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Contemporary works of art that remodel the canon not only create complex, hybrid and plural products but also alter our perceptions and understanding of their source texts. This is the dual process, referred to in this volume as “refraction”, that the essays collected here set out to discuss and analyse by focusing on the dialectic rapport between postmodernism and the canon. What is sought in many of the essays is a redefinition of postmodernist art and a re-examination of the canon in the light of contemporary epistemology. Given this dual process, this volume will be of value both to everyone interested in contemporary art—particularly fiction, drama and film—and also to readers whose aim it is to promote a better appreciation of canonical British literature.
Immigrants who travel and settle in foreign countries face challenges due to cultural differences or even deliberate segregation by dominant groups. In their attempt to negotiate their existence, some decide to stick to the culture of their mother nations and some stand in the middle, and blend some aspects of their mother culture and the new culture. Although immigrants who remain closer to their own cultures are easily spotted and relegated, they are assigned a place on the identity continuum, whereas immigrants who choose to stand in the middle run the danger of being neither this nor that, neither here nor there, and can undergo severe internal fragmentation. In this book, Cultural Hybridity and Fixity: Strategies of Resistance in Migration Literatures, Andrew Nyongesa delves into these two strategies of resistance and analyzes the merits and demerits of each with reference to Safi Abdi’s fiction.
There can never be literary growth in the contemporary world which is devoid of literary criticism, this is the backbone of literary theory. Literature is no longer a mere narration of stories, and prudent literary writers know that great literature is based on theoretical frameworks which give their works an edge in the intellectual world. In this book, Tintinnabulation of Literary Theory: Traversing Genres to Contemporary Experience, Andrew Nyongesa demonstrates how five theoretical frameworks, namely: Marxism, Feminism, Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Stylistic are applied to genres of literature. The last chapter shows how theory has moved away from the lecture hall to real life experience. The book is a practical guide to university students and tutors of literature in their undying desire to embrace Literary Criticism.
This book is response to the recent surge of formidable voices that consistently demean and attempt to reverse the gains of pan-Africanism. Besides questioning its relevance, these voices supplant essential tenets of pan-Africanism – Blackness, the narrative of Return, sanctity of the ancestral homeland, exposition of evils of colonialism and African Literature – with new postulations. These new suppositions deny race, accentuate onward migration and diminish the ancestral homeland to any ordinary city to globetrot. These voices liken any reminiscence of colonial evils to Afro-pessimism, pronounce African Literature dead on arrival and proceed to ‘substitute’ pan-Africanism through studies, which neglect pioneer and contemporary literary works, cultural productions, folklore, conversations on social media (blogs, Facebook, WhatsApp) and questionnaires to gauge their influence among Black peoples themselves. This study adopts a design that interrogates literary works, data from questionnaires and social media to determine the relevance and influence of pan-Africanism and the new paradigm.
This book likens writers’ incessant focus on racism, negative ethnicity, patriarchy and social stratification in societies to a naïve physician who prescribes analgesics to treat symptoms while the underlying cause of the disease seethes in the blood. In the same way, persons who consistently blame their reckless conduct and shabbiness miss the point if they do not transform the actual cause of the problem: the mind. While most literary scholars problematise gender disparities, racial and political othering, oppression, environment degradation, education matters, poor parenting and governance, they tend to disregard the root cause: modernism. This book finds a gap in this grey area to address the authentic cause of the symptoms that most literary writers and scholars treat. Pertinent modernist tenets such as bureaucracy, the nation state, systematisation and rationality, and dualism are at the heart of racism, corruption and other aforementioned symptoms. It is the contention of this study that postmodernism offers a comprehensive understanding of modernism to mitigate its effects on society.
Taking a critical, research-oriented perspective, this book explores the theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical connections between reading and teaching young adult literature in middle and secondary classrooms and adolescent identity development.
Nomadis a philosophical memoir, telling how Ayaan Hirsi Ali came to America in search of a new life, and the difficulties she faced in reconciling her two worlds. With vivid anecdotes and observations of people, cultures, and political debacles, this narrative weaves together Hirsi Ali's personal story -- including her reconciliation with her devout father who had disowned her when she denounced Islam -- with the stories of other women and men, high-profile and not, whom she encounters. With a deep understanding and intimate perspective of the situation of Muslim women and moderates in the world today and her singular, unwavering intellectual courage, Hirsi Ali offers her always notable, often controversial analysis of Islam vis a vis the superiority of Western democratic values.
This volume brings together essays that, individually and collectively, address the force of the literary text with regard to problematic identities. They work out of shared concerns with literary representations of this issue in different regions, nations and communities that often prove divided; they pursue questions related to textual identity, where the literary text itself is contested internally, or in its generic and historical relations. In sum, these studies actively test identity, as social or literary concept, discovering in difference the very condition of a useful, if paradoxical, sense of personal or textual coherence. What happens to us when we move between different cultures ...
Literary critics have focused on the nexus between literature and the ecological environment. As a mirror of society, literature encapsulates the natural ecosystem to address environmental degradation as one of the major issues being confronted by communities the world over. Individual literary critics have demonstrated how literary writers have deliberately presented the impact of Mother Nature on the lives of characters. However, most critics have hardly demonstrated the essential role of the ecological environment on the political, social and religious attributes of human life.in Re-centring Mother Earth: Ecological Reading of Contemporary Works of Fiction, Andrew Nyongesa investigates the role of Mother Nature in the political, cultural, religious aspects of human life in contemporary novels. Using eco-criticism, the study challenges homocentric attributes of literature and shows how the ecological environment affects all facets of human life.
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