How Mariama Bâ Became World Literature: Translation and the Legibility of Feminist Critique

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (5) ◽  
pp. 1239-1255
Author(s):  
Tobias Warner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Feminist Critique ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Mariama Ba ◽  
English Edition ◽  
The Way

How did Mariama Bâ‘s 1979 novel Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter) become one of the most widely read, taught, and translated African texts of the twentieth century? This essay traces how the Senegalese author's work became recognizable to a global audience as an attack on polygamy and a celebration of literary culture. I explore the flaws in these two conceptions of the novel, and I recover aspects of the text that were obscured along the way—especially the novel's critique of efforts to reform the legal framework of marriage in Senegal. I also compare striking shifts that occur in two key translations: the English edition that helped catalyze Bâ‘s success and a more recent translation into Wolof, the most widely spoken language in Senegal. By reading Letter back through these translations, I reposition it as a text that highlights its distance from an audience and transforms this distance into an animating contradiction.

How Mariama Bâ Became World Literature: Translation and the Legibility of Feminist Critique

2019 ◽  
pp. 181-202
Author(s):  
Tobias Warner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
The Self ◽  
Feminist Critique ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Mariama Ba ◽  
Postcolonial Literatures ◽  
Work First ◽  
So Long A Letter

How did Mariama Bâ’s 1979 novel Une si longue lettre[So Long a Letter] become one of the most widely read, taught, and translated African texts of the twentieth century? This chapter examines how prize committees, translators, editors, and critics all shaped how the Senegalese author’s work became recognizable to a global audience. Bâ’s success came to be bound up with two interpretations of her work: first, that her novel was a broadside against the institution of polygamy in Senegal; and, second, that it was a celebration of the self-fashioning powers of literary culture. This chapter rejects both these accounts, arguing instead that these ways of framing the novel reveal the terms through which postcolonial literatures become legible as world literature. The conversion of Lettreinto world literature is contrasted with its vernacular appropriation by the contemporary Wolof novelist Maam Yunus Dieng, who translates and rewrites this iconic text.

scholarly journals Disfluencies signal reference to novel objects for adults but not children

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-609 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah J. OWENS ◽  
Justine M. THACKER ◽  
Susan A. GRAHAM
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Novel Object ◽  
Filled Pauses ◽  
Novel Objects ◽  
Novel Targets ◽  
The Way ◽  
Familiar Objects

AbstractSpeech disfluencies can guide the ways in which listeners interpret spoken language. Here, we examined whether three-year-olds, five-year-olds, and adults use filled pauses to anticipate that a speaker is likely to refer to a novel object. Across three experiments, participants were presented with pairs of novel and familiar objects and heard a speaker refer to one of the objects using a fluent (“Look at the ball/lep!”) or disfluent (“Look at thee uh ball/lep!”) expression. The salience of the speaker's unfamiliarity with the novel referents, and the way in which the speaker referred to the novel referents (i.e., a noun vs. a description) varied across experiments. Three- and five-year-olds successfully identified familiar and novel targets, but only adults’ looking patterns reflected increased looks to novel objects in the presence of a disfluency. Together, these findings demonstrate that adults, but not young children, use filled pauses to anticipate reference to novel objects.

scholarly journals Allusion As The Way Of Rendering Elements Of Ancient Greek Mythology In The Tissue Of Modern Literature

2021 ◽  
Vol 03 (01) ◽  
pp. 505-514
Author(s):  
Mirzaeva Aziza Shavkatovna ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Great Influence ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Greek Mythology ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
American Writer ◽  
The Way

World literature of XX century has experienced the great influence of postmodermism, which resulted in diversity of styles and refusal of well-known structures and forms. One of the most widely used stylistic devices, characterizing the features of postmodernism, is intertextuality. Appearing only in recent years, intertext become widespread with its own forms, such as allusion, quote and reminiscence. And the novel “Percy Jackson” b y American writer Rick Riordan seems to be an example of the use of intertext-allusion within the work. 12-year-old boy, Percy Jackson, becomes the part of adventeruos, danderous and exciting world of Ancient Greek Gods, legends, myths and heroes. This work tries to study and analyse the importance of allusion to understand the idea of the writer and interpret the used allusions in the first book of Riordan “Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief”.

scholarly journals Exposure and Black Migrancy in Teju Cole

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-79
Author(s):  
Nicholas Gamso
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Control

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.

scholarly journals Secondary Art and the Two-Story House: Kuwabara Takeo and the Comparative Imagination in Mid-Century Japan, 1935–1947

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Adam Bronson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Comparison ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
Cross Cultural Comparison ◽  
The Way

This article focuses on the life and ideas of Kuwabara Takeo, a cultural critic and scholar of French literature who became renowned for his 1946 critique of haiku as a “secondary art” in comparison with the novel. By reconstructing Kuwabara's intellectual trajectory from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, I show how this famous essay was in part an effort to respond to Karl Löwith's famous critique of Japanese intellectuals. Löwith argued that Japanese intellectuals were insufficiently critical towards their own culture, due to the way that they compartmentalized practices and ideas associated with either Japanese culture or Western civilization. Kuwabara resisted such tendencies through the practice of cross-cultural comparison. His work gained encouragement from and responded to Löwith's critique in a way that illuminates the role that comparisons played in the intellectual culture of mid-twentieth-century Japan.

‘She had never been a woman’: Second Wave Feminism, Femininity and Transgender in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977)

2018 ◽  
pp. 64-86
Author(s):  
Rachel Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Sex Reassignment Surgery ◽  
Feminist Critique ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Second Wave ◽  
Male To Female ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter focuses on a novel by a writer whose reputation as one of the most innovative and influential authors of the late twentieth century is firmly established. The centrality of Angela Carter’s work to feminist literary culture is widely recognised and celebrated, as is her passionately combative engagement with the feminist orthodoxies of her time. Through a focus on the contrasting depictions of an involuntary transsexual, the eponymous Eve (who is subject to sex reassignment surgery without her consent), and an elective transgender person, Tristessa (who is refused medical treatment despite living as woman), this chapter aims to address the critical legacies of specific strands of Second Wave feminist critique. It does so by situating the novel within the context of debates and controversies about the place of male-to-female transsexuals in the women’s movement contemporary to the era of its writing and reception.

Intersecting Imperialisms

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-457
Author(s):  
Ben Holgate
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
Narrow Road ◽  
National Literatures

Abstract Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013), which features the Thai-Burma “Death Railway” in World War Two, depicts a complex web of imperial regimes that converge and clash in the mid-twentieth century. The protagonist is an Australian soldier effectively fighting for his country’s former colonizer, Britain, which is losing its empire to Japan. I build on Laura Doyle’s concept of “inter-imperiality” to explore how the novel illuminates the historical process of imperial factors intersecting at multiple levels, from the geopolitical and economic to the personal and cultural. The novel demonstrates how inter-imperial identities challenge simple binary models of imperialism, and how so-called national literatures are produced in a world context. This is evident in Flanagan’s intertextual homage to classical Japanese author Matsuo Bashō. The novel also highlights how world literature discourse ought to take into account temporal and ethicopolitical factors (Pheng Cheah), suggesting an overlap with postcolonial studies.

Stotra as Tradition

2019 ◽  
pp. 265-286
Author(s):  
Hamsa Stainton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Devotional Poetry ◽  
Kashmir Śaivism ◽  
The Way

Part of the enduring appeal of the stotra form has been the way that it has enabled specific communities to creatively negotiate Kashmir’s literary and religious pasts. This chapter analyzes stotras in the seventeenth and twentieth centuries to explore how hymns have functioned as part of tradition as a process. In the seventeenth century, Sāhib Kaul’s devotional poetry provides evidence for how one community of immigrants to Kashmir integrated themselves into a complex religious and literary culture while using its Maithila Śākta heritage as a resource for innovation. In the twentieth century, Swami Lakshman Joo promoted the study and practice of stotras in influential ways. Lastly, the chapter argues that stotras have been pivotal to the configuration of “Kashmir Śaivism” as a distinct regional tradition.

The Novel after Film

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Foltz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Public Culture ◽  
Visual Language ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Aldous Huxley ◽  
Moral Purpose ◽  
Modern Novel ◽  
The Way

The Novel After Film examines how literary fiction has been redefined in response to the emergence of narrative film. It charts the institutional, stylistic, and conceptual relays that linked literary and cinematic cultures, and that fundamentally changed the nature and status of storytelling in the early twentieth century. In the cinema, a generation of modernist writers found a medium whose bad form was also laced with the glamour of the popular, and whose unfamiliar visual language seemed to harbor a future for innovative writing after modernism. As The Novel After Film demonstrates, this fascination with film was played out against the backdrop of a growing discourse about the novel’s respectability. As the modern novel was increasingly venerated as a genre of aesthetic refinement and high moral purpose, a range of authors, from Virginia Woolf and H. D. to Henry Green and Aldous Huxley, turned their attention to the cinema in search of alternative aesthetic histories. For authors working in modernism’s atmosphere of heightened formal sophistication, film’s violations of style took on a perverse attraction. In this way, film played a key role in changing the way that novelists addressed a transforming public culture which could seem at moments to be leaving the novel behind.

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