scholarly journals Exposure and Black Migrancy in Teju Cole

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-79
Author(s):  
Nicholas Gamso

AbstractThrough a reading of Teju Cole’s novel Open City (2011), this article argues that the exposure of black migrants constitutes the principal organizing conceit of global literary culture and knowledge production. The novel’s protagonist, a Nigerian emigre named Julius, is faced with ceaseless scrutiny as he traverses urban spaces in the US, Europe, and West Africa, meeting other migrants. In staging Julius’ encounters with others, the novel allegorizes a structure of racialized subjection continuous with the modern history of western epistemology and glaringly present in the contemporary. Yet it also provides grounds for a recursive ethic of opacity, which Julius eagerly endorses. The article surveys critical studies of race, migration, infrastructure, and world literature, in addition to Cole’s writings on photography. The aim is not only to uncover the logics of racialization at play in the enactment of culture, but also to conceive of culture itself as a historical infrastructure of privation and control.

2019 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 299-315
Author(s):  
Angelika Zirker

Mark Twain’s novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, first published in England in 1884 and a year later in the US, is paradoxical in that it is one of most frequently censored books of world literature – and, concurrently, one of the most frequently read and praised. The following article will try to explain this paradox and, in a first step, address the history of the novel’s censorship and the (various) reasons given for it. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has undergone censorship since its first publication, and even today it is included in the list of »Banned and Challenged Books« of ALA (American Library Association). What are, in fact, reasons for banning the book? And how are these reasons questioned by defenders of the book? Which strategies are used? Since the novel’s publication, those who have completely dismissed the book and those who have appreciated it as a »masterpiece« have opposed each other. An overview of these controversies will result in a close reading of one of the most debated chapters in the novel, with a focus on the autodiegetic narrator Huck, who has been characterized as a naïve child that simply does not know any better, as a »fallible narrator«, or as a liar. But it remains doubtful whether the narrator’s weakness is the answer to the question of Huck’s alleged racism. The paper will offer alternative roads into the novel that consider both the text and the context of its origin.


Author(s):  
Rebecca C. Johnson

Zaynab, first published in 1913, is widely cited as the first Arabic novel, yet the previous eight decades saw hundreds of novels translated into Arabic from English and French. This vast literary corpus influenced generations of Arab writers but has, until now, been considered a curious footnote in the genre's history. Incorporating these works into the history of the Arabic novel, this book offers a transformative new account of modern Arabic literature, world literature, and the novel. This book rewrites the history of the global circulation of the novel by moving Arabic literature from the margins of comparative literature to its center. Considering the wide range of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century translation practices, the book argues that Arabic translators did far more than copy European works; they authored new versions of them, producing sophisticated theorizations of the genre. These translations and the reading practices they precipitated form the conceptual and practical foundations of Arab literary modernity, necessitating an overhaul of our notions of translation, cultural exchange, and the global. The book shows how translators theorized the Arab world not as Europe's periphery but as an alternative center in a globalized network. It affirms the central place of (mis)translation in both the history of the novel in Arabic and the novel as a transnational form itself.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 152-165
Author(s):  
Tega Brain

This paper considers some of the limitations and possibilities of computational models in the context of environmental inquiry, specifically exploring the modes of knowledge production that it mobilizes. Historic computational attempts to model, simulate and make predictions about environmental assemblages, both emerge from and reinforce a systems view on the world. The word eco-system itself stands as a reminder that the history of ecology is enmeshed with systems theory and presup-poses that species entanglements are operational or functional. More surreptitiously, a systematic view of the environment connotes it as bounded, knowable and made up of components operating in chains of cause and effect. This framing strongly invokes possibilities of manipulation and control and implicitly asks: what should an ecosystem be optimized for? This question is particularly relevant at a time of rapid climate change, mass extinction and, conveniently, an unprecedented surplus of computing.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-58
Author(s):  
Elena D. Andonova-Kalapsazova

The article undertakes the analysis of Ann Radcliffe’s novel The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797) from a history of literary emotions perspective which, I argue, yields insights into the attitudes towards emotions embedded in Radcliffe’s works. A reading of the novel from such a perspective also complements the critical studies of the artist’s engaging with the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility. The novel is read as a text that registered but also participated in the dissemination of an epistemology of emotional experience articulated in the idiom of eighteenth-century moral philosophers – Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith - at the same time as it retained some of the older, theology-based conceptions of passions and affections. The dynamic in which the two frameworks for understanding the emotions exist in the novel is explored through a close reading of the vocabulary in which Radcliffe rendered the emotional experiences of her fictional characters. In this reading it is the passions which are found to have been invested with a variety of meanings and attributed a range of moral valences that most noticeably foreground the movement from a generally negative towards a more complex appreciation of powerful emotions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 1749-1755
Author(s):  
Asst. Prof. Raad Kareem Abd-Aun Asst. Lec. Ameer Abd Hadi

During the peak of the sectarian war in Iraq after the US invasion in 2003, there seemed to be an absolute absence of the mind and a great deal of hatred and tension among the people of Baghdad that turned into maddening acts of terrorism, like car bombings and suicide bombers, killing thousands of innocent people. Frankenstein in Baghdad came to be the mouthpiece of that very critical phase in the modern history of Iraq. The abundant acts of killing and bloodshed during 2005 turned into an ugly form of a monster called " Whatsitsname" formed from the fragmented parts of those killed by terrorist acts. The creature bears a clear resemblance to Marry Shelley's monster in her novel Frankenstein. The monster is a loose perpetrator that kills whoever it meets. This study attempts to analyze the writer's poetics of adaptation in the novel and his debt to other literary works.


2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 170
Author(s):  
Netanias Mateus De Souza Castro

Resumo: A história do romance viu, diante de si, formas diversas de narrar, conforme aponta os escritos de Theodor W. Adorno, por exemplo. Desde narradores impessoais, mantendo a distância segura que lhe confere a narrativa em terceira pessoa até os casos em que o que se narra é algo diretamente relacionado ao próprio narrador. Esse parece ser o caso do romance de Marçal Aquino, Eu receberia as piores notícias de seus lindos lábios, que conta o envolvimento amoroso de Cauby e Lavínia a partir do olhar do próprio Cauby. Esse narra de um modo cuja relação de si mesmo com a narrativa fica explícita, tamanha é sua passionalidade em relação às suas vivências e ao ato de narrar. Isso se manifesta tanto na linguagem, em termos de escolhas narrativas, quanto nas ações do narrador-personagem-protagonista que narra e vive aquilo que narra. Suas características mais notáveis são a passionalidade, a capacidade de registrar fotograficamente detalhes da narrativa e o rompimento com técnicas narrativas tradicionais.Palavras-chave: narrador; primeira pessoa; romance brasileiro contemporâneo; Eu receberia as piores notícias de seus lindos lábios.Abstract: The history of the novel saw, before it, different ways of narrating, as pointed out by the writings of Theodor W. Adorno, for example. From impersonal narrators, maintaining the safe distance that the third person narrative gives him until the cases in which what is narrated is something directly related to the narrator himself. This seems to be the case with Marçal Aquino’s novel I would receive the worst news from his beautiful lips, which tells of Cauby and Lavínia’s loving involvement from the point of view of Cauby himself. He narrates in a way whose relationship with himself and the narrative is explicit, such is his passion for his experiences and the act of narrating. This manifests itself both in language, in terms of narrative choices, and in the actions of the narrator-character-protagonist who narrates and experiences what he narrates. Its most notable characteristics are passionality, the ability to photographically record details of the narrative and break with traditional narrative techniques.Keywords: narrator; first person; contemporary Brazilian romance; Eu receberia as piores notícias de seus lindos lábios.


2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (6) ◽  
pp. 1749-1753
Author(s):  
Lirije Ameti

This theme, The Portrait of the American Woman in Margaret Mitchell's Novel " Gone With The Wind " is broad, challenging, interesting and among many contradictory to one another's point of view, at different social grounds , periods of time simply or merely of the fact that a female writer of this tremendous saga read mostly by women represents multi dimensional themes. It is an interweave of tradition, history , war, social classes, Reconstruction, transition and more. All these and many other themes written with a masterful disciplined imagination put in the longest novel in history. A masterpiece of 1037 pages published in 1939 and subsequently in the greatest and longest motion picture on screen. Piling up records and building it's own history and legends. The novel has sold in more than 25 million copies in at least 27 languages in thirty countries and in more than 185 editions according to the research conducted in 2004. These figures continue to increase, not to mention that the film is seen by more individuals than the total population of the USA. GWTW has grown and conflated into a phenomenon of American and later into a phenomenon of levels of basic appreciation after international popular culture. Thus criticism was attested at the levels of basic appreciation , often in the opposite poles of love and /or hate , the evaluation again in bipolar terms of praise and / or scorn. On the popular level the book was lauded and in the literary world it was defamed. Mitchell's novel " Gone With The Wind " was seen as important symbols of American culture forces. A serious biography in 1965 sparked reconsiderations simply by the assumption of Mitchell's importance as a writer. Other re- evaluations followed which asserted the literary quality of the work, notably in feminist terms. Attesting the qualities that critics wrote such as Michener who said: " The spiritual history of a region". Many other scholarly papers have been undertaken to attack it and completed to praise it. Because of the enormous popularity , readability , embodiment of the heroine woman character Scarlett O'Hara with many other women who saw themselves in those situations or experienced the same then or even nowadays. These multi themes to discuss about, issues primarily of women, the novel is defined as a woman's literary artistic achievement, seen through the eyes off a woman Scarlett herself and many other women characters. Is seen the distinction of the past and present of the old and new society. Mitchell herself says it is about courage and gumption to change as a necessity in order to survive war, reconstruction and transition. The search of survival by poor and nearly defeated young women who had no control or capacity to understand these tensions. Indeed this novel has become an icon of the US culture.


Author(s):  
Brian Cowan

The two most influential works for the study of eighteenth-century literary culture in the last half-century must surely be Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957) and Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). This essay discusses the influence of both Watt and Habermas on studies of the novel and the public sphere, and it explores the reasons for the endurance of their arguments despite decades of substantial criticism devoted to their interpretative shortcomings. It also explains the emergence of a post-Habermasian approach to the history of public-making in response to these criticisms. It concludes by discussing how recent post-Habermasian studies of news culture and political partisanship may illuminate the history of the origins of the English novel.


The economic hypotheses and policy stances of each of the various economic schools of thought carry over to theories of financial regulation. The empirical cases observed in the US, UK and Australia show the unravelling of financial stability by the see-saw between command-and-control and voluntary forms of self-regulation. This chapter traces the pertinent events with a focus on the regulatory changes during and after the 1980s.


Meliora ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Esther Goldberg

This thesis attends to the slippages between life and nonlife in Emily Fridlunds 2017 novel History of Wolves. It traces the matter that is granted life or animacy, as well as the matter that is devitalized. Through the protagonist, Linda, the novel investigates the role of both scientific knowledge production and Christian Science in placing arbitrary biological limits on life forms, making some visible and others unseeable and unsayable. The thesis fleshes out the characters’ climate denial as yet another erasure of the animate agents. Ultimately, the thesis asks: if we can expand what is worthy of life, can we, in turn, expand what agents, actors, and matters are deserving of care?  


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document