Showing papers in "World Literature Today in 1989"

The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction

Abstract: In \"The Company We Keep\", Wayne C. Booth argues for the relocation of ethics to the center of our engagement with literature. But the questions he asks are not confined to morality. Returning ethics to its root sense, Booth proposes that the ethical critic will be interested in any effect on the ethos, the total character or quality of tellers and listeners. Ethical criticism will risk talking about the quality of this particular encounter with this particular work. Yet it will give up the old hope for definitive judgments of 'good' work and 'bad'. Rather it will be a conversation about many kinds of personal and social goods that fictions can serve or destroy. While not ignoring the consequences for conduct of engaging with powerful stories, it will attend to that more immediate topic, What happens to us as we read? Who am I, during the hours of reading or listening? What is the quality of the life I lead in the company of these would-be friends? Through a wide variety of periods and genres and scores of particular works, Booth pursues various metaphors for such engagements: 'friendship with books', 'the exchange of gifts', 'the colonizing of worlds', 'the constitution of commonwealths'. He concludes with extended explorations of the ethical powers and potential dangers of works by Rabelais, D. H. Lawrence, Jane Austen, and Mark Twain.

Beyond the Word of Man: Glissant and the New Discourse of the Antilles

Abstract: By SYLVIA WYNTER Introduction to the Argument. During his childhood years 1940-44, Edouard Glissant, like all residents of the French colonial island of Martinique, found himself in a lived situation of double blockade. Outside, the United States fleet blockaded the ships of Vichy France. Internally, not only did the presence of the navy and the naval authority of Vichy France as the cause of the U.S. blockade lead to a lack of food on the exportimport outpost that was the island, but incidents of direct racism inflicted by the French sailors, as colonial occupiers, led also to an intensified sense of dispossession on the part of the islanders. This second effect was one that was common to all the still colonialized population groups of the Caribbean islands, whether Francophone, Anglophone, or Dutchspeaking, since it was based on the common exclusion from all powers of decision-making with respect to our fate in the context of the global conflagration of World War II, and therefore to the recognition that to be a colonial was precisely to be excluded from all autonomous processes of decision-making with respect to one's fate as a collectivity. There was a specificity, however to touch here on one of the major motifs of Glissant's discourse to the situation of Martinique, as distinct, for example, from my own parallel childhood experience in the then British colonial island of Jamaica. The population of Martinique found itself, willy-nilly, on the side of a France which, having had to accept German domination, was now both an ally to and a neocolony of a Germany determined to found the empire of its ThousandYear Reich on European "natives" in place of the series of primary non-European "natives " on whose subordination France, like several other European nation-states, had built hers. Although on the one hand for, British colonies such as Jamaica, however helpless to control events, there was a strong sense among the population as a whole that under all the British propaganda there was indeed a core truth which impelled their allegiances, this was not to be so in Martinique. The core truth in our case was that the delirium of the Nazi system of thought, which was based on the taking to a logical extreme of the social Darwinist discourse of "race" that had been put in place in the nineteenth century as the legitimating "magical thought" of that century's industrial mode of colonialism, would now have to be fought by colonized and colonizers alike. We therefore had the assurance, during the years 1940-44, that we were, as British subjects, on the side of the "good guys," on the side of an opening rather than a regressive dynamics of historical and cultural change. The situation of Martinique differed not only in the accidental sense of finding itself subordinated to collaborationist rather than to Resistance France, but also in a structural-existential sense; for the dual processes of intellectual and social assimilation specific to the Catholic French model of colonization

Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings

Abstract: This is clearly one of those books that not only enhances established work on the field but also initiates new ground by being the first comprehensive effort in \"literary criti cism where Latina writers of all these groups are considered simultaneously.\" The material in Breaking Boundaries is or ganized chronologically by group. The first section focuses on Chicana writing, since this was the first group to establish itself in the historical and literary scene. These writ ers are followed by Puerto Rican, Cuban and Latin Americans from other countries. Each section of the book opens with one of two \"testimonios\" written by selected writers which direct the attention of the reader to the biographical, experiential, socio historical, political and cultural aspects that inform their particular creative texts. These \"testimonios\" are then followed by critical essays on specific works, individual writers and/or ethnic group. Flanking this ordering we find an introductory article and a bibliog raphy as well as information on the contribu tors. Clearly the criteria for this book is to focus on established women writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, Nicholasa M?hr, Dolores Prida, Lourdes Casal and Margorie Agosin, as well as on lesser known ones and to provide a more natural connec tion between the writers conceptual realm and the analytical, evaluative tasks of critics. The editors of Breaking Boundaries envi sioned this text as a cooperative effort to encourage a better understanding of the nat ure of Latina Literary discourse. At the root of such a project lies the question of what specific aspects justify the studying of the various groups within the parameters of one single text. We need to ask if there is really so much in common. Although the editors do not claim that these groups form a ho mogenous body of writers, there is insis tence on the fact that the various groups actually share \"socio-historical realities that unite them in literary and political issues.\" The editors discuss with sensitivity and a broad perspective some of those common factors that unite the various groups. In \"At the Threshold of the Unnamed: Latina Lit erary Discourse in the Eighties,\" their intro ductory essay, the editors state that: \"As all of these processes of historical, political, ar tistic, cultural, literary, and feminist con sciousness indicate, the Latina writer is a woman who, first and foremost, recognizes her historical context as a Latina in the U.S.

Language in Literature

Abstract: An activity-based introduction to stylistics, this textbook explains some of the topics in literary linguistics and helps students in analysing written texts. How can you tell good writing the excellent, the brilliant and the ingenious from bad writing the weak, the banal and the confusing? By looking at the technique and the craft of writing, Language in Literature examines the ways in which language is organised to create particular meanings or effects. Covering a range of topics naming patterns, modality and evaluation, the structure of simple narratives, the recording of character speech and thought, the dynamics of dialogue, presuppositions and textual revision the book presents the structuring principles within the English language. Activities and end-of-chapter commentaries encourage a 'learning by doing' approach and equips the reader with the main linguistic terms necessary for the analysis of literary and nonliterary texts.

The Importance of Nietzsche: Ten Essays

Abstract: In this book, one of the most distinguished scholars of German culture collects his essays on a figure who has long been one of his chief preoccupations. Erich Heller's lifelong study of modern European literature necessarily returns again and again to Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche prided himself on having broken with all traditional ways of thinking and feeling, and once even claimed that he would someday be recognized for having ushered in a new millennium. While acknowledging Nietzsche's radicalism, Heller also insists on the continuity of the story in which he does indeed occupy a central place. By considering Nietzsche in relation to Goethe, Rilke, Wittgenstein, Yeats, and others, Heller shows the philosopher's ambivalence toward the tradition he inherited as well as his profound effect on the thought and sensibility of those who followed him. It is hardly an exaggeration to say, as Heller does in his first essay, that Nietzsche is to many modern writers and thinkers-including Mann, Musil, Kafka, Freud, Heidegger, Jaspers, Gide, and Sartre-what St. Thomas Aquinas was to Dante: the categorical interpreter of a world, which they contemplate imaginatively and theoretically without ever much upsetting its Nietzschean structure. Thus it is Nietzsche's thought, so pervasively present in the themes of modernity, that gives coherence and unity to Heller's essays. What emerges from them is that, despite his iconoclastic declarations and unorthodox philosophical practices, Nietzsche deals with the human spirit's persistent concerns. His questions remain urgent, and even the answers, in all their contradictoriness, possess the commanding force of his inquiry. An example is the incompatibility of the famous extremes, the teaching of the "Ubermensch" and the Eternal Recurrence of All Things. These cancel each other out and yet grow from the same intellectual and spiritual roots, as is shown lucidly and cogently by one of Heller's most forceful essays, "Nietzsche's Terrors: Time and the Inarticulate." In fathoming the depth of this contradiction, Heller at the same time reveals the importance of Nietzsche for those who seek to understand the wellsprings of the epoch's disquiet, turmoil, "and" creativity."

Journey Continued: An Autobiography

Abstract: This second part of Alan Paton's autobiography begins in 1948, the year of publication of his best-selling book \"Cry, the Beloved Country\" and the rise to power of the Afrikaner Nationalists, whose oppressive and racist policies Paton was to fight as a writer, leader of the Liberal Party and devoted Christian. The book continues to focus on Paton's literary and political life. He tells of the success of \"Cry, the Beloved Country\", including the making of a musical and film based on it; his subsequent writing, including biographies of J.H.Hofmeyer and Archbishop Geoffrey Clayton, and the novel \"Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful\". His involvement with the controversial Liberal Party, which he led during the stormy time of the Sharpeville massacre and afterwards, is remembered, as is a visit to the USA in the last days of McCarthyism and legal segregation, and acquaintances including Nelson Mandela, Trevor Huddleston, Patrick Duncan, Robert Sobukwe and Chief Albert Lutuli. The story ends in 1968, when the Liberal Party disbanded to avoid obeying the government's order to separate into racial parties, but an epilogue brings the reader up to the present day. The first part of the autobiography is \"Towards the Mountain\", (OUP, 1981).

Ernst Jünger : Leben und Werk in Bildern und Texten

Abstract: individual and collective level. His account of the Prodigal Son stands as the centerpiece of his significant collection, for in it he reveals with subdued pain his identification with this biblical figure as an eternal outsider. In her perceptive commentary Gisela Kraft points out that just because the author, who published his first poems in Sorbian a decade ago, writes here in the literary language of his GDR colleagues, this by no means makes Hexenbrennen a "German" book. Indeed, when Kraft asked Dyrlich which he would choose to read if offered a German and a Polish book, he opted for the Polish publication without hesitation. Whether the forceful immediacy wrought by Dyrlich's economical use of language marks the influence of his native Sorbian upon his German must be decided by someone who knows both languages and the author's work in them.