Literary Production in The Hispanic Caribbean

Callaloo ◽  
1988 ◽  
pp. 132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julio Rodriguez-Luis
Author(s):  
Jonathan Evans

The Many Voices of Lydia Davis shows how translation, rewriting and intertextuality are central to the work of Lydia Davis, a major American writer, translator and essayist. Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2013, Davis writes innovative short stories that question the boundaries of the genre. She is also an important translator of French writers such as Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, Marcel Proust and Gustave Flaubert. Translation and writing go hand-in-hand in Davis’s work. Through a series of readings of Davis’s major translations and her own writing, this book investigates how Davis’s translations and stories relate to each other, finding that they are inextricably interlinked. It explores how Davis uses translation - either as a compositional tool or a plot device - and other instances of rewriting in her stories, demonstrating that translation is central for understanding her prose. Understanding how Davis’s work complicates divisions between translating and other forms of writing highlights the role of translation in literary production, questioning the received perception that translation is less creative than other forms of writing.


Author(s):  
Thibaut d'Hubert

The introduction opens with a reflection on the relative marginality of the kingdom of Arakan and what it entailed in terms of historiography. I observe a reconfiguration of cosmographical imaginaries around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that conditioned the formation of vernacular literary traditions in eastern South Asia and around the Bay of Bengal. Then I provide a brief overview of the Bengali poet Ālāol’s life and works and discuss what the study of his poetics brings to our knowledge of Middle Bengali literature. I highlight the fragmented landscape of Middle Bengali literary production and the need to study Middle Bengali poems as literary texts and not only as sources for social or religious history. The last section of the introduction provides an overview of the contents of the book.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Morton

The chapter outlines different models of nature in medieval Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy in order to show how the Rose plays them against each other to articulate its own model of the complex relationship between art and nature. For the Rose there is no getting at nature except by means of art, as suggested by the self-conscious artificiality of the figure of Nature, taken from the allegories of twelfth-century Neoplatonism. Art, a broad category that encompasses all human activity, is insufficient in describing nature’s truths and is potentially sophistic in its lies. However, questions of nature are always questions of art on whose help humans depend to understand and to represent to themselves a nature that can never be fully known. Finally, the model of reproductive nature is used to legitimate the reproduction of texts and the continuation of arts that is literary production.


Author(s):  
James McNaughton

The Unnamable confronts inherited narrative and linguistic forms with the incommensurability of recent genocide. Initially, the book performs this inadequacy by confronting novel tropes with distorted images cribbed from memoirs of Mauthausen concentration camp. Then it updates surrealist treatments of Parisian abattoirs, asking whether industrialized slaughter is also the sign and fulfillment of modern genocide. The Unnamable also confuses literary production and the biopolitical aspirations of authoritarian politics: Beckett’s narrator writes from a conviction that language can become wholly performative and has the capacity to incarnate and to kill. The narrator attempts to deconstruct language, but doing so ironically transcends literary and philosophical problems to reveal historiographical problems as well, the missing voices of those killed without trace. The chapter ends with a theoretical coda that productively contextualizes Beckett’s strategy with historiographical debate about narrative and genocide by Paul Ricoeur, Giorgio Agamben, Hayden White, and others.


Author(s):  
Malcolm Schofield

This chapter attempts to situate Plato’s philosophizing and literary production in its historical context. The evidence external to the dialogues that such an enterprise can rely on is either scrappy or suspect, or both. Thus, what is offered here is a series of snapshots that follow a chronological sequence, from Plato’s relationship with Socrates and the Athens that executed him; through his momentous first visit to Italy and Sicily and its impact on his thinking about politics and philosophy; to the founding of the Academy, Plato’s rivalry with Isocrates, and the birth of the theory of Forms; and ending with the worlds of the late dialogues.


2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 502-507
Author(s):  
DANIEL ROBERT KING

Tim Groenland's The Art of Editing is an exciting new addition to the field of literary sociology, making a valuable contribution to a discipline which has seen a resurgence since the turn of the millennium. In his seminal early work in the field, John Sutherland traces the origins of this kind of publishing history to Robert Escarpit's Sociology of Literature (1958), which he describes as the beginning of “modern, serious work” in considering the effects of the literary marketplace on the fiction of a particular era. However, it is the first two decades of the twenty-first century that have seen the most significant growth in sociological studies of literary production, a trend that Alan Liu calls “the resurgent history of the book.” This is a “resurgence” that Liu argues has resulted in “restoring to view … vital nodes in the circuit” of literary production, including “editors, publishers, translators, booksellers,” and many others. This recent growth in scholarly interest in the production and circulation of literary texts includes other significant figures such as James F. English, Mark McGurl, John B. Thompson, Loren Glass, Paul Crosthwaite, and David D. Hall.


2020 ◽  
Vol 113 (3) ◽  
pp. 837-852
Author(s):  
Eirini-Sophia Kiapidou

AbstractThis paper focuses on the 12th-century Byzantine scholar Michael Glykas and the two main pillars of his multifarious literary production, Biblos Chronike and Letters, thoroughly exploring for the first time the nature of their interconnection. In addition to the primary goal, i. e. clarifying as far as possible the conditions in which these two works were written, taking into account their intertextuality, it extends the discussion to the mixture of features in texts of different literary genre, written in parallel, by the same author, based on the same material. By presenting the evidence drawn from the case of Michael Glykas, the paper attempts to stress the need to abandon the strictly applied taxonomical logic in approaching Byzantine Literature, as it ultimately prevents us from constitute the full mark of each author in the history of Byzantine culture.


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