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1993, New Voices in Caribbean Literature, ed. Kenneth …
Resistance and Complicity in David Dabydeens "The Intended MARGERY FEE a "n his last day in his grandparents' village in Guyana, the narrator of David Dabydeen's The Intended is given money and a farewell kiss by Auntie Clarice, who calls out "a final riddle: 'you is we, ...
Erik Bordeleau characterizes the political collective the Invisible Committee as a revolutionary and literary force entangled within a complex field of power relations. He asserts that the collective configures a politics of enunciation that oscillates between anonymity and extreme personalization. This essay is part of the research theme Commonist Aesthetics
Many would claim diary writing to be the unvarnished truth of a life written as it is lived. Yet a diary—a book Thomas Mallon concluded is never kept just for the writer themselves—comprises a self-constructed identity comparable to that of an autobiography. In this paper, I take a narrative approach to examining identity construction in the pages of a diary. Using the tools of narrative inquiry and focused through Jacques Derrida’s discussion of secrets and testimony in Demeure, I examine a single diary entry of Emily Hawley Gillespie, an ordinary 19th century woman who lived on an Iowa farm, to uncover her testimony of identity as witness, martyr, and keeper of a self-described secret within a single diary entry—a secret she vows to take to her grave.
Womens History Review, 2006
The aggregate of experiences from pre-independence colonial rule and abuse, to post-independence imperialism; from multifarious exploitations and concomitant struggles to drastic socio-cultural disturbance, economic underdevelopment, political enslavement, and psychological derailment, has awakened socially concerned writers to the recurrent patterns of injustice that violate the people's humanity, and has impelled the socially aware and the morally responsible to use their pens in helping restore the lost humanity of the oppressed and in establishing a new life and history characterized by freedom, justice, and dignity.
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 2023
This article examines the second-person narrative mode in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat. Its function is explained by situating the novel within that niche known as the “you-text.” But the generic function must also be accounted for within the thematic tensions of the novel, specifically those oscillations of avowal and disavowal. So a second concern is this: how does the novel speak back to narrative theory? How does its “compulsion to tell the truth” – shadowed by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission – trouble, expand or extend the typologies used to talk about texts where “you” consolidates narrator and narratee? Considering this consolidation as part of what might be called a narratology of the self, I suggest that Agaat’s “you” can be seen as further collapsing the roles of confessor and penitent. Such collapse reinforces the interiority of Milla’s self-addressed excoriations, since it mirrors the doubled consciousness of Protestant confession. But it also inaugurates a new type of address – the “implied you” – which turns on the reader as much as on the novel’s protagonist.
When A. S. Byatt prefaced her selections for The Guardian’s best books of 2012 with the declaration that British fiction is “going through an extraordinarily various and imaginative period,” she was unwittingly claiming Patrick Flanery, the Nebraska-raised, Oxford-educated author of a novel about postapartheid South Africa, as a Brit. This kind of extranational imaginary is not unique in the life of British fiction; indeed, the Man Booker Prize makes an annual show of reconstituting the Empire as a literary territory, prizing postcolonial literatures as its own. But Byatt’s recommendation of Flanery’s extraordinary first novel, Absolution, says something further about the state of world literature, specifically the actual production of literatures that imagine cultures and geographies unbound by national borders. In this revitalized moment for world literature, the place of production and the writer’s national affiliation(s) are more often than not marginalized by discussions of what Wai Chee Dimock, in Through Other Continents, calls the “complex tangle of relations” bound up in the “shorthand” of national literatures (3). Dimock specifically argues for American literature, long chided for its provincial navel-gazing, as a national literary tradition ironically forged from its relations with the transnational languages, cultures, and influences of the world. Flanery grows that argument exponentially to include the South African landscape in American literature. Absolution contributes to the growing canon of Anglophone literatures that imagine the historical circumstances of non-Western peoples and places, while simultaneously challenging the discursive capabilities of history, politics, memory, and story to narrate the most fraught moments in the life of a nation. Set during the interregnum just before and after the fall of the apartheid government in South Africa, Flanery’s Absolution is a Rash-omon of interdependent narratives, each claiming some territory of the elusive truth about two killings of familial and national consequence. The failure of those narratives to draw a complete picture of the events and their aftereffects forms the heart of the novel’s conviction that the novelist, the memoirist, the historian, and even the censor share a common responsibility and peril: when faced with the failure of narrative to adequately capture human events, an account must still be written, however fragile and incomplete. Absolution chronicles the story of the aging writer Clare Wald and her would-be biographer, Sam Leroux, as they wrestle with the ghosts of a conjoined history overshadowed by the legacy of apartheid, and with the fragile narrative pieces of a nation in transition. Flanery’s refusal to resolve those compelling fragments, to bind the characters to a rigid ethics, characterizes the thoughtfulness with which he approaches such delicate source material. Absolution casts its drama across the landscapes of Johannesburg and the Eastern and Western Cape provinces with what the South African writer and literary critic Michael Titlestad calls an “impeccably local” idiom and diction. This is a novel concerned with historical reckonings, with the individual’s attempt to craft a narrative from the manifold discourses and voices that lay claim to the truth of social and institutional violence and its aftershocks. Flanery’s focal character, Clare, remarks on her own attempts to make sense of her conflicted past and present in South Africa: There are two things to say about that. First, that history is not always correct, because it cannot tell all the stories that have been, cannot account for everything that happened. . . . Second, that the record of memory, even a flawed memory, has its own kind of truth. And indeed the novel reads as a series of interwoven, elegant, and terrifying flawed memories. Flanery’s novel works between gut and intellect with a brutal beauty that seems at once precisely attuned to apartheid’s setting while portraying a broader geography of state atrocities, as in this description of torture: “Before killing you they would burn the names from your mouth, pull syllables from your fingernails, soak vowels and consonants from your nostrils, remind you of their authority with steel and wire, electricity and fire” (88). Absolution is also a crime story— corporeal, institutional, and literary—intertwined with documents and accounts from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission...
Traumatic Memory and the Ethical, Political and Transhistorical Functions of Literature, 2017
IntroductIon "Colonialism," writes Gillian Whitlock in The Intimate Empire: Reading Women's Autobiography, "impacts at the point where the very sense of the possibilities for self-definition are constituted, and autobiographical writing bears the traces of its origins in specific historical relations of power, rule and domination." 1 In countries under colonial rule, the
Journal of Folklore Research v. 41, nos.2-3 (May-December 2004): 105-123., 2004
PROCESS: Journal of Multidisciplinary Undergraduate Scholarship, 2024
This analysis assesses the power dynamics of Friday and Susan, the African and White subversives, respectively, in J.M. Coetzee’s Foe—a reconceptualization of Daniel Defoe’s master text, Robinson Crusoe. My reading of Foe captures the problematic middle ground narrator and memoirist Susan, postcolonial in theory, occupies as a European in practice—she is (post)colonial. In trying to understand Friday, Africanized in Foe, and place him in her island memoir, she superimposes onto him a European identity and epistemology. Significantly, she fails to comprehend that he operates in his own non-vocal, non-written narrative phenomenologically and ontologically, experientially and bodily—his own epistemological framework against the master text. To this end, I consider sources that explore Friday’s embodied meaning, Susan’s narrative authority, or Friday’s subversion. Such a critical conversation provides nuance to the analysis of master narrative and colonial superimpositions on epistemology and identity as they clash with Friday’s enduring, “nonauthorial,” phenomenological, and embodied narrative. This perdurable nonauthorship, non-phonological and non-literary, is Friday’s mode of resistance to communication or re-education at the hand of colonial, Western narrative authority, phonological and literary, through Susan. I coalesce such conflict and resistance into a direct assessment of the Susan–Friday relationship and power dynamic, a gap that must be properly bridged. I approach a reading of Foe with this identity-building power dynamic as my central focus. (Post)colonial Susan actualizes the colonialist narrative, though Friday’s nonauthorship resists such hegemony. As a discourse with Robinson Crusoe, I also evaluate how this resistance is a response to Friday’s characterization in Defoe’s master narrative.
International Fiction Review, 1997
In The Aunt's Story (1948), Patrick White depicts the fervent desire of modern man to find his identity, and thus achieve a state of wholeness which eventually leads to inner serenity. To White wholeness is finding one's identity, that is, understanding the inherent duality of the animus/anima in the human psyche. 1 Once this is realized, man's innate imagination is inspired, and original creation ensues. The novel depicts the conflicts that arise, the confusion that is bred, and the desire to attain the state of wholeness through a painful but unique experience. The Aunt's Story depicts Theodora Goodman, a fifty-year-old, single woman who decides to take a trip around the world after her mother dies. In the first part of the novel, White describes Theodora as a clever girl who always asks tough questions, and who experiences deep moments of insight. On her twelfth birthday, when she is struck by lightning, the Man who was Given his Dinner predicts that she will know truths no one else does. Theodora is seen in relation to her sister Fanny, her brother-in-law Frank, Violet Adams, the painter, Pearl, Gertie, and Tom. The most significant incident in her life is her meeting with Moraitis, the cellist, who tells her that man can be happy only if he acquires a vision in life. In the second and third parts of the novel, Theodora travels first to Europe and then America. In France, at the Hotel du Midi, she meets the Block sisters, Aloysha and Ludmilla Sokolnikov, Mrs. Rapallo, and the artists Whetherby and Leisolette. The interaction with each one helps Theodora develop and acquire knowledge of human nature. In America she withdraws from the world, lives in a shack, and attempts to form her vision, but Holstius appears to tell her that her life has been a failure because she has tried insistently to reconcile the irreconcilable. The novel concludes as Theodora is quietly taken to a mental hospital.
European journal of American studies, 2015
As a formal device, the first-person plural narrator is both enigmatic and technically demanding; and historically it has been rare in US fiction. After all, who is "we" in the United States? Yet an increasing number of American novelists and short story writers have turned to this narrative technique over the past 20 years and particularly since 9/11 (Costello, "Plural"), revealing the continued political significance of this voice. How might one account for such a rise in collective narration, a trend that surprisingly few commentators have identified, questioned or examined at any length? What are the implications of telling a story in this difficult, even risky way? And in light of the formal challenges it poses to reader as well as writer, why have contemporary works of fiction that are told collectively often been critically and commercially successful? 2 In this essay, I will attempt to answer such questions, examining the uses to which recent US writers have put the collective narrator in short stories and longer fiction.I will also explore the multiple tensions embodied by this dynamic narrative device, which often becomes thematically crucial, as it exposes the clash between public and private, the individual and the communal, freedom and conformity. The first-person plural narrator represents a paradoxical, mysterious and unsettling voice which is inclusive and exclusive, everyone and no-one, all-seeing yet strictly limited (cf. Costello, "Plural"). It can suggest any kind of collectivity: gendered, generational, racialized, religious, ideological, social, national. Thus, the choice of a particular personal pronoun is inherently political (cf. Morris 11-18; Woller 340-66; Richardson 43; and Costello, "Lyric"195, 199). Linguistically, the first-person plural pronoun can involve and implicate the reader as addressee and it can be interpreted on a microcosmic or macrocosmic, specific or metonymic scale (see Marcus 6-7; and Margolin 119). "We" is, like the pronoun "you," flexible and ambiguous (Freedman 2-3, 13-15; Payne 125).
Abstract Ross Dabney, J. Butt & K. Tillotson, and others think that Dickens revised the role of Edith in the original plan of Dombey and Son upon the advice of a friend. I tend to believe that Dickens's swerve from his course was prompted by two motives, his relish for grand scenes, and his endeavour to engage the reader's sympathies for a character who was a victim of a social practice which he was trying to condemn. Dickens's humanitarian attitude sought to redeem the sinner and condemn the sin. In engaging the reader's sympathies, Dickens had entrapped his own. Both Edith and Alice are shown as victims of rapacious mothers who sell anything, or anybody for money. While Good Mrs Brown sells Alice's virtue and innocence for cash, Mrs Skewton trades on Edith's beauty in the marriage market to secure fortune and a good establishment. Edith and Alice's maturity and moral growth and their scorn and anger at their mothers' false teaching come in line with public prudery. Moreover, their educators in the principles of Mammonism have not succeeded altogether in stifling their innate feminine tenderness and capacity for affection, the thing that draws them near their reader's heart and wins them love and sympathy. Keywords: Money, transaction, victims, saleable, Mormonism, greedy, rapacious
Dedan Kimathi on Trial, 2017
See book chapter entry. This is an excerpt from my chapter 'Memorialization and Mau Mau: A Critical Review'', in Julie MacArthur (ed), Dedan Kimathi on Trial. Colonial Justice and Popular Memory in Kenya's Mau Mau Rebellion (2017),
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