scholarly journals Literary production in Niger: The case of the novel

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aïssata S. Kindo Patengouh

Literature, like all art, is in part geographically and historically determined. Despite its imaginary nature, literature maintains close ties with its context of emergence. African literature is in part an illustration of determinisms of this type and owes a great deal to colonial trauma. Nevertheless, it also draws on autochthonous myths – both old and new – on the colonial heritage, and on new mentalities generated by decolonisation and other factors. However, certain political and ideological choices visible in literary texts underline national specificities. My intention, as a citizen of Niger, is to contribute to bringing Nigérien literature, and the Nigérien novel, in particular, into the limelight. In fact, this production is only just emerging, as the first novel dates back to 1959. This paper focuses on the fundamental problem of the relation between the novel produced in Niger and the Nigérien society, and by extension, the relation between Nigérien literature and the society from which it is emerging. Based on a thematic study, in the spirit of socio-criticism, an attempt will be made to place a selected corpus of eleven novels, published between 1977 and 1993, in their context of emergence. The geographical (spatial and climatic) milieu is omnipresent and dominant in these works; focus on a traditional socio-cultural milieu is recurrent and is still of current importance, while the modern socio-cultural milieu is determinant but not quite as dominant as rural space. These are some of the basic elements composing the backdrop of Nigérien novelistic creation. They suggest aspects of a collective identity. Nonetheless these are not, in themselves, sufficient grounds on which to identify a specific literary production.

Matatu ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 386-399
Author(s):  
Augustine Uka Nwanyanwu

Abstract Today African literature exhibits and incorporates the decentred realities of African writers themselves as they negotiate and engage with multifarious forms of diaspora experience, dislocation, otherness, displacement, identity, and exile. National cultures in the twenty-first century have undergone significant decentralization. New African writing is now generated in and outside Africa by writers who themselves are products of transcultural forms and must now interrogate existence in global cities, transnational cultures, and the challenges of immigrants in these cities. Very few novels explore the theme of otherness and identity with as much insight as Adichie’s Americanah. The novel brings together opposing cultural forms, at once transcending and celebrating the local, and exploring spaces for the self where identity and otherness can be viewed and clarified. This article endeavours to show how African emigrants seek to affirm, manipulate, and define identity, reclaiming a space for self where migrant culture is marginalized. Adichie’s exemplary focus on transcultural engagement in Americanah provides an accurate representation of present-day African literary production in its dialectical dance between national and international particularities.


Ería ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-283
Author(s):  
Juan Ignacio Plaza Gutiérrez

Este artículo subraya la presencia que el espacio y el paisaje ocupan en la narrativa de Miguel Delibes. Para ello, se ha elegido su novela El disputado voto del señor Cayo. Tras una contextualización, se repasa brevemente el perfil de Miguel Delibes, destacando su vinculación y la de su producción literaria con el paisaje y la sociedad de Castilla. Finalmente se aborda la dimensión geográfica que hay en la novela, subrayando los elementos y valores más destacados de la organización del paisaje y de la caracterización del espacio, y la diversidad y riqueza terminológicas del lenguaje de este escritor castellano.Cet article souligne la présence de l’espace et du paysage dans le récit de Miguel Delibes. Pour cela, on a choisi son roman Le vote disputé de Monsieur Cayo. Après une contextualisation, le profil de Miguel Delibes est brièvement passé en revue, mettant en évidence ainsi son lien et celui de sa production littéraire avec le paysage et la société castillane. Enfin, la dimension géographique du roman est abordée, en soulignant les éléments et valeurs les plus importants de l’organisation du paysage et de la caractérisation de l’espace, ainsi que la diversité et la richesse terminologique de cet écrivain castillan.This article highlights the presence of space and landscape in the narrative of Miguel Delibes. To this end, his novel The Disputed Vote of Mr. Cayo has been chosen. After a contextualization, the profile of Miguel Delibes is briefly reviewed, highlighting his linkage and that of his literary production with the landscape and society of Castile. Finally, the geographical dimension of this novel is broached, emphasizing the most outstanding elements and values of landscape organization and spatial characterization, as well as the diversity and richness of terminology by this Castilian writer.


Imbizo ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Mapara ◽  
Beatrice Mapara

Literary texts are at times anchored in others that have come before them. This article thus notes that the relationship that exists between written works as well as oral works has been an abiding phenomenon since the emergence of the written word, whether it is Sumerian, Greek or Roman. This practice, also called intertextuality, is prevalent today in African literature. Informed by this tradition of intertextuality, the authors analyse Ignatius Mabasa’s novel, Mapenzi, and argue that the use of direct and indirect references to other creative works by the writer goes a long way in enhancing the text’s thematic and stylistic development. The article further observes that the intertextual references found in Mabasa’s novel evidence that he is a well-read artist who sees intersections between what he writes and what others before him have also written about. The article concludes by delineating the differences between plagiarism and creativity, in that an intertextual reading of Mapenzi reveals that as a creative work, besides connections to prior works, the novel has a life of its own, and has in fact carved a space for itself within Zimbabwean Shona literature. The article sums up such intertextual play as hochekoche (interlinkages), the creation of catenae between literary texts.


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.


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.


Author(s):  
Francesca Orestano

By dwelling first on the ‘faults’, then on the ‘excellencies’ remarked by reviewers and critics of Little Dorrit, this chapter also traces the history of that novel’s critical reception as it evolved from a close focus on contemporary politics and economics toward a study of the writer’s Hogarthian skill at building a visual satire. Subsequently the characters’ psychology as well as Dickens’s became the object of critical enquiry. When visual studies brought to the fore the import of perception and its narrative function, another area of investigation opened, in this chapter specifically connected with, and culturally encoded in, the technique of the stereoscope and the scientific notion of the binocularity of vision. Implemented by Dickens in the construction of Little Dorrit, this notion allows for a further critical reading of the novel as lieu de mémoire where real and imagined imprisonments, inscribed in history, also conjure the scene where cultural memory rewrites individual and collective identity in the present.


Author(s):  
Iryna Dumchak ◽  
Sofiia Shemerliuk

The article deals with the peculiarities of transformations in the process of translation of English prose into Ukrainian. Despite the large number of works covering this issue, the problem of translating prose texts is not dismissed. There is a need to systematize and study the types of lexical and grammatical transformations, used in translating literary texts, in practice. To observe the process of formation of inter-language transformations, the novel by an Irish writer Colm Toibin ‘House of Names’ has been chosen. The various scientists’ approaches to establishing the transformation types are analyzed. It is revealed that due to differences in the syntactic, grammatical and morphological structures of the English and Ukrainian languages, lexical and grammatical transformations are widely used in translation. Lexical transformations are the deviations from direct vocabulary matches. The lexical transformations are mainly caused by the fact that the volume of the lexical units of the original language and the language of translation do not coincide. Among lexical transformations, the most common are generalization, concretization, compensation, lexical additions. Grammatical transformations are to transform the structure of a sentence in the translation process according to the rules of the source language. The transformation can be complete or partial depending on whether the structure of the sentence changes completely or partially. The article presents the examples of the grammatical transformations of inversion, replacement, addition and omission comparing the original text and its translation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shirzad Tayefi ◽  
Mohammad Hossein Ramezani Fookulaee

Contrary to the French school of comparative literature, according to which it is merely possible to compare the two written texts in terms of conditions, in the American approach, the adaptation of literary texts to various arts, including cinema, is possible, which leads to a better understanding of literature. Since novels and films have many similarities, they are in many respects similar to each other, and two genres are considered analogous.These commons provide a good ground for discussing a movie from the perspective of a new literary theory and critique, and allow us to use the concepts and terminology we normally know as a tool for discussing the novel to critically explore the structure and art and the themes of the film. On the other hand, in recent years, the term "postmodernism" has been widely criticized about the novel in our country, and many new fiction writers also have a fascination with postmodern style fiction. Therefore, in this research, first, reviewing the views of some of the most important postmodern literature scholars, nineteen techniques used in postmodern novels are explored, and their qualitative method of applying them to Naser al-Dinshah film actor have been investigated.The results of the study show the relationship between literature and cinema (as a visual text) and the ability to compare the two written and visual texts; as many techniques used in the writing of postmodern novels are also with a high frequency have been used in the studied film


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (5(74)) ◽  
pp. 6-9
Author(s):  
S.V. Ananeva

The poetry of the large genre form –the story and the novel includes «openness» as a fundamental opportunity that is endowed with the author and the reader. The poetics of works «in motion» creates a new mechanism of aesthetic perception, expanding the national picture of the writer's world. The concept as a focus of knowledge about the world expands the boundaries of the study of prose by I. Schegolikhin, T. Frolovskaya and K. Keshin. The concepts of the Motherland, memory, oblivion in the literary texts of Russian writers of Kazakhstan are extremely important. A literary work enters into complex non-textual relations with the surrounding reality, expanding the spiritual horizon of society, while preserving traditions and continuity


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 17-32
Author(s):  
Konul Khalilova ◽  
Irina Orujova

The current article involves the issues of losses, gains, or survivals contributing to literature in the process of translation. It represents a thorough study based on the novel “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck from English and, respectively, its translation into Azerbaijani by Ulfet Kurchayli. It investigates the problematic areas or challenges emerging from the source-text discrepancies. Furthermore, this article also concentrates on the issue of cultural non-equivalence or the losses occurring in translating English literary texts into Azerbaijani. The paper identifies the translation techniques adopted by the translator of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Adopting certain techniques rather than others has led to many losses on different levels. The translator’s important role as a cultural insider is also emphasized. The wide gap, distance, or the differences between the cultures, languages, and thought patterns of the English and Azerbaijani language speakers are the main factors resulting in various losses in the process of translation. Coping with these extra-linguistic constraints is harder than the linguistic ones as the translator has no choice in the given situations, deleting these elements from the TT or replacing them with elements that do not fit the context. This article aims at determining translation losses and gains, defining ways that the translator employs for compensating losses, through the analysis of John Steinbeck’s style in The Grapes of Wrath. The article concludes that there are some situations where the translation of a certain text from the SL into the TL embraces alteration in the whole informational content of the text, in the form of expressions or words.


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