, after all, a novelist.-Orhan Pamuk Borrowed Forms considers the impact of musical forms on late twentieth-century literature. The book looks closely at four musical concepts that have significantly influenced the novel and critical theory: polyphony, or the art of combining multiple, interdependent voices; counterpoint, the carefully regulated setting of one voice against another; variation, the virtuosic exploration of the diverse possibilities contained within a single theme; and opera, the dramatic setting of a story to a musical score. Although these musical forms took shape in the European Renaissance and Baroque, novelists have appropriated them as literary strategies because they open up alternative ways of conceiving relations among different subjectivities, histories, and positions, and provide a dynamic means to challenge and renew literary forms. In our cultural moment, novels circulate more widely than any other literary genre, and possess an exceptional plasticity that readily accommodates multiple perspectives, languages, styles, and registers. Not surprisingly, the novel has emerged as the privileged literary vehicle for expressing plurality and difference. How the novel reflects this increasingly transnational consciousness, and more precisely, how novelists and critics deploy musical forms to respond to new ethical and aesthetic demands, are among the principal questions this book addresses.
Francophone Afropean Literatures, 2014
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Papers by Kathryn Lachman