Caribbean Literature and Literary Studies: Past, Present and Future

Author(s):  
Alison Donnell
2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-34
Author(s):  
Simona Bertacco

This essay weaves together translation and postcolonial literary studies to propose a translational model of reading for Caribbean literature. Translation and creolization provide the conceptual and aesthetic lens for reading Caribbean literary texts: If translation is an apt model, since it captures languages in transit toward other languages and other contexts, creolization embodies the points of contact among what Naoki Sakai calls the “uncountable languages within the literary texts,” unlocking novel ideas of language and literature. The essay offers “translational reading” of texts by Derek Walcott, Velma Pollard, and Dionne Brand as an alternative to the traditionally monolingual model of reading.


Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 126
Author(s):  
Jay Rajiva

I argue that both Rita Felski’s postcritical model (as articulated in The Limits of Critique) and its academic reception are made possible only by ignoring or erasing African-American and Afro-Caribbean modes of engagement with art that predate and complicate the critical-postcritical binary. To counteract the vanguardism of this trend in literary studies, I pair Caribbean philosopher-poet Edouard Glissant’s meditation on the origins of Creole speech as an indirect language of “detour” with Nathaniel Mackey’s theorizing of black art as “paracritical”—a mode that assimilates performance and critique, language and metalanguage, and that sits adjacent to (and not against or behind) traditionally academic discourses of engaging with literature. If Glissant provides the cultural and philosophical frame for an Afro-Caribbean way of reading literature, Mackey supplies the artistic metaphor par excellence of the paracritical hinge, voiced in the idioms of jazz and blues. Finally, I examine how Glissant and Mackey’s ideas find formal and aesthetic expression in Trinidadian-Canadian author Dionne Brand’s 2005 novel What We All Long For, paying attention to the reader response engendered by the adjacencies of violence, empowerment, possibility, and desire in the novel. In order to analyze What We All Long For, we must promote the liveliness and vivacity of the reading experience and put the text under ethical scrutiny, evincing the paracritical faculty that Afro-Caribbean art demands: commingling the twin pleasures of reading and interpretation, establishing a counter-hegemonic model of literary engagement that implicates the reader without stripping away reading’s pleasure.


Author(s):  
Hanjo Berressem

Providing a comprehensive reading of Deleuzian philosophy, Gilles Deleuze’s Luminous Philosophy argues that this philosophy’s most consistent conceptual spine and figure of thought is its inherent luminism. When Deleuze notes in Cinema 1 that ‘the plane of immanence is entirely made up of light’, he ties this philosophical luminism directly to the notion of the complementarity of the photon in its aspects of both particle and wave. Engaging, in chronological order, the whole body and range of Deleuze’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s writing, the book traces the ‘line of light’ that runs through Deleuze’s work, and it considers the implications of Deleuze’s luminism for the fields of literary studies, historical studies, the visual arts and cinema studies. It contours Deleuze’s luminism both against recent studies that promote a ‘dark Deleuze’ and against the prevalent view that Deleuzian philosophy is a philosophy of difference. Instead, it argues, it is a philosophy of the complementarity of difference and diversity, considered as two reciprocally determining fields that are, in Deleuze’s view, formally distinct but ontologically one. The book, which is the companion volume toFélix Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Ecology, argues that the ‘real projective plane’ is the ‘surface of thought’ of Deleuze’s philosophical luminism.


2017 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-63
Author(s):  
Benjamin Pickford

Benjamin Pickford, “Context Mediated: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Political Economy of Plagiarism” (pp. 35–63) Context has long been a critical determiner of methodologies for literary studies, granting scholars the tools to make objective claims about a text’s political or economic relation to the situation of its genesis. This essay argues that Ralph Waldo Emerson anticipatively criticizes our commitment to such practices through his use of plagiarism—a literary mode that exemplifies the denial of the sovereignty of context. I focus on two core principles that underlie Emerson’s conception of literature’s civic role in Essays: Second Series (1844): first, that literature is driven by an impulse to decontextualize; second, that this means that it has a deep affinity with the deterritorializing logic of capital. Provocatively proposing Emerson as a theorist of the relation between literature and economics, I argue that Essays: Second Series shows how the literary text can negotiate its ineluctable culpability with capitalism, but this does not mean that it can presume to possess a privileged point of vantage that might deny such culpability. Given that this is precisely what much historicizing or contextualizing scholarship implies, I contend that Emerson gives us a case study in the limits of literature and criticism’s economic agency.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 426-437
Author(s):  
Nikolay N. Nosov

The article is devoted to L.I. Strakhovsky (alias Leonid Chatsky; 1898—1963), a Russian writer and poet of the first wave of emigration, and his poetry and prose reflected in foreign publications of his works in Russian. Returning to our culture the name of this author, now half-forgotten in his homeland, and introducing this name into literary studies, the article tries to reveal the thematic and stylistic diversity of L.I. Strakhovsky’s poetry and prose. The research’s object is foreign publications of L.I. Strakhovsky’s artistic works in separate books, almanacs and periodicals published in Belgium, Germany, Canada and identified through collection catalogues of leading Russian libraries (the Russian State library, the Alexander Solzhenitsyn House of Russia Abroad) and library resources that display foreign Russian-language publications by L.I. Strakhovsky. The article highlights and analyzes the main stylistic (symbolism, acmeism, “junior acmeism”) and thematic (autobiographical, English, mystical) components of L.I. Strakhovsky’s works, reveals the components’ individual features, the originality of their constancy and mutual influence. The main of these features is that L.I. Strakhovsky’s works can be stylistically periodized on the basis of the author’s increased propensity to cyclize his works though without creative evolution in the usual sense and with the stable nature of his working throughout his life. To review the publications and analyze the nature of L.I. Strakhovsky’s works, the article draws on the context of Russian and emigrant literature of his era, creatively associated with L.I. Strakhovsky and its main figures, and notes his literary and cultural influence.


Author(s):  
Ioana Bot

The present study reviews D. Popovici’s founding attempts in the field of literary history. It pursues his activity along four axes: critical editions of modern Romanian authors, studies in literary history, university lectures and “Studii literare” [Literary Studies], the scientific journal he founded as a professor of Cluj University. Both original and modern in his theoretic, methodologic as well as academic options, Popovici is a founder of institutions and initiator of a research school. His scientific projects are singular in their scope. Yet his critic posterity destines him to an unwarranted “singularity”. Our reflection focuses upon the exemplary elements in the scholar’s destiny.


Author(s):  
Fabiana Rezer ◽  
Hélio Penna Guimarães ◽  
Grazia Maria Guerra

Objective: to describe scientific evidence on the implementation and control of the device for measuring invasive blood pressure (IBP). Methods: integrative review of the literature, based on Latin American and Caribbean Literature in Health Sciences (LILACS), Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), PubMed, through the Descriptors in Health Sciences (DeCS) and the Medical Subject Headings (MesH): hemodynamic; monitoring; blood pressure; invasive. Articles were selected in English, Portuguese and Spanish, published between 2009 and 2018. The search resulted in a sample of 10 articles. Results: The articles were analyzed and presented in 4 thematic groups according to the information they provided regarding the puncture of the IBP catheter, being: 1- Indications for IBP catheter puncture; 2 -Contraindications and complications resulting from the use of the IBP catheter; 3 -Most indicated puncture sites; 4- Implementation and maintenance of IBP catheter. Conclusion: Further research may contribute to patient care with an IAP device, as well as assisting physicians and nurses in patient care, reducing the risks and potential adverse events of the IAP.


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