Download or read book Manifold Utopia written by Marc Delrez and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-10-01 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of Janet Frame's fiction addresses with unusual directness the Utopian momentum that underpins her concern with fundamental social issues, traditionally highlighted in existing criticism of her work. The idea behind this book is that Frame's critique of society, while it is offered for its own sake on one level, should not lead us to neglect the author's more speculative interest in an alternative conception of the human person. Her engagement in a species of experimental portraiture proves elusive, though, owing to an indirectness of approach that usually takes the form of thematic circumscription, rather than explicit representation. For example, the figure of the mute child, recurrent in her work, may well testify to a concern with the plight of the mentally ill; but on another level it also points to an envelope of intractable experience which it is the artist’s task to penetrate and explain. Such aspiration is inseparable from the search for a new medium of expression, felt to be necessary if one is to meet the challenge of apprehending the scope of pioneering knowledge. This close reading of the novels reveals that the alternative dimension of experience to be found in Frame’s novels is characterized by an intact capacity for remembering, or for imaginatively re-creating, eclipsed aspects of the present. Frame's view of Utopia thus turns out to be manifold: it is existential and ontological, linguistic and epistemological, but also historical and political. An unravelling of these intertwined strains then serves to clarify the complex question of Frame's post-colonial sensibility, which cannot be said to rely on a sense of rigid identity, whether national or otherwise.
Download or read book The Unharnessed World written by Cindy Gabrielle and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-06-18 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though New Zealand author Janet Frame (1924–2004) lived at a time of growing dissatisfaction with European cultural models, and though her (auto-)biography, fiction and letters all testify to the fact that a direct encounter between herself and Buddhism occurred, her work has, so far, never been examined from the vantage point of its indebtedness to Buddhism. It is of the utmost significance, however, that a Buddhist navigation of Frame’s texts should shed fresh light on large segments of the Framean corpus which have tended to remain obdurately mysterious. This includes passages centering on such themes as the existence of a non-dual world or a character’s sudden embrace of a non-ego-like self. Of equal significance is the conclusion one then draws that this unharnessed world which human beings are often unable to embrace has always been right under their nose, for, whenever the aspect of the intellect that filters perceptions into mutually excluding categories fails to function, he or she finds a place of subjective arrival in, and sees, this supposedly unknowable ‘beyond’. Thus, possibly against the grain of mainstream criticism, this study argues that Janet Frame constantly seeks ways through which the infinite and the Other can be approached, though not corrupted, by the perceiving self, and that she found in the Buddhist epistemology a pathway towards evoking such alterity.
Download or read book Frameworks written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Janet Frame’s work is notorious for the demands it makes on reader and critic. This collection of nine new essays by international Frame specialists draws on a range of critical frameworks to explore fresh ways of looking at Frame’s fiction, poetry, and autobiography. At the same time, the essays plug into the energy of Frame’s work to challenge our thinking within and beyond these frameworks. Frameworks offers a unique perspective on Frame studies today, showcasing its major concerns as well as heralding new Frame narratives for the decade ahead. Mindful of preceding Frame criticism, these essays use their contemporary vantage-point to recast seminal questions about the relationship between Janet Frame’s work and its critical contexts. Each of the essays makes a case for framing her work in a particular way, but all are characterized by self-reflexivity regarding their own critical practice and the relationship they assume between exegetical framework and Frame’s work. Underlying this practice, and contained within the pun of the title, are the elementary-sounding yet fundamental questions of Frame studies: How does Frame’s work work? And how do we work with her work?
Download or read book Janet Frame written by Claire Bazin and published by Northcote House Pub Limited. This book was released on 2011 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible close re-reading of Frame's novels and short stories from an autobiographical perspective. This study examines the whole of Janet Frame's output starting with the fiction (novels, short-stories and poems) before focusing on the two autobiographical novels, Owls do Cry and Faces in the Water, to end with the autobiographical trilogy, a sort of restorative prism inviting us to (re) read all her preceding works. It is the autobiography and its film version, An Angel at My Table (1990, directed by Jane Campion), that won her international fame. Frame's life is extraordinary, not only because she was spared a lobotomy by winning a prize for her collection of short stories, but also because writing from the 'rim of the farthest circle,' she provides food for thought for anyone interested in postcolonial and gender studies.
Download or read book Community in Twentieth Century Fiction written by P. Salvan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-01-19 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the imaginary construction and deconstruction of human communities in modern and contemporary fiction. Drawing on recent theoretical debate on the notion of community (Nancy, Blanchot, Badiou, Esposito), this collection examines narratives by Joyce, Mansfield, Davies, Naipaul, DeLillo, Atwood and others.
Download or read book Mnemopoetics written by Valérie Bada and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2008 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its very beginning, African American drama has borne witness to the creative power of the slaves to maintain their human dignity as well as to fashion a complex culture of survival. If the memory of slavery has always been at the heart of the African American theatrical tradition, it is the way in which it is processed and inscribed that has developed and is still changing. Through the close reading and socio-historical analysis of eight plays from 1939 to 1996, the author seeks to unravel the fluctuating patterns in the shaping of the theatrical memory of slavery long after its abolition. To do so, she defines the concept and practice of mnemopoetics as the making of memory through imagination as well as the critical approaches that decipher and interpret cultural productions of memory. As a constellation of processes akin to the fluidity of memory, mnemopoetics blends creative representation and critical exploration to suggest that the cultural creation of memory necessarily entails a self-reflexive involvement with its own interpretation. If slavery embodies the deep, foundational memory of America, African American drama represents the open, communal space where it becomes possible to convert the irretrievable nature of a vicarious past into the redeeming function of a collective memory.
Download or read book Pacific Islands Writing written by Michelle Keown and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2007 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with an overview of European representations of the Pacific, Michelle Keown presents a broad-ranging introduction to the postcolonial literatures of the Pacific from the late 1960s through to the new millennium, focusing mainly on writing in English, but also exploring the growing corpus of francophone and hispanophone Pacific writing.
Download or read book The Cross Cultural Legacy written by Gordon Collier and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-11-07 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume pays tribute to the formidable legacy of Hena Maes–Jelinek (1929–2008), a pioneering postcolonial scholar who was a professor at the University of Liège, in Belgium. Along with a few moving and affectionate pieces retracing the life and career of this remarkable and deeply human intellectual figure, the collection contains poems, short fiction, and metafiction. The bulk of the book consists of contributions on various areas of postcolonial literature, including the work of Wilson Harris, the ground-breaking writer to whom Hena Maes–Jelinek devoted much of her career. Other writers treated include Ben Okri, Leone Ross, Kamau Brathwaite, Jamaica Kincaid, Peter Carey, Murray Bail, Patrick White, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Dan Jacobson, Joseph Conrad, and Eslanda Goode Robeson. Caryl Phillips revisits his earlier reflections on the ‘European tribe’. There are wide-ranging essays analysing consanguineous authors, on such topics as Caribbean treatments of the Jewish Diaspora, Swiss-Caribbean authors, the contemporary Australian short story and the Asian connection, and ‘habitation’ in Australian fiction, as well as a searching examination of the socio-political fallout from the scandal of Australia’s ‘Stolen Generations’. Contributors are: Gordon Collier, Tim Cribb, Fred D'Aguiar, Geoffrey V. Davis, Jeanne Delbaere, Marc Delrez, Jean–Pierre Durix, Wilson Harris, Dominique Hecq, Marie Herbillon, Louis James, Karen King–Aribisala, Bénédicte Ledent, Christine Levecq, Alecia McKenzie, Carine Mardorossian, Peter H. Marsden, Alistair Niven, Annalisa Oboe, Britta Olinder, Christine Pagnoulle, Caryl Phillips, Lawrence Scott, Stephanos Stephanides, Klaus Stuckert, Peter O. Stummer, Petra Tournay–Theodotou, Daria Tunca, Cynthia vanden Driesen, Janet Wilson.
Download or read book Janet Frame in Focus written by Josephine A. McQuail and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-01-26 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Zealand author Janet Frame (1924–2004) during her lifetime published 11 novels, three collections of short stories, a volume of poetry and a children’s book. The details of her life—her tragic early years, her confinement in a psychiatric hospital and her miraculous reprieve—overshadow her work and she remains largely neglected by scholars. These essays focus on Frame’s autobiography, short stories and novels. Contributors from around the world explore a range of topics, including her mother’s Christadelphian faith, her relationships with two 20th century icons (William Theophilus Brown and John Money), and a view of Frame in the context of trauma studies. Two of the essays were presented at the 2014 Northeast Modern Language Association convention.
Download or read book Janet Frame written by Matthew Paul Pierre and published by Fairleigh Dickinson. This book was released on 2011-05-12 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Janet Frame: Semiotics and Biosemiotics in Her Early Fiction, Paul Matthew St. Pierre exploits the linguistic discipline of semiotics and the neurobiological discipline of biosemiotics to propose an original and dynamic reading of the first four works of fiction by New Zealand writer Janet Frame (1924-2004): The Lagoon: Stories (1951), Owls Do Cry (1957), Faces in the Water (1961), and The Edge of the Alphabet (1962). Opposing the prevailing reading of Frame's early fiction as autobiographical, deriving from her medical history, he argues her books are singular evocations of her astonishing imagination. His purpose is to fix this historical record and provide an alternative model for interpreting one of the 20th century's most stylistically demanding and rewarding writers. Semiotics and biosemiotics are his means for unlocking the early fiction and her later works to a polemical analysis focusing on language, sign transmissions, writing the body, and the biosemiotic self. In The Lagoon, Owls Do Cry, Faces in the Water, and The Edge of the Alphabet Frame produced what St. Pierre interprets as an original semiotic and biosemiotic modeling system that she applied throughout her oeuvre of twenty books, comprising eight story collections, seven novels, a book of poetry, a children's novel, and three volumes of autobiography. Using this modeling system, she designed her fiction as a visual verbal field consisting of still and moving images generated in the imagination, located in the brains and central nervous systems of her narrators, characters, and readers, and, primarily, of the author herself. The author discusses the significations of: 1) Frame's image-signs in water, glass, photographs, film, membranes, skin, and clothing; 2) her primary sign repertoire of objects, language, and human persons in the figures of blood, skin, and sun; 3) her body-signs, including those generated in the circulatory and neurological systems of all human organisms as biosemiotic living systems, in facial displays and body parts such as teeth, temples, eyes, skin, hair, nostrils, shoulders, knees, cheeks, vaginas, and prefrontal lobes; 4) her theories of the body, normalcy, and selfhood in the figures of urine, feces, blood, sweat, bile, saliva, phlegm, and semen, and body parts such as feet, hands, noses, teeth, lips, entrails, and wombs, in the context of social forces of dismemberment; 5) her biosemiotic system applied to her subsequent books, constituting her theory of human beings as sign-transmitting organisms, living systems doubled with and interchangeable with the closed sign system of her oeuvre. Janet Frame: Semiotics and Biosemiotics in Her Early Fiction is designed to appeal to the international audience of Frame readers and a specialized audience of semioticians and biosemioticians who investigate how sign transmissions function in visual verbal fields and related living systems.
Download or read book Postcolonial London written by John McLeod and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-08-02 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alongside the major postcolonial writers, the book provides analytical study of newer writers who have to date received little critical attention, eg. Linton Kwesi Johnson, Bernardine Evaristo, Fred D'Aguiar Postcolonial studies and contemporary fiction are among the most popular courses at undergraduate level Published to coincide with our major postcolonial studies promotions in 2004, including a full colour postcolonial mini-catalogue mailed to academics worldwide, and inserts at conferences in Canterbury (UK), Frankfurt (Germany) and Hyderabad (India) The book's relevance expands beyond London; the 'city' is a trendy topic in literary and cultural studies and this book uses theories of the metropolis to explore ideas of empire and the nation. uses theories of the metropolis to explore ideas of empire and the nation.
Download or read book Scenes of Intimacy written by Jennifer Cooke and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-05-09 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars from a range of critical perspectives explore representations of intimacy in contemporary writing, from fiction to autobiography.
Download or read book Life Writing and the End of Empire written by Emma Parker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-03-21 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dismantlement of the British Empire had a profound impact on many celebrated white Anglophone writers of the twentieth century, particularly those who were raised in former British colonial territories and returned to the metropole after the Second World War. Formal decolonisation meant that these authors were unable to 'go home' to their colonial childhoods, a historical juncture with profound consequences for how they wrote and recorded their own lives. Moving beyond previous discussions of imperial and colonial nostalgia, Life Writing and the End of Empire is the first critical study of white memoirists and autobiographers who rewrote their memories of empire across numerous life narratives. By focussing on these processual homecomings, Emma Parker's study asks what it means to be 'at home' in memories of empire, whether in the settler farms of Southern Rhodesia, or amidst the neon lights of Shanghai's International Settlement. These discussions trace the legacies of empire to the habitations and detritus of everyday life, from mansions and modest railway huts, to empty swimming pools, heirlooms, and photograph albums. Exploring works by Penelope Lively, J. G. Ballard, Doris Lessing, and Janet Frame, this study establishes new connections between authors usually discussed for their fiction, and who have been hitherto unrecognised as post-imperial life writers. Offering close, sustained analysis of autobiographies, memoirs, travel narratives, and autofictions, and identifying new subgenres such as 'speculative life writing', this book advances rich new readings of autobiographical narrative. By tracing the continuing importance of colonialism to white subjectivity, the role of imperial memory in Britain, and the ways that these unsettling forces move beneath the surface of modern and contemporary literature, this study offers new conceptual insights to the fields of life writing and postcolonial studies.
Download or read book The Frame Function written by Jan Cronin and published by Auckland University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Owls do Cry to The Carpathians, the novels of Janet Frame have challenged our understanding of what fiction does. In The Frame Function, Jan Cronin traces the operation of a prescriptive authorial presence within the novels to offer an engaging &‘inside&–out' guide to a great writer's work. Drawing on Frame's personal and professional correspondence and the dynamic between that Frame and the various Frames of the novels, Cronin explores key issues: Frame's relationship with her readers; the nature of the &‘difficulty' the novels present; and the questions of intentionality Frame's work forces us to address. Each chapter offers readers a tour of one or more Frame novels: how they work; how Frame writes; and the impact these fundamentals have on readers interpreting and engaging with her work. Readers of Frame's books frequently sense the presence of some kind of puzzle to be solved but can't quite distil its parameters. The Frame Function takes as its starting point this capacity of Frame's texts to lure the reader into looking for solutions while simultaneously deterring such behaviour. In crafting a portrait of Frame's compositional processes, Cronin provides new insights into the underlying relationship between prescriptiveness and elusiveness in Frame's work. The Frame Function is a guide for those who are intrigued, stimulated, sometimes baffled by Frame's powerful novels.
Download or read book Antipodean Childhoods written by Helga Ramsey-Kurz and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-05-15 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though obvious, the productiveness of combining the three concepts of childhood, otherness and the postcolonial has not inspired much academic inquiry so far. The essays assembled in this book make up for this omission and address aspects of growing up in Australia and New Zealand from various angles. They base their argument on the premise that, whether in settler, migrant or indigenous communities, children tend to be ascribed a space of their own, mostly outside but never independent of that of adults. How adults configure this space both practically and imaginatively, for instance in the arts, in adult and children’s literature, in film and photography, or in historical documents, is one of the questions answered in the process. How these configurations have developed with time and under the influence of specific historical circumstances is another. Thus, the individual papers are more than a contribution to the current (re-)discovery of the theme of childhood in European cultures in that Antipodean Childhoods remains centrally concerned with the cultural specificity of childhoods lived in Australia and New Zealand and with the theoretical relevance of this specificity to postcolonial literary, cultural and historical studies.
Download or read book Engaging with Literature of Commitment Volume 1 written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection ranges far and wide, as befits the personality and accomplishments of the dedicatee, Geoffrey V. Davis, German studies and exile literature scholar, postcolonialist (if there are ‘specialties’, then Australia, Canada, India, South Africa, Black Britain), journal and book series editor.... Themes covered include publishing in Africa, charisma in African drama, the rediscovery of apartheid-era South African literature, Truth and Reconciliation commissions, South African cinema, children’s theatre in England and Eritrea, and the Third Chimurenga in literary anthologies. Surveyed are texts from Botswana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. Writers discussed (or interviewed: Angela Makholwa) include Ayi Kwei Armah, Seydou Badian, J.M. Coetzee, Chielo Zona Eze, Ruth First, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Bessie Head, Ian Holding, Kavevangua Kahengua, Njabulo Ndebele, Lara Foot Newton, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o/Micere Githae Mugo, Sol Plaatje, Ken Saro–Wiwa, Mongane Wally Serote, Wole Soyinka, and Ed¬gar Wallace, together with essays on the artist Sokari Douglas Camp and the filmmaker Rayda Jacobs. Because Geoff’s commitment to literature has always been ‘hands-on’, the book closes with a selection of poems and an entertaining travelogue/memoir.
Download or read book The Lost Child in Literature and Culture written by Mark Froud and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-18 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an extensive study of the figure of the lost child in English-speaking and European literature and culture. It argues that the lost child figure is of profound importance for our society, a symptom as well as a cause of deep trauma. This trauma, or void, is a fundamental disruption of the structures that define us: self, history, and even language. This puts the figure of the child in context with previous research that the modern conception of ‘a child’ was formed alongside modern conceptions of memory. The book analyses the representation of the lost child, through fairy tales, historical oppression and in recent novels and films. The book then studies the connection of the lost child figure with the uncanny and its centrality to language. The book considers the lost child figure as an archetype on a metaphysical and philosophical level as well as cultural.
