In Praise of New Travelers: Reading Caribbean Migrant Women's Writing

Approaching postcolonial theory through cultural analysis, this book offers an accessible and concrete appraisal of current developments in postcolonial criticism. Detailed readings of a range of Anglophone Caribbean migrant women's texts from the late 1980s and 1990s lead to sharp insights into three issues that are crucial to an understanding of the field: place, voice, and silence.The discussion of these issues allows us to trace current feminist, postmodern, and postcolonial debates about the nature of the speaking subject, as it is emerging from today's postcolonial cultural practices. Postcolonial criticism often understands this subject as hybrid and multiple. This book shows how the specifics of this multiplicity must be acknowledged through analysis of the power structures and the violence through which this multiple subject is established.The book is also a consistent inquiry into reading positions. The argument about the differences between postcolonialist, black and Caribbean feminist, white feminist, and postmodern criticism is conducted as a discussion about the effects, insights, and blindnesses produced by these different ways of reading Caribbean migrant women's writing. Scrutinizing the grain of these texts encourages us to move beyond the kind of general statements for which postcolonial theory has been severely criticized.The author also extends her critique of reading positions to issues of methodology, using these approaches to direct her interpretation. Narratology is supplemented by an analysis of the interdiscursive processes through which texts are created, and psychoanalytic concepts are used to explore the ambiguous merits of postcolonial reading. Above all, In Praise of New Travelers celebrates the vigorous, subversive, and liberating creativity of an accomplished generation of Caribbean migrant women writers.

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https://magrudy.com/book/in-praise-of-new-travelers-reading-caribbean-migrant-womens-writing-9780804729475/

94.500000 USD

Cinematograph of Words: Literature, Technique, and Modernization in Brazil

This is an extraordinarily imaginative attempt to analyze the relations between literature and technique in Brazil from the 1880's to the 1920's. The author suggests that in these relations we can see more clearly the shape of a period that is otherwise usually defined from a literary perspective as pre- or post- something or other, rather than in terms of its own characteristics. One such characteristic is the intense interaction with the new technologies then arising in Brazil, the beginning of the professionalization of writers, and a revision of the concept of literature, redefined as technique.The author's chief concern is to determine what is distinctive about the literary production of the period. Rather than focusing on literature's relations with visual art, with a rising social class, or with the sociopolitical divisions within the educated classes of Brazilian society, the author examines the cronica (a kind of journalistic essay), poetry, and fiction of these decades in terms of their encounter with a burgeoning technological and industrial landscape.This encounter is examined from two perspectives. The first is explicit representation: the portrayal in Brazilian literature of modern artifacts, new means of transformation and communication, and the newborn industries of advertising and commercial publication. The second perspective examines how these close contacts with the technological world came to shape cultural production-that is, not how literature represents technique, but how literary technique changed as it incorporated procedures characteristic of photography, film, and poster art. This transformation was consistent and concurrent with significant changes taking place in the perceptions and sensibilities of the population of major Brazilian cities, a population increasingly attuned to images, the instant, and technology as all-powerful mediators of the urban landscape, time, and a subjectivity constantly under the threat of extinction.

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https://magrudy.com/book/cinematograph-of-words-literature-technique-and-modernization-in-brazil-9780804729130/

89.250000 USD

A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes from the Latin American Sixties

A Turbulent Decade Remembered studies the 1960s-the continental moment that marked Latin America's full entry into both modernity and post-modernity in the international arena. Delving into scenes of importance for the intersection of aesthetics and politics, the book addresses the impact of the Cuban Revolution on the imagination of the decade, the student movements of 1968 in their international context, and the tragic events of Tlatelolco, memorialized in different ways by Mexico's greatest intellectuals. In examining the construction of the great novels usually identified as the Boom, the book revises the critical tradition established since the late sixties, rethinking the oft-cited magical realism, while considering the role of the press, prizes, gendered networks of solidarity and competition, and the emergence of a literary star system. The implications of all these forces of the republic of letters are set in dialogue with an analysis of the major novels of the decade, with particular attention to their literary craft, their manipulation of space, voice, and varied readerships.

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https://magrudy.com/book/a-turbulent-decade-remembered-scenes-from-the-latin-american-sixties-9780804756624/

94.500000 USD

All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison

This book is about culture and comparison. Starting with the history of the discipline of comparative literature and its forgotten relation to the positivist comparative method, it inquires into the idea of comparison in a postcolonial world. Comparison was Eurocentric by exclusion when it applied only to European literature, and Eurocentric by discrimination when it adapted evolutionary models to place European literature at the forefront of human development. This book argues that inclusiveness is not a sufficient response to postcolonial and multiculturalist challenges because it leaves the basis of equivalence unquestioned. The point is not simply to bring more objects under comparison, but rather to examine the process of comparison. The book offers a new approach to the either/or of relativism and universalism, in which comparison is either impossible or assimilatory, by focusing instead on various forms of incommensurability -comparisons in which there is a ground for comparison but no basis for equivalence. Each chapter develops a particular form of such cultural comparison from readings of important novelists (Joseph Conrad, Simone Schwartz-Bart), poets (Aime Cesaire, Derek Walcott), and theorists (Edouard Glissant, Jean-Luc Nancy).

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https://magrudy.com/book/all-the-difference-in-the-world-postcoloniality-and-the-ends-of-comparison-9780804731973/

89.250000 USD

The Ends of Literature: The Latin American Boom in the Neoliberal Marketplace

The Ends of Literature analyzes the part played by literature within contemporary Latin American thought and politics, above all the politics of neoliberalism. The why? of contemporary Latin American literature is the book's overarching concern. Its wide range includes close readings of the prose of Cortazar, Carpentier, Paz, Valenzuela, Piglia, and Las Casas; of the relationship of the Boom movement and its aftermath; of testimonial narrative; and of contemporary Chilean and Chicano film. The work also investigates in detail various theoretical projects as they intersect with and emerge from Latin American scholarship: cultural studies, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial studies. Latin American literature, both as a vehicle of conservatism and as an agent of subversion, is bound from its inception to the rise of the state. Literature's nature, role, and status are therefore altered when the Latin American nation-state succumbs to the process of neoliberalism: as the too-strong state (dictatorship) yields to the too-weak state (the market), and as the various practices of civil society and public life are replaced by private or privatized endeavors. However, neither the end of literature nor the end of the state can be assumed. The end of literature in Latin America is in fact the call for more literature; it is the call of literature, in particular that of the Boom. The end of the state, likewise, is the demand upon this state. The book, then, analyzes the ends in question as at once their purpose, direction, future, and conclusion. Also key to the study is the notion of transition. Within much recent Latin American political discussion la transicion refers to the passage from dictatorship to democracy, as well as to the failure of this shift, the failure of post-dictatorship. The author argues that the movement from literary to cultural studies, while issuing from intellectual and aesthetic circles, is an integral component of this same transition. The thematization of the bind between these two displacements-hence of Latin America's voyage into post-transition -forms a fundamental portion of the text.

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https://magrudy.com/book/the-ends-of-literature-the-latin-american-boom-in-the-neoliberal-marketplace-9780804743457/

94.500000 USD

Literary Primitivism

This book fundamentally rethinks a pervasive and controversial concept in literary criticism and the history of ideas. Primitivism has long been accepted as a transhistorical tendency of the civilized to idealize that primitive condition against which they define themselves. In the modern era, this has been a matter of the West projecting its primitivist fantasies onto non-Western others. Arguing instead that primitivism was an aesthetic mode produced in reaction to the apotheosis of European imperialism, and that the most intensively primitivist literary works were produced by imperialism's colonized subjects, the book overturns basic assumptions of the last two generations of literary scholarship. Against the grain, Ben Etherington contends that primitivism was an important, if vexed, utopian project rather than a form of racist discourse, a mode that emerged only when modern capitalism was at the point of subsuming all human communities into itself. The primitivist project was an attempt, through art, to recreate a primitive condition then perceived to be at its vanishing point. The first overview of this vast topic in forty years, Literary Primitivism maps out previous scholarly paradigms, provides a succinct and readable account of its own methodology, and presents critical readings of key writers, including Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, D. H. Lawrence, and Claude McKay.

https://magrudy.com/book/literary-primitivism-9781503602366/

68.250000 USD