Generic fracturing in Okot p’Bitek’s White Teeth

Based on a stylistic analysis of selected African novels, centrally Okot p’Bitek’s Lak Tar/White Teeth (1953; English translation: 1989), this article identifies a narrative technique employed by these novels, to use heterogeneous genres inserted into the prose fiction of the novel. Typically, various genres of poetry are used in this way, creating a textuality that is richly “heteroglossic” (Bakhtin, 1981). However, the range of genres that can be used in this way is not limited and includes proverbs, sayings, songs, newspaper articles, letters, or more recently digital texts such as blogs or tweets. The article uses the term “generic fracturing” to refer to this technique. Generic fracturing is used in novels for specific purposes. The article focuses on the employment of a genre of Acoli praise poetry, mwoc, in White Teeth for characterization. It is further argued here that such heterogeneous genres do not only serve to construct the narrative, but are in fact markers of thought systems that differ from the “default” ontology, epistemology, and aesthetics of the novel. These features were inherited from the genre’s European history and imposed in Africa by colonial administration through which novelistic production was initially engineered. Generic fracturing is thus a textual strategy to effectuate disruptions and subversions of an intellectual framework that was a colonial imposition, and it points towards alternative ways of thinking. These were usually derived from local African cultural traditions in early African-language novelistic production. Generic fracturing, however, continues being used up to the present day in African novels to signal the co-existence and interaction of heterogeneous knowledges and philosophical frameworks.

Mastering the Great Purge Trauma: Mythopoetic Strategies in Contemporary Russian Literature for the Young

Formerly reserved for adult, texts about traumatic events of the past have now entered the domain of children’s literature. Such texts “play the key role in the double-edged process of grieving and prevention” (A. Etkind) and are seen as essential for familiarizing Russian children and adolescents with social history. This article analyzes the ways of representing and mastering traumatic experiences of the past in contemporary literature an focuses on the period of the Great Purge in Russia, using the examples of E. Elchin’s Breaking Stalin’s Nose and Y. Yakovleva’s Raven’s Children. 1938. These narratives rely on the mythopoetic strategies of a parable as an ultimately artificial and supra-historical construction; at the same time, they utilize techniques used by literary non-fiction oriented towards ego-texts and documentary evidence. These strategies use real historical events as a trigger for associative memory in the manner characteristic of the aesthetics of post-memory. Keywords: historical trauma, fiction of the Great Purge, historical fiction for children and young adult (YA), mythopoetic textual strategy, E.Elchin, Y. Yakovleva

THE RETENTION OF ARABIC LANGUAGE AS A NATIONAL IDENTITY IN TWO OF GADAH AS-SAMMAN’S NOVELS: POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVE

Purpose: This article aims to analyze the retention of the Arabic language as a national identity by Lebanon nationalists who live as exiles outside European countries in two of her novels, Lailatul-Milyār and Sahrah Tanakkuriyyah Lil-Mautā. As a product of fiction from a colonized country, both stories represent postcolonial discourses, showing the effect of colonialism, while also voicing resistance to colonialism. Methodology: The research materials or material objects in this article are two of as-Sammān’s novels. Data sources were grouped in primary data, which is the two of Sammān’s novels, and secondary data, which is various references that support analysis, including books, journals, blogs, and other relevant sources in academic studies. Deconstruction is a textual strategy, which is utilized for analyzing the data in this study. No software tool is used. Main Findings: The Lebanese nationalists in Europe tried to maintain the use of the Arabic language as the first and foremost national identity for several reasons, including defending (1) the Arabness, (2) the membership in the national community, and (3) the nation and nationality. Implications/ Applications: This study highlights that resistance to colonialism can be done in various ways, both through violence and non-violence. In modern times, non-violent methods are frequently used. Among the non-violent ways is to fight for the retention of the Arabic language as a national identity so that to maintain it means to maintain Arabism, the membership of the nation’s community, and defend the nation and nationality of the Arabs. Novelty/Originality of this study: These findings highlight the struggle of the Lebanese nationalists in Europe; the younger generation who are trying to inherit Arabic must also struggle to learn it, both formal and informal, even against the mainstream. The results of persistence and perseverance in learning Arabic cannot be seen immediately, but a long time after that. The ability to speak Arabic, then, can foster a spirit of nationalism in the young Arab generation.

“Better is the Little That the Righteous Has than the Abundance of Many Wicked” (Ps 37:16): Social and Moral Stratification in Late Persian-Period Judah as Reflected by Psalm 37

This paper offers a social-scientific analysis of Psalm 37, aiming to define its ideological purpose and textual strategy. The psalm is also read as part of the sequence of Pss 35–37 as it was arranged by the editors of Book I of the Psalms. Financial deprivation and public humiliation of a moral upright minority by an immoral upper class seem to have caused growing discontent and feelings of aggression among the psalmist’s in-group. The author of Psalm 37 assumes the role of a wisdom teacher in order to reprimand, exhort and encourage members of the in-group to stay true to their faith under trying circumstances.

Die Autonomie des ,souveränen Individuums‘ in Nietzsches Genealogie der Moral

The second essay of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals introduces the ‘sovereign individual’ as ‘responsible’, ‘autonomous’ and ‘free’. Does this affirmative use of moral terminology reveal an unexpected affinity between Nietzsche’s thought and philosophical modernity? In the last decades, this issue has been at the heart of a vast and controversial debate. My analysis shows that, rather than throwing light on Nietzsche’s general position, the specific use of Kantian terms in this passage of GM is due to a polemical intention. Implicitly, Nietzsche rejects Eduard von Hartmann’s criticism of the ‘absolute sovereignty of the individual’. The author of the Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins (1879) sees the most radical herald of this ‘sovereignty’ in Max Stirner. From Nietzsche’s point of view, Hartmann’s rejection and Stirner’s affirmation share a reductive conception of ‘sovereignty’. Reinterpreting and ‘revaluing’ Kant’s moral terminology, Nietzsche aims to give an interpretation of individual sovereignty that is at the same time antithetical to Stirner’s and wholly at odds with Hartmann’s ethical views. In showing this, the paper gives a new answer to an old question; for already in the 1890s, Hartmann himself, accusing Nietzsche of plagiarizing Stirner, raised the issue of the historical relationship between the two philosophers. More generally, the paper shows that Nietzsche employs a specific textual strategy, which consists in taking Kantian terms in an ‘anti-Kantian’ sense and systematically cultivating the art of using ‘a moral formula in a supramoral sense’.

Literary Speech as a Medium of Contact

An intersubjective event, a text comprises the medium of contact between subjects of literary discourse. Within texts the conventionality of speech serves to enable us to express ourselves, while at the same time it-owing to conventionality itself-makes shared individual expe rience at least difficult, if not impossible, a condition of which modern literary culture is painfully aware. Epitomizing this paradox of the uniquely personal and the formulaic/ impersonal is the literary discourse of love. In post-Romantic literary culture this paradox reveals itself in the shift of authors’ and readers’ attention from accepted rhetorical forms to those “transitive parts” of thought and speech that (according to William James) pass largely unrecognized in everyday language practice. Precisely these “transitive parts” activate the fleeting “feelings of relation” (as opposed to conventional meanings) that connote extended and multiple relationships “between the larger objects of our thought.” We argue that this authorreader pact-evinced, variously, by Flaubert’s search for “absolute style” and Barthes’ exploration of the aesthetic potential of lovers’ discourse-heightens attention to the materiality of language and to the mimetic, collaborative, performative aspects of literary communication. “The zealous practice of a perfect reception” invokes enhanced pleasure and the empathic effect that (post)modern readers learn to derive from language play by locating the subtle subjectivity of expression in the seemingly style-less banality of everyday speech. In this article this textual strategy of literary modernism is analyzed by way of selfreflexive love speech in the prose of Gustav Flaubert and the poetry of William Carlos Williams.