Book•
The Politics of Postmodernism
01 Jan 1989-
TL;DR: In this article, the postmodernist representation is de-naturalized the natural, Photographic discourse, Telling Stories: fiction and history, Re-presenting the past: 'total history' de-totalized, Knowing the past in the present, The archive as text.
Abstract: General editor's preface. Acknowledgements. 1. Representing the postmodern: What is postmodernism? Representation and its politics, Whose postmodernism? Postmodernity, postmodernism, and modernism. 2. Postmodernist representation: De-naturalizing the natural, Photographic discourse, Telling Stories: fiction and history. 3. Re-presenting the past: 'Total history' de-totalized, Knowing the past in the present, The archive as text. 4. The politics of parody: Parodic postmodern representation, Double-coded politics, Postmodern film? 5. Text/image border tensions: The paradoxes of photography, The ideological arena of photo-graphy, The politics of address 6. Postmodernism and feminisms: Politicizing desire, Feminist postmodernist parody, The private and the public. Concluding note: some directed reading. Bibliography. Index.
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TL;DR: McGuinness's Someone Who's Watch Over Me as mentioned in this paper is a play about three bollocks in a cell in Lebanon with three characters: an Englishman, an Irishman and an American.
Abstract: as one of its characters observes ruefully, Frank McGuinness’s Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me has all of the ingredients of a bad joke: “There were three bollocks in a cell in Lebanon. An Englishman, an Irishman and an American” (17). One of the three “bollocks” (the American) is a doctor; another (the Irishman) is a journalist; the third (the Englishman) is a professor of Old English literature. Together, they have been taken hostage by a group of terrorists whose motives they cannot fathom and whose eventual plans for them they hardly dare to ponder. Hamstrung as far as movement is concerned, as they are chained to a wall, and oppressed by boredom, the prisoners are slaves to the whims of an absent and inscrutable force. In short, Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me bears an unmistakable resemblance to Waiting for Godot, as Frank Rich pointed out in a peevish review of the New York production: “Not even Beckett,” wrote Rich, “always succeeded in keeping plays about boredom from being boring. And Mr. McGuinness, if a charming writer in spurts, is no Beckett” (13). Yet the situation that McGuinness dramatizes is recognizable as a horrifically common late-twentieth-century phenomenon, and it is in this respect that Rich’s review misses the point. McGuinness mobilizes the Beckettian predicament in the service of a play that is deeply conscious of its political and historical horizons. It stages the “realities” of the so-called New World Order by representing the old world antagonists—Irish and English—in the company of their new world accomplice, the American. Beset by complex postcolonial relationships and locked in endless games, the men are held captive by an invisible “Third World” that they barely attempt to understand. Thus, Someone teases with the possibility of what might be called absurdist allegory, while also resisting the allegorizing impulse with its
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Journal Article•
1 citations
04 Oct 2018
TL;DR: A satire of the historical novel is presented in this paper, where the authors argue that the fictionalization of history and the transformation of its discourse are formulated from a perspective deeply rooted in modernity, and the democratic project extrapolated from these novels is limited to a mere reorganization of traditional discourses that persistently excludes groups of non-European heritage from the national project.
Abstract: After the fall of the last dictatorship in Argentina, the historical novel has undergone profound transformations encouraging literary critics to associate it with the process of the redemocratization of the region. Indeed, the genre can be seen to express an important political dimension promoting democracy, diversity, and inclusion. It can, on occasion, rewrite national history and include new and often unorthodox perspectives on the past, thereby rescuing traditionally marginalized groups from oblivion. However, the fictionalization of history and the transformation of its discourse are formulated from a perspective deeply rooted in modernity, and the democratic project extrapolated from these novels is limited, therefore, to a mere reorganization of traditional discourses that persistently excludes groups of non-European heritage from the national project. The short novel El placer de la cautiva by Leopoldo Brizuela, analyzed in this article, offers a parody of the genre that draws on the disc...
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01 Dec 1990
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors define ecofeminism as an insistence "on some version of the world as active subject, not as resource to be mapped and appropriated" and use the expression "theatre ecology" on their website.
Abstract: Preface 1 Eco-feminism seeks to equate the oppression of women with the exploitation of nature. Donna Haraway, for example, defines ecofeminism as an insistence “on some version of the world as active subject, not as resource to be mapped and appropriated.” Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991), 199. Interestingly, the Calgary women’s theatre company Urban Curvz also uses the expression “theatre ecology” on its website.
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TL;DR: The authors argue that earlier texts written in English may be as, if not more sophisticated than later ones if read within a national context, and examine three novels from Southeast Asian countries where English has a contested presence within a multilingual environment, F. Sionil Jose's My Brother, My Executioner, Lloyd Fernando's Scorpion Orchid (Malaysia, 1976), Goh Poh Seng's If We Dream Too Long (Singapore, 1972).
Abstract: Models describing the use of the English language in postcolonial literary texts are often progressivist, moving from imitation of colonial models to a return to indigenous subject matter, and finally to a fluent appropriation of English within new national and – increasingly – transnational contexts. This paper argues a contrary position: that earlier texts written in English may be as, if not more, sophisticated than later ones if read within a national context. Examining three novels from Southeast Asian countries where English has a contested presence within a multilingual environment, F. Sionil Jose's My Brother, My Executioner (The Philippines, 1973), Lloyd Fernando's Scorpion Orchid (Malaysia, 1976), Goh Poh Seng's If We Dream Too Long (Singapore, 1972), it observes how a language inextricably linked to struggles over class, modernity, and culture enables exploration of specific contradictions in national projects. Rather than being seen as markers on a road to representational mastery, such novels...
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