Eumenides and the Invention of Politics

Recent scholarship has shown that the Eumenides of Aeschylus, far from presenting a complete and coherent picture of the well-ordered polis, in fact offers something quite different, namely, a complex set of questions, concerns and conundrums regarding the very nature of political society. But I suggest that the literature has not yet provided a fully satisfying account of the ways in which those questions are underwritten by the specifically literary practice of Aeschylus as it develops the play’s larger theoretical – especially moral – implications. I argue that the Eumenides can fruitfully be read as a sustained exercise in the subversion of expectations that unsettles its audience and thereby opens up a discursive and aesthetic space for the development of a distinctive political problematic; and further, that this problematic involves a challenging series of meditations on what today would be called political ethics, broadly conceived.

Pre-Modern Comparative Literary Practice in the Multilingual Islamic World(s)

Report of the conference organized by Huda Fakhreddine, David Larsen, and Hany Rashwan

Looking at the Works of Alice Tawhai: An Argument for Māori Literary Nationalism

<p>Contemporary Māori writer Alice Tawhai has published two collections of short stories, Festival of Miracles (2005) and Luminous (2007). Tawhai's narratives portray Māori people living an array of diverse lifestyles and her collections include stories about isolation, gangs, substance abuse, identity, education, art and spirituality; her work has been reviewed in literary magazines and online as new fiction that reflected a contemporary society in Aotearoa and these literary reviews imply that Tawhai's stories are a reflection of Māori people. For Māori readers, Tawhai's narratives demand a different interpretation of the text, a different way of reading, in order to read these stories of their own merits. To this end, this thesis proposes a practice for reading called 'Māori literary nationalism' which is based on a book called, American Indian Literary Nationalism whose proposed literary practice can be suitably adapted for a Maori literary context. One of the most important components of Maori literary nationalism is the idea of keeping Māori as the central focus, analyzing Māori literature with an insider's view. Māori literary nationalism provides a space for Māori readers to discuss literature, exchange ideas and encourage dialogue amongst each other. More importantly Māori literary nationalism offer Māori readers an opportunity to read Alice Tawhai's work in a way that foregrounds the uniqueness of her short stories.</p>

Looking at the Works of Alice Tawhai: An Argument for Māori Literary Nationalism

<p>Contemporary Māori writer Alice Tawhai has published two collections of short stories, Festival of Miracles (2005) and Luminous (2007). Tawhai's narratives portray Māori people living an array of diverse lifestyles and her collections include stories about isolation, gangs, substance abuse, identity, education, art and spirituality; her work has been reviewed in literary magazines and online as new fiction that reflected a contemporary society in Aotearoa and these literary reviews imply that Tawhai's stories are a reflection of Māori people. For Māori readers, Tawhai's narratives demand a different interpretation of the text, a different way of reading, in order to read these stories of their own merits. To this end, this thesis proposes a practice for reading called 'Māori literary nationalism' which is based on a book called, American Indian Literary Nationalism whose proposed literary practice can be suitably adapted for a Maori literary context. One of the most important components of Maori literary nationalism is the idea of keeping Māori as the central focus, analyzing Māori literature with an insider's view. Māori literary nationalism provides a space for Māori readers to discuss literature, exchange ideas and encourage dialogue amongst each other. More importantly Māori literary nationalism offer Māori readers an opportunity to read Alice Tawhai's work in a way that foregrounds the uniqueness of her short stories.</p>

Tamizdat as a Literary Practice and Political Institution

The article seeks to define tamizdat as a literary practice and political institution of the late Soviet era. Comprising manuscripts rejected, censored, or never submitted for publication at home but smuggled through various channels out of the country and printed elsewhere, with or without their authors’ knowledge or consent, tamizdat contributed to the formation of the twentieth-century Russian literary canon. Tamizdat thus mediated the relationships of authors in Russia with the Soviet literary establishment on the one hand and with the underground on the other, while the very prospect of having their works published abroad, let alone the consequences of such a transgression, affected these authors’ choices and ideological positions in regard to both fields. The article argues, along these lines, that tamizdat was as emblematic of the literary scene after Stalin as its more familiar and better researched domestic counterparts, samizdat and gosizdat, whereby the traditional notion of late Soviet culture as a binary opposition between the official and underground fields is reinvented, instead, as a transnationally dynamic three-dimensional model.

A escrita movediça de Paulo Leminski em Catatau / Paulo Leminski’s quick writing in Catatau

Resumo: Em Catatau (1975), obra subintitulada pelo próprio autor como “romance-ideia”, Paulo Leminski vive a aventura da própria escrita e cria seu texto a partir da permeabilidade das palavras, das línguas, dos tempos e dos espaços, mostrando o escritor como locutor e o leitor como ouvinte de suas palavras-ímãs. Nesse sentido, o objetivo deste artigo consiste em verificar como esse percurso da escrita leminskiana em Catatau conflui para construção de uma escrita movediça, culminando numa reflexão acerca do fazer literário, traço recorrente na obra do autor. Destaca-se, então, o tecer da escrita de Catatau mediante o entrelaçar constante de aliterações, jogos tipográficos, parônimos, justaposições, trava- línguas, num ritmo próprio, como um turbilhão de linguagem. Para que se possa circular nesse redemoinho, buscou-se comparar a escrita do “romance-ideia” com alguns de seus textos poéticos e dialogar com ideias de Jacques Derrida (1973), Gilles Deleuze (1997), Anne-Marie Christin (2006), Márcia Arbex (2006), Arnaldo Antunes (2005) e Jorge Luis Borges (2011). Percebe-se que a escrita de Paulo Leminski está sempre no percalço da palavra, seguindo seus rastros, seja por meio do som ou da imagem. Em Catatau, a escrita é como um laboratório em que a linguagem é experimentada nos níveis sonoro, sintático e imagético sempre em busca de uma explosão de sentidos surpreendentes.Palavras-chave: Paulo Leminski; Catatau; escrita; som; imagem.Abstract: In Catatau (1975), a work subtitled by the author himself as a “novel idea”, Paulo Leminski lives the adventure of writing itself and criates his text from the permeability of words, languages, times and spaces, showing the writer as a speaker and the reader as a listener of his magnets words. In this sense, the purpose of this article is to verify how this path of Leminskian writing in Catatau converges to the construction of a quick writing, culminating in a reflection on literary practice, a recurring feature in the author’s work. Then, the weaving of Catatau’s writing stands out through the constant interweaving of alliterations, typographical games, paronyms, juxtapositions, tongue twisters, in a proper rhythm, like a whirlwind of language. In order to be able to circulate in this whirlwind, we sought to compare the writing of the “novel-idea” with some of its poetic texts, dialoguing with the ideas of Jacques Derrida (1973), Gilles Deleuze (1997), Anne-Marie Christin (2006) and Márcia Arbex (2006), Arnaldo Antunes (2005) and Jorge Luis Borges (2011). It is noticed that the writing of Paulo Leminski is always in the hitch of the word, following its tracks, either through sound or image. In Catatau, writing is like a laboratory where the language is experienced at sound, syntactic and imagery levels, always in search of an explosion of surprising meanings.Keywords: Paulo Leminski; Catatau; writing; sound; image.

What Testimony Does to Literature

This article sheds light on a literary practice that critics began to reflect upon in the twentieth century: witnessing. This genre, by adopting a narrative model based on statements of evidence presented in the courtroom, distinguishes itself from other forms of expression practiced by witnesses. Survivors of political violence take up their pens and describe the situation they have been subjected to, so as to attest to historical facts and prevent erasure of the event through forgetting, denial or negation. This enterprise, which seeks to document lived experience and thereby pay homage to victims who did not survive, constitutes both a source of evidence for legal procedure and a contribution to the writing of history. Witnessing, however literary it may be, is founded on a pact of veracity, in which witnesses are bound to relate no more than their own experience and to do so with precision. Finally, witness accounts are addressed to society at large or even to humanity as a whole, in the hope of emancipating it from such violence by raising awareness of its intolerable nature. Though witnessing still lacks legitimacy within the literary field, the link it establishes between ethical, aesthetic and political positions makes this genre exemplary of what literature is capable of.

Recovering World-Welcoming Words: Language, Metaphysics, and the Voice of Nature

This article presents a theological–literary response to a concern in contemporary theory with heeding and articulating the speech of nonhuman things. Drawing from Rowan Williams’ metaphysics of poetic addition, I argue that an ‘ecotheological’ literary practice challenges us to become attentive and responsive to the language of the nonhuman, by creatively performing the co-mingling of nonhuman and human language. Drawing from Jean-Louis Chrétien’s phenomenology of the voice, I propose a theological conception of language as a gift of hospitality to the voice of nonhuman things that is also a gift of poetic addition—a ‘saying more’ which, adding being to the world, also manifests its gift-like nature. In contrast to recent critical approaches, I argue for the qualified retrieval of ‘nature’ as a figure both literary and theological, a voice that gives voice to things and speaks by means of human literary production. Through a reading of Shakespeare’s King Lear, I show that the paradoxical and poetic ambiguities of the literary sense of ‘nature’ serve precisely to shed light on its suspect modern iteration, while at the same time taking us beyond critique to enable a cautious yet attentive retrieval of its poetic and symbolic scope.