The “Pursuit of Knowledge” and the Paradoxes of Postcolonial Encyclopedism in Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know

Genre ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-103
Author(s):  
Benjamin Bergholtz
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Incompleteness Theorem ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Encyclopedic Narrative

The author argues that Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know (2014) is an encyclopedic narrative that encourages and interrogates the pursuit of knowledge. Rahman achieves this feat by creating a deceptive dialogue revolving around knowledge and narrative. While his characters’ analysis of everything from America’s intervention in Afghanistan to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem illustrates the ways in which the light of history, metaphor, and narrative (mis) shape the pursuit of knowledge, our own knowledge is limited by the history and metaphors of our twin narrators. The conflict between the search for knowledge and the inadequacies of narrative would appear to doom the encyclopedism of Rahman’s characters and readers alike, but the novel complicates this conclusion. Rather than refuting or embracing the pursuit of knowledge, In the Light fosters a uniquely postcolonial approach to encyclopedism that is simultaneously curious and cautious, polymathic and prudent, wide-reaching and reflective. This “postcolonial encyclopedism,” as he calls it, helps us recognize that encyclopedic narrative, a genre long associated with the giants of European and American literature, may be a potentially empowering, if ambivalent, mode of inquiry for postcolonial and global authors in the twenty-first century.

scholarly journals “Ae Thoosand Tongues”: Language and Identity in Psychoraag

2011 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Ashley
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Language And Identity ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Language And Music ◽  
Twenty First Century

Suhayl Saadi’s 2004 novel, Psychoraag, asks important questions about language, nation, and identity in twenty-first century Scotland.This article analyzes the ways in which language and music shape identity in the novel; explores the tensions that exist between the novel’s competing languages; studies the narrator’s personae; and examines his search for psychic, emotional, and linguistic wholeness. It argues that Psychoraag is an effective commentary on the inherent limitations of exclusionary conceptions of Scottishness, for the novel demonstrates that it is only by transcending traditional notions of Scottishness and embracing linguistic disorder that contemporary Scottish identity can be fully articulated.

scholarly journals Interpretations of Emanuel Swedenborg’s image of the afterlife in the novel Oneiron by Laura Lindstedt

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiina Mahlamäki ◽  
Tomas Mansikka
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Postmodern Novel ◽  
Western Esotericism ◽  
The Relationship

This article discusses the relationship between Western esotericism and literature. As an example of a secular author who uses and benefits from esoteric texts, ideas and thoughts as resources in creating a literary artwork, the article analyses Laura Lindstedt’s novel Oneiron. A Fantasy About the Seconds After Death (2015). It contextualises the novel within the frames of Western esotericism and literature, focusing on Emanuel Swedenborg’s impact on discourses of the afterlife in literature. Laura Lindstedt’s postmodern novel indicates various ways that esoteric ideas, themes, and texts can work as resources for authors of fiction in twenty-first century Finland. Since the late eighteenth century Swedenborg’s influence has been evident in literature and among artists, especially in providing resources for other-worldly imagery. Oneiron proves that the ideas of Swedenborg are still part of the memory of Western culture and literature.

Loving Shakespeare

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-78
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Rivlin
Keyword(s):  
Gender Politics ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Positive Feelings ◽  
The Relationship

This article focuses on Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl (2016), a retelling of The Taming of the Shrew published in the Hogarth Shakespeare Project, to explore how the novel and the series seek to create affective ‘middlebrow’ communities that purport to keep Shakespeare alive through love. Counter-intuitively, Tyler chose to adapt a play whose gender politics are unlovable to many twenty-first-century American readers, including the author. But although Tyler has said that she ‘hates’ Shakespeare, her solution is surprisingly to inspire mild, positive feelings in her readers. In mediating Shakespeare in this way, Tyler effectively strengthens bonds of empathy and affection between herself and her readers. Extending its claim, the article argues that the Hogarth Shakespeare Project is a ‘middlebrow’ publishing enterprise, in the sense that it uses Shakespeare to cultivate communities built on the relationship between the adapting author and her readers.

The graveyard and the garden: Reading connectivities in Rana Dasgupta’s “The Changeling”

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 190-206
Author(s):  
Helle Schulz Bildsøe ◽  
Ulla Rahbek
Keyword(s):  
Global City ◽  
First Century ◽  
Community Garden ◽  
The Novel ◽  
National Capital ◽  
Story Cycle ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Systemic Network ◽  
Organic Networks

In the novel Tokyo Cancelled (2005), Rana Dasgupta explores the contemporary age of globalization as a time of chaotic change. Tokyo Cancelled is composed as a story cycle of 13 tales. This article focuses on one of these tales in particular, “The Changeling”. “The Changeling” relates the tumultuous experiences of Bernard, who is a changeling and archetypal stranger in the pestilence-ridden city of contemporary Paris. The article explores the juxtaposition of systemic and organic networks as the central trope through which Dasgupta explores change and connectivities in a global twenty-first-century moment. We argue that the story presents a process of symbolic transformation whereby the national capital changes into a global city. This change signifies a shift from a national towards a planetary perspective. “The Changeling” comprises at least two different kinds of networks which converge and conflate into one overarching web that is the metropolis: there is a systemic network of control materialized in Montparnasse graveyard and an organic network out of control manifested in a community garden where people congregate to tell stories. Indeed, Dasgupta revisits Benjaminian storytelling as a global networking practice which, while locally contextualized in an impromptu garden in Paris, hints at an awareness of worldwide connectivity.

Precariousness, kinship, and care: Becoming human in Claire Cameron’s The Last Neanderthal

2020 ◽  
pp. 002198942096798
Author(s):  
Rūta Šlapkauskaitė
Keyword(s):  
Female Subject ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Origins ◽  
Shared Experience ◽  
Donna Haraway ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Twenty First Century

This article employs Christine L. Marran’s notion of “obligate storytelling” to examine the poetic structures of vulnerability in Canadian author Claire Cameron’s novel The Last Neanderthal (2017). The theoretical backbone of ideas on the materiality of being suggested by Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Erinn C. Gilson, and Matt Edgeworth, among others, solicits a reading which foregrounds the moral upshot of conceiving the body as an affective centre of life and an arc of anthropogenesis. By following this trajectory, I attempt to show how in troping the archeological dig as a biosemiotic archive, Cameron exposes the structural homologies between the lives of her two female protagonists, a twenty-first-century scientist and a Neanderthal, whose bones she has unearthed. The novel’s use of narrative bifocality offers a visceral construction of subjectivity, which takes its bearings from the shared experience of corporeal vulnerability. By thus imaginatively unspooling the affective links between the neoliberal female subject and her Neanderthal cousin, the novel calls upon us both to rescale our conceptions of creaturely life and rethink our narratives of human origins.

The novel of the Greek civil war in the twenty-first century: (post)memory and the weight of the past

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-318
Author(s):  
Vassiliki Kaisidou
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ethical Commitment ◽  
Literary Market ◽  
Twenty First Century

Between the years 2000 and 2015 novels on the Greek civil war (1946–9) flooded the Greek literary market. This raises important questions as to why the burden of the civil conflict weighs heavily upon generations with no experiential connection to these events. This article begins by offering an interpretation for the literary upsurge of the civil war since the 2000s. Then it uses Marianne Hirsch's concept of postmemory to illustrate the authors’ ethical commitment to ‘unsilence’ and redress the past through the use of archival evidence and testimonies. The case studies of ThomasSkassis’Ελληνικόσταυρόλɛξο (2000), Nikos Davvetas’ Λɛυκή πɛτσέτα στορινγκ (2006),and SophiaNikolaidou's Χορɛύουνοιɛλέφαντɛς(2012) serve to illustrate my argument.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document