1,721,028 research outputs found
Refracting Post-9/11 Terror: Trauma and Empathy in Nadeem Aslam's Postcolonial Fiction
No full textNadeem Aslam’s latest novels bring the politics of post-9/11 terror to the fore by exploring various manifestations of human vulnerability in those who confront tensions and conflicts in the wake of 9/11. In The Blind Man’s Garden and The Golden Legend, the British-Pakistani author combines vulnerability with empathy to build up a postcolonial narrative where the state of contemporary global terror emerges. Thus, Aslam’s two novels can be read as studies in vulnerability and empathy, and this is what the article aims to demonstrate. To do so, it focuses on the issues of grievability as a modality of dispossession. It then moves on to show how grief and wounds are tackled by analysing some formal strategies that arouse empathic connections in the reader. The last part of the article concentrates on the temporal disarray that in both novels acts as a background against which a dialogic structure between self and other is eventually developed, thus refracting the politics of terror
Jhumpa Lahiri. Vulnerabilità e resilienza
No full textIl presente saggio è dedicato allo studio del macrotesto di Jhumpa Lahiri e adotta una lente critica che mette insieme gli studi postcoloniali, la prospettiva psicoanaliti-ca dei trauma studies e l’approccio spaziale dalla teoria ecocritica e geocritica. Il vo-lume propone un percorso esplorativo dell’opera di Lahiri, sia in lingua inglese che in italiano, servendosi di un’ampia gamma di strumenti analitici che enfatizzano l’oscillazione dialettica tra vulnerabilità e resilienza nell’estetica della scrittrice indo-americana. In particolare, lo studio intende illuminare la natura paradossale del rapporto tra malinconia, nostalgia e scrittura: attestandosi come strumento di testi-monianza degli eventi traumatici che forgiano le vite degli immigrati, la narrazione assurge a mezzo epistemologico tramite cui la scrittura è in grado di aprirsi a possi-bilità metamorfiche in grado di favorire il mutamento e la definizione del sé
Archives of Environmental Apocalypse in Sarah Moss’s Cold Earth: Archaeology, Viruses and Melancholia
Full text linkIn contrast to the traditional genre of eco-apocalyptic fiction, Sarah Moss’ debut novel, Cold Earth (2009), does not culminate in a collective catastrophe. It instead employs archaeology, environmental apocalypse, viruses and ghosts to disclose the transformative power of the archive. This article surveys the ways through which the archaeological motif, environmental apocalypse, elegiac tones and disarrayed temporality can function as archiving vehicles, preserving past memory and opening up to the future. And yet, in doing this, both landscape and writing melancholically internalize losses, so as to become themselves archives, while eventually edging towards post-melancholic attachments
Wasted humanity and nonhuman materiality in Cynan Jones’s Everything I Found on the Beach
No full textCynan Jones’s Everything I Found on the Beach (2011) is a sinister portrait of human life, showing how ambition and the search for better opportunities crash against the brutal reality of our contemporary times. Jones’s second novel is a profound meditation on how certain human beings dwell on the borders of our developed societies, while the pernicious consequences of neoliberal economy and globalisation cause unbearable marginalisation and injustice, thereby recalling Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of “wasted lives.” In my essay, I will discuss how Jones’s characters epitomise the growing volumes of human waste as an inevitable outcome of modernisation and globalisation, while the nonhuman acts as a witness to this sense of human waste and precarity. I will first address how the excluded and the economic migrants carry the stigma of their wasted lives, incarnating Bauman’s wasted humanity. I will then engage with how nonhuman matter infiltrates the narrative texture of Jones’s novel. By juxtaposing human voices with nonhuman matter, Everything I Found on the Beach allows all voices to be equally heard, thus showing how the struggle to survive brings together human beings, animals and inanimate objects through a polyphonic assemblage
“She’s not the full shilling”: insanity and redemption in William Trevor’s Reading Turgenev"
No full textThroughout his œuvre, William Trevor frequently explores the disorders of the human mind, with his Irish writings often depicting deviance, mental illness, and madness as responses to suffering and loss. In Reading Turgenev (1991), this focus is embodied in Mary Louise Dallon’s presumed madness, which shapes both the novella’s themes and its narrative structure. Partly set in 1950s Ireland – a period marked by peak asylum confinement – the novella critiques institutionalisation through narrative delirium and multifocal storytelling, unfolding like a mosaic rather than following a linear chronology. Through an examination of how insanity disrupts the linear concept of time, the intertextual connections to Turgenev’s writings, and the influence of Mary Louise’s experiences on her perceptions and thoughts, this article suggests that Trevor’s novella slides between the phenomenological and the realist, presenting a heroine who oscillates between madness and redemption
Language Migration across Literature: Jhumpa Lahiri’s Italian Self-Quest
No full textJhumpa Lahiri is one of the most prominent contemporary authors of Indian origin writing in English. Her short stories and novels raise many important issues, such as the quest for self, the investigation of diasporic identities, the exploration of the everyday tensions and cultural conflicts of Bengali expatriates to the United States. Writing in the interstices of borders between languages, because of her multifaceted Bengali-American background, Lahiri’s recent linguistic migration to the Italian language brings to the fore the link between language and self through literature. This article surveys the main manifestations of writing as self-quest in Lahiri’s Italian production. To do so, it addresses the category of “self-begetting fiction” (Kellman 1976; 1980) as instrumental in foregrounding a shift towards a more abstract and yet autobiographic style. On the one hand, I argue that Lahiri’s Italian writing assumes the shape of a “fragile shelter”, despite her exposure to linguistic limitations. On the other, I argue that these limitations are still envisaged as a reparative strategy, evocative of Ricœur’s narrative identity. In Lahiri’s hands, the fiction of self-begetting becomes one of self-definition and rebirth, a Heideggerian invitation to “dwelling in language” which eventually prevails over the aesthetics of dislocation
Territorial Conflicts in the Contemporary Indian Novel in English
No full textA number of contemporary Indian novels in English, such as The Lowland, The Inheritance of Loss and Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?, explore territorial conflicts in recent Indian history. Combining realist modes with postcolonial allegories, these novels offer a glimpse of gloomy post-Partition upheavals, such as the Naxal riots, the separatist movements for Gorkhaland and the Emergency, highlighting the ethical power of transnational fiction
“The Persistence of Nationalism in Bangladeshi Postmillennial Fiction: Realism and Dystopia in Neamat Imam’s The Black Coat”
No full textMy article analyses Neamat Imam’s The Black Coat (2013) as an
exemplificative case study of the Bangladeshi postmillennial literary scene.
I contend that, whereas Bangladeshi literature has seen the emergence
of prominent diasporic voices by opening to the market of the English
language, Imam can be said to draw on a traditional realistic style as his
debut novel chronicles a tragic moment in Bangladeshi post-Independence
history. In this regard, my essay takes it as a working hypothesis that
Imam’s narrative conveys a critical revision of postcolonial Bangladesh and
it does so by intertwining realism and dystopia. On the one hand, the novel
privileges a dystopian aesthetic that engages with the catastrophes of the
present, thus echoing the colonial past and foreshadowing an unpromising
future. On the other hand, The Black Coat resists the hallucinatory effects
of dystopia owing to the realist mode the narrative hinges around. My essay
aims to show how nationalism still represents a trend in contemporary
Anglophone literature and how, in certain respects, Imam’s novel
denounces fundamental contradictions that are still current in Bangladesh
in the age of globalisation
THROUGH THE VEIL: VOICES OF THE AFTERLIFE IN GEORGE ELIOT’S *THE LIFTED VEIL*
Full text linkWritten between George Eliot’s early and late novels, The Lifted Veil (1859) departs from the typical third-person narration characteristic of the Victorian writer’s oeuvre. The story is told in the first person from the perspective of an eccentric young man named Latimer, an aesthetic choice that lends a confessional tone to the tale. Latimer possesses a special ability: he can read the future and foresee his own death. In many ways, the novella straddles dark fantasy and realism as it juxtaposes elements of Gothic fiction, such as Latimer’s interests in revivification, with an attentive depiction of the material reality. After all, The Lifted Veil reminds the reader that Eliot’s literary realism alternates between an accurate depiction of the external world and an investigation of human consciousness. Starting from these premises, in this essay I would like to argue that through the motif of the veil Eliot builds up a densely poetic narrative in which the boundary between art and fiction, reality and imagination is refracted. On the one hand, The Lifted Veil pushes realism to its limits much like Giuseppe Sanmartino’s famous marble sculpture Cristo velato (1753), foregrounding a narrative form replete with sensory vividness, especially for the visual, haptic and olfactory imagery that permeates the text. On the other hand, the novella serves a much broader purpose in that it may be read as an aesthetic experiment. Through the trope of the veil, Eliot acknowledges that scientific inquiry can expand the scope of literary writing, contributing to a more accurate form of realism
Narrative Empathy, Vulnerability and Ethics of Care in William Trevor’s Fiction
Full text linkThis essay engages with the relationship between ethics and literature. To this end, it addresses the theoretical framework of narrative empathy as illustrative of the supposed ethical power of literary writing. Using a corpus of William Trevor’s fiction, Reading Turgenev (1991) and Love and Summer (2009) as case study, the essay suggests that Trevor’ use of metafictional devices (metalepses and the disnarrated), temporal disarray and multifocal perspectives tends to complicate the general assumption of empathy as necessarily easy and spontaneous. These formal strategies of literary representation manifest the underlying manipulative nature of narrative empathy, confronting readers with the ethical effects of empathy. In so doing, Trevor’s fiction edges towards the aesthetics of vulnerability in that it entails an ethics of reading and writing that reminds the reader of the darkest sides of human existence
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