Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1852694
Yanbin Kang
Considering assistance ‘the finest of Joys’ (Fr1729), Dickinson singularly espouses withdrawing or withholding giving, regarding at times ‘leaving alone’ as an essential aspect of perfect assistance. This essay offers a reading of several of Dickinson’s poems that relate to the ethics of withholding: including ‘To offer brave assistance’ (Fr492), ‘We grow accustomed to the Dark -’ (Fr428), ‘I rose - because He sank -’ (Fr454), and ‘It came his turn to beg -’ (Fr1519), arguing that Dickinson’s idiosyncratic non-service stems from a creative conversation with the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1852688
Ö. Öktem
In this paper, I focus on an offstage character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Claribel, the Neapolitan princess who is given to the King of Tunis by her father King Alonso in an arranged marriage. First, I emphasize the significance of this union in terms of the sexual and political dynamics of the play. Drawing attention to the exchange value of women in establishing hierarchies or alliances between groups in patriarchal societies, I argue that Claribel’s miscegenated union with the African king undermines the play’s overconfident postcolonial interpretations based on the Prospero-Caliban relationship. Reading the play against the historical and political conditions in the Mediterranean, which is the play’s topography, in the second part of the essay, I speculate on the young princess’s possible future in Tunis. Claribel’s story is suggestive of the hundreds of Christian maidens that populated the Islamic harems in this period. While most of these women were acquired through abduction, not through exogamy, their stories and the esteem and power they attained in Muslim royal families may be helpful in envisaging a destiny for Claribel.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1852691
Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak
Although the genres assembled in Ivan Vladislavić’s The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories have been discussed more than once, the collection encourages further enquiry and diverse comparisons with experimental fiction. This essay, drawing on the writer’s choice and stylistic tendency to hover on the verges of fiction and non-fiction, proposes to re-view the hybrid material of the volume as a collection of paratexts immersed in a rich history of paratextual writing. Vladislavić’s spectrum of inspiration is broad, and several of its sources are mentioned explicitly in The Loss Library (Laurence Sterne, François Rabelais and Jorge Luis Borges), but the discussion that follows refers only to two collections: A Perfect Vacuum: Perfect Reviews of Nonexistent Books and Imaginary Magnitude, both by Stanisław Lem. The essay argues that the decision to withdraw from either mainstream or experimental literature into paratextual writing is aesthetically and politically meaningful. The withdrawal entails a spectrum of consequences involving the assemblage and leporello-like architecture of the collection, a typically paratextual emphasis on transition, an obliteration of borders between the text and the extratextual, as well as a notable emphasis on communication. Additionally, a multiplicity of voices taken from everyday life, resulting in a proliferation of focalizers, and the politics of pronouns, including the plurality of the first-person narrative, to name but a few, create a sense of community, inviting the reader to participate in the creative process. Instead of authorship as authority, instruction and guidance, the collection proposes a sincerity of communication and tenderness on the part of the narrator.
尽管伊万·弗拉迪斯拉维奇（Ivan Vladislavić）的《失落的图书馆》（the Loss Library）和《其他未完成的故事》（Other Unfinished Stories）中汇集的流派已经被讨论过不止一次，但该系列鼓励进一步探究，并与实验小说进行多样化的比较。本文借鉴了作者在小说和非小说边缘徘徊的选择和风格倾向，建议将该卷的混合材料重新视为一个沉浸在丰富的文本写作历史中的文本集。弗拉迪斯拉维奇的灵感范围很广，《失落图书馆》（The Loss Library）中明确提到了其中的几个来源（劳伦斯·斯特恩（Laurence Sterne）、弗朗索瓦·拉贝莱（François Rabelais）和豪尔赫·路易斯·博尔赫斯（Jorge Luis Borges。本文认为，从主流文学或实验文学中退出到副文本写作的决定在美学和政治上都是有意义的。撤回带来了一系列后果，包括集合和leporello式的建筑，典型的对过渡的副文本强调，文本和文本外之间边界的消除，以及对沟通的显著强调。此外，日常生活中的多种声音，导致焦点人物的激增，代词的政治性，包括第一人称叙事的多样性，创造了一种社区感，邀请读者参与创作过程。该集没有将作者作为权威、指导和指导，而是提出了叙述者真诚的沟通和温柔。
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1857117
Zhiyong Mo
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1852697
J. Kosgei
This paper presents an analysis of Valerie Cuthbert’s The Great Siege of Fort Jesus (1970) by interrogating the relationship between its historical sources and its bias and omissions. Written for young adults, the novel engages with histories of the Kenyan coast during the 16th and 17th centuries. Using this text as a lens permits more general reflections on writers’ use of sources and how their choices shape the historical novels that emerge. I examine Cuthbert’s sources to determine which she adopts, what revisions she undertakes and which she neglects entirely. I conclude that the history Cuthbert relies on is notably one-sided, amounting to misrepresentation with potentially detrimental political consequences. Both her sources and the novel that emerges from them, I conclude, implicate and inscribe specific ideological positions tied to a specific arrangement of power.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1852683
Catherine Addison
Woman at Point Zero, by Nawal El Saadawi, has been neglected by African feminist commentary, probably because of its radicalism. 20th-century African feminisms, under different names and descriptions, generally advocated a moderate approach to gender relations, refusing to exclude or stigmatize men. However, a change is underway in the attitudes of younger African feminists, especially in South Africa, as the recent #MenAreTrash and #AmINext hashtags and protests about rape culture have demonstrated. The protagonist of Saadawi’s novel, Firdaus, who discovers her true vocation in the action of killing a man, matches and outstrips the anger of these younger feminists. So radical is Woman at Point Zero that it appears to advocate androcide as a response to patriarchy, which, to Firdaus, represents multiple types of abuse and injustice, including capitalism. This paper explores degrees of feminist radicalism as well as developments in African feminist thought, before considering Woman at Point Zero as an example of the radical extreme whose time may have come. The novel exists, if not as a provocation to direct action, at least as a terrible warning to men – and members of other genders – and hence as a trigger of radical change.
Nawal El Saadawi的《零点的女人》一直被非洲女权主义评论所忽视，可能是因为它的激进主义。20世纪的非洲女权主义者，以不同的名字和描述，普遍主张对性别关系采取温和的态度，拒绝排斥或污蔑男性。然而，正如最近关于强奸文化的#MenAreTrash和#AmINext标签和抗议活动所表明的那样，年轻的非洲女权主义者的态度正在发生变化，尤其是在南非。萨达维小说的主人公费尔道斯在杀人中发现了自己的真正使命，她与这些年轻女权主义者的愤怒相匹配，并超越了他们。《零点女人》是如此激进，以至于它似乎主张将杀雄作为对父权制的回应，而对费尔道斯来说，父权制代表了包括资本主义在内的多种虐待和不公正。本文探讨了女权主义激进主义的程度以及非洲女权主义思想的发展，然后将《零点的女人》作为一个激进极端的例子，其时代可能已经到来。这部小说的存在，如果不是对直接行动的挑衅，至少是对男性和其他性别成员的可怕警告，因此也是彻底变革的导火索。
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1852693
L. Wright
Set during the Anglo-Boer War, The Hero is the story of a young man’s rebellion against the mores of fin de siècle England. It offers a fierce critique of military heroism, anticipating by some years the drastic demolition of military idealism that was to follow WWI. Ambiguous off-stage soldierly heroics, under the big skies of South Africa, take the novel far beneath the gently comic surface of life in Little Primpton to probe fundamental questions about human nature: war and sex, politics and combat, mating and marriage. Published in 1901, Maugham never permitted this novel to be republished. No reason was given, but this article proffers an explanation presenting the novel as a revealing autobiographical fable that establishes the philosophical roots of Maugham’s emerging aesthetic.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1852686
C. Stobie
Two speculative novels, which were recently published in South Africa, are analyzed in this article as they reveal forms of precarity in various African settings, and they imaginatively portray forms of conviviality to offset or transcend political and social oppression. The Book of Malachi by T.C. Farren was published in 2019 and The Theory of Flight by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu in 2018. These works are particularly pertinent to current public debate and outrage in South Africa about recurring outbreaks of xenophobia and the prevalence of gender-based violence, rape and femicide. I begin by providing a brief overview of the novels before expanding on my theoretical perspective, combining African and Western work. In the heart of the paper, I examine each of my primary texts in turn, arguing that, in these examples of speculative fiction, precarity and conviviality are presented as intimately connected concepts that simultaneously highlight the effects of oppression, violence and trauma, while they portray interpersonal and transcultural connections enacting hard-won empathy, generosity and courage as hopeful antidotes to pessimism, despair and defeatism.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1852685
Deena Dinat
This article theorizes the relationship between the concepts of national time and national literature in contemporary South African fiction. Contemporary South African literary criticism has largely understood South African literature as existing in the same concept of temporality as the nation-state itself. I argue here that this temporal conflation limits the possibilities for reading South African literature after the end of apartheid by reinforcing the nation-state’s institutional claims to the experience of time itself; this conflation thus inadvertently reproduces the power of the nation-state over the literary. I turn to Imraan Coovadia’s 2014 Tales of the Metric System, a novel obviously concerned with notions of standardization, rationalization and measurement, as an example of a text that disarticulates the competing claims to time itself. While it mimics the nation-state’s claim to homogenous, empty time, the novel simultaneously populates its historical national narrative with what Partha Chatterjee calls the heterogenous time of the nation, and thus suggests the possibilities for reading South African literature through multiple and contested temporalities.
本文从理论上分析了当代南非小说中民族时间概念与民族文学的关系。当代南非文学批评在很大程度上把南非文学理解为与民族国家本身存在于相同的暂时性概念中。我在这里认为，这种时间上的合并限制了阅读种族隔离结束后南非文学的可能性，因为它强化了民族国家对时间本身经验的制度要求;因此，这种合并无意中再现了民族国家对文学的权力。我转向Imraan Coovadia在2014年出版的《公制系统的故事》(Tales of the Metric System)，这本小说显然是关于标准化、合理化和测量的概念，作为一个文本的例子，它消解了对时间本身的竞争主张。虽然它模仿了民族国家对同质、空的时间的主张，但小说同时用帕塔·查特吉(Partha Chatterjee)所说的民族的异质时间填充了其历史民族叙事，从而暗示了通过多重和有争议的时间来阅读南非文学的可能性。
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Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2020.1852707
James Hodapp
Recently, literary critics have grown concerned that serious literary criticism is slowly being replaced by a literary culture of endorsement that has proliferated online. They fear that ‘hot takes,’ listicles and simplified systems of ranking books (‘buy or don’t buy,’ star ratings and so on) are gaining cultural currency while serious analysis and critique is going out of style. One critic, Christian Lorentzen, even wonders: ‘What if a generation of writers grew up with nobody to criticize them?’ At the same time, reviews, interviews and other content concerning African literature have become widely available online. In particular, African literary podcasts have become increasingly popular and influential. By examining the nature of paratextuality, via Gérard Genette, in reference to African literary podcasts, this article examines whether African literary podcasts are contributing to this decline, offering audio equivalents of traditional reviews or creating an innovative mode of critique. It concludes that African literary podcasts are sui generis and provide both substantive critique and an outlet for voices traditionally marginalized from mainstream literary discourse.
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