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This research deals with one of the topics in the postmodern novel, it is a topic beyond the narrative, standing at one of his appearances (the author), because of its great role in the performance of the narrative process within the artwork, we have discussed its manifestations in seven novels from the works of the Iraqi novelist Saad Muhammad Rahim, who practices metanarrative techniques extensively, in an analytical manner, it traces the phenomenon, according to the most prominent researchers interested in the novel beyond the narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although most scholarship reads Ousmane Sembene's oeuvre according to the dynamic between colonizer and colonized, this article examines his 1981 novel, Le Dernier de l'empire [The Last of the Empire], through an expanded optic: the global Cold War. The trope's complexity manifests in, for example, references to the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and the Vietnam War, as well as to political instability on the African continent. Sembene demonstrates how the Cold War was not simply an American and Soviet affair through repeated use of the catalogue as literary device. In so doing, the novel interpolates Third Worldism into the Senegalese context. Aesthetically, Sembene blends griot storytelling techniques, flashback (analepsis), and Soviet montage to critique neocolonialism in the postcolony. The narrative depicts the threat of military coup to the succession of power according to how postcolonial actors interpret the Cold War's intellectual and geographic multipolarity. In sum, the novel creolizes the Cold War in both content and form., INTRODUCTION This article's focus is the Cold War as a complex trope in Le Dernier de l'empire [The Last of the Empire], which was published by L'Harmattan in 1981. The [...]

In this essay, I discuss Flora Nwapa's novel Efuru with an intent to continue Obioma Nnaemeka's critique of the problematic tradition/modernity world-view. Using Efuru as a counterexample, I show the ways in which Nwapa, by narrating the life of a common Igbo woman, enables a reading of women in her culture as active agents of change. Her representation of Igbo women's agency, seen most clearly in the protagonist Efuru's pragmatic resistance to her constraining conditions, is what elevates the text to universal relevance and thus transcends the Euro/Americentric tradition/modernity paradigm. I draw on Edward Said's opposition between vision and narrative to first discuss how Nwapa's dynamic narrative counters an essentialist reading of Igbo cultural tradition and women. Next, using Raymond Williams's idea of practical consciousness, I focus on the cultural implications of Nwapa's narrative. I argue that Efuru's spontaneous resistance to social pressures is indicative of an ongoing cultural change. Finally, I conclude that Efuru transcends the narrow tradition/modernity paradigm because it accurately represents the many challenges facing women in the wider postcolonial world., INTRODUCTION Flora Nwapa was the first Igbo woman writer to publish novels in English. In her first novel, Efuru (1966), she reconstructs her native Igbo society under British colonial rule [...]

In The Arcades Project (1927-40), Walter Benjamin gave special, albeit scattered, attention to the flaneur, sketching a literary evolution from bohemian idler of urban myth, to observer driven by dogged curiosity (Poe), to consummate tracker and reader of signs (Cooper). Extending the topographies traversed by the flaneur-as-detective, this essay explores Afropolitan reincarnations in The Hour of the Red God (Crompton 2014) and Children of the Street (Quartey 2011), set in African megalopolises, scenes of conflicting aspirations and shifting temporalities and subjectivities. Informed by theoretical insights forwarded by Nuttall and Deleuze and Gautarri, this approach encourages more nuanced critical discussions of the genre conventions and narrative strategies at play in the growing number of African urban crime novels (Darko, Braithwaite, Ngugi) and other metropolitan-centered texts., There's a lot of shoe leather involved in writing a mystery-- people are walking through streets. A mystery takes a lot of high-minded ideas and puts them on the ground. [...]

Beckett warned against the neatness of identification. Yet the dangers of conflation are often courted--both in the fictional worlds themselves where suffering is at a constant, and also in the sometimes overly-familiar narratives of surrounding scholarship. Given this conflict, how does humiliation--and responses to it--define Beckett's individual 'creatures'? In Molloy, despite the many likenesses between the title character and his near-doppelganger, humiliation manifests as an ontologically determining phenomenon that disallows the conflation and consolidation of private suffering. Alongside the many instances of wretchedness and abuse, the novel quietly posits humility as ethical imperative when approaching the suffering of others. Keywords: Samuel Beckett / Molloy / ethics / humiliation / humility, In July 1946, Les Temps modernes published part of Beckett's short story, 'Suite.' Simone de Beauvoir had not understood, nor did she particularly care, that the piece was incomplete or [...]

ORATORY AND RHETORIC IN J.R.R. TOLKIEN'S FICTION play a critical part in the world he creates: they advance the narratives within his novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the [...]

In this article, I read the postcolonial Bildung that Ian Holding's protagonist undergoes in Of Beasts and Beings in the context of Zimbabwe's policy of reconciliation. On becoming aware of his whiteliness, this character, prompted by shame, writes a narrative in which he projects himself into the position of a black person. I argue that this act of imaginative identification may be read as the white protagonist's attempt to reconcile with his black compatriots, but also show that the form of reconciliation here involved is dialectical in nature rather than assimilative. Thus conceived, reconciliation places the two races in a dialectical relationship that posits the possibility of their sublation and with it the attainment of a truly postcolonial condition. I, however, go on to argue that the novel self-reflexively questions its representation of this post-racial state by acknowledging its own implication in colonial history. Through a critique of its shameful complicity with this history, it casts doubt on the ability of the sympathetic imagination to enable a transcendence of the discourses of whiteness. Finally, I contend that the novel's desire for transcendence, despite its awareness of its implication in colonial history, invests it with an ambivalence that allows it to negotiate the problem of the shamefulness of white, postcolonial writing., I After independence in 1980, the Zimbabwean government adopted a policy of national reconciliation aimed at resolving the differences and ending the separation between the previously colonized black people and [...]

Destructive and destroyed bodies occupy a prominent position in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novels Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun. In this essay, I examine the author's representation of violent acts like murder and rape and the ethical implications of her rejection of narrative closure. I argue that the author's refusal to pass judgment on her characters constitutes a deliberate rhetorical move intended to create unease in her readers. My dual focus on bodies that are being violated or destroyed and those that carry out the violation and destruction allows me to transcend the perpetrator/victim dichotomy that continues to be an essential feature of postcolonial studies as well as trauma literature. As I will try to show, Adichie's avoidance of judgment illustrates the ethical imperative behind her literary vision., In the course of the Biafran War (1967-70), between one and three million men, women, and children lost their lives, the majority of them Igbo (Falola and Heaton 180). As [...]

This paper examines a number of African-authored narratives (novels and film) in the light of recent thinking about futurism and the role of speculative fiction as a means of envisioning the future. Uppinder Mehan, coeditor of the first ever anthology of 'postcolonial science fiction and fantasy,' So Long Been Dreaming, notes that postcolonial writing has rarely 'pondered that strange land of the future' and warns, 'If we do not imagine our futures, postcolonial peoples risk being condemned to be spoken about and for again' (Mehan 270). Kodwo Eshun, in a seminal essay, expands on this to argue that, while the 'practice of countermemory as ... an ethical commitment to history, the dead and the forgotten' has traditionally relegated futurism to the sidelines of black creativity, this has been progressively challenged by 'contemporary African artists ... [for whom] understanding and intervening in the production and distribution of this dimension constitutes a chronopolitical act' (292). The paper proposes that this chronopolitical act (what in literature we now call speculative fiction) has its roots in African modes of storytelling that draw on myth, orality, and indigenous belief systems that lend themselves to the invention of personal mythologies, the rewriting of history in the light of future realities, and the use of extra-realist or magical phenomena as part of the everyday. Since these elements characterize many novels not thought of as speculative, this suggests that futurism has been a strain in African writing from its inception. The turn from mythic revisioning to speculative fiction as a distinct and recognizable genre in the 21st century has notably been embraced by women writers such as Nnedi Okorafor and Lauren Beukes, in whose work gender/femininity is a determinant in the projection of imagined futures. The paper examines how speculative narrative strategies in a range of texts are brought to bear on specific historical situations on the African continent (those characterized, for example, by genocide, civil war, cross-continental migration, urban dereliction, xenophobia, violence, and the occult) and the potential futures to which they point. The paper argues, therefore, that such narratives, rather than being relegated to the category of fantasy, deserve attention as key indicators of futuristic thinking., HISTORY OF A GENRE The social realist strain of much Anglophone African literature that has, since the inaugural moment of Things Fall Apart (1958), dominated the landscape and shaped critical [...]

Ian McEwan's Atonement re-traces the development of twentieth-century fiction from modernist amorality to postmodern relativism, incorporating their shared acknowledgements of the subjectivity of narrative. However, the novel both draws upon and moves beyond these modes of subjectivity as part of an ethically committed exploration of memory and history. On the one hand, McEwan's writer-figure, Briony, fails to grapple ethically with historical memory, preferring consolation to the real historical record. McEwan's novel itself, in containing Briony's work within a measure of critical distance, does not offer consolation. Rather, it creates an experience in which readers must move beyond Briony's shortcomings and toward a more nuanced acceptance of history's traumas, of the damages of war, and sexual violence: a way to truly do justice to historical memory. Keywords: Atonement / Ian McEwan / narrative / ethics / consolation / history, The narrative of Ian McEwan's Atonement (2001) opens by evoking high modernist fiction, exploring cognition, memory, the textures of a single day, and the country house setting as a site [...]

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Later: My Life at the Edge of the World by Paul Lisicky Gray wolf Press. 240 pages, $16. THROUGHOUT his career. Paul Lisicky has moved effortlessly between fiction and memoir. [...]

Delayed Rays of a Star by Amanda Lee Koe Doubleday. 383 pages, $27.95 WHO AMONG US has not wanted to see inside the lives of the most glamorous or intriguing [...]

In this paper, we will provide insights into how much of Hemingway's life is present in his novels. We have focused on some of his novels, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Moveable Feast, The Old Man and the Sea, in which he wrote about events he experienced or participated in like World War I, World War II, the Spanish Civil War etc., places he visited or went to like Italy, Paris, Spain, Cuba, Africa etc., people he knew or met in his life through whose representations he transmitted his own emotional state. In his novels, we also read about bullfighting, hunting, fishing, safaris, skiing, and all other sports that were so familiar to Hemingway. Written in very realistic lines and a simple style to masterfully combine fact and fiction, the novels can be read as factography since they collect bits and pieces from the past to create narratives that would lead the reader towards a true understanding of reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature offers the opportunity to encounter worlds beyond one’s own circumstances, environment, and situation. As an intercultural phenomenon, literary critique and analysis without borders can only be achieved by recognising cultural borders. Reading the literature of different cultures opens literary discourses to cross-cultural dialogue, but for too long, the lack of Indigenous literature within Australian literary discourses stymied the social potential of this intercultural phenomenon. Pressure from the global literary community has necessitated a vast shift of white consciousness to actively embrace narratives of different cultural dimensions, and novels that highlight cultural borders have become a key feature of Australian literature. Invisible literary borders have become apparent through exposure to the once silent voices that now emphasise messages of difference. Indigenous writers including Alexis Wright, Sally Morgan, Kim Scott, Jackie Huggins, Anita Heiss, Larissa Behrendt and Alice Nannup have opened reader consciousness to a broad scope of Indigenous perspectives. Within the arena of literary theories, the writer, reader and novels themselves have all had moments of glory, and while particular texts or authors have been immortalised, others have slipped into oblivion. Through the first person narrative of a non-Indigenous woman, this paper reveals how an intercultural literary experience revealed the restrictions of standard literary critique practices and inspired the creation of a relational discourse to engage with Indigenous voices as part of a methodological process. This intercultural literary process has the potential to inspire cultural awareness through acceptance and understanding of difference to overcome cultural unconsciousness. Such development has the capacity to destabilise invisible borders embedding lasting change in the consciousness of Australian readers and provide a foundational and fundamental step toward sustainable outcomes for Indigenous people.

There is a substantial literature theorizing ways that fictional narrative informs how identity is constructed and experienced in day-to-day life. However, there has been very little research on the ways that constructions of disability in fictional literature have influenced, or been influenced by policy discourse. This study takes some preliminary steps toward an interdisciplinary analysis of literary and policy discourses over the course of Ontario's institutional cycle in order to explore the nature of the relationship between constructions of mental disability in novels and social policy. A snowball sample of novels containing characters with mental disabilities was refined to a smaller sample published within the originally identified phases of this institutional cycle: between 1839 and 2009. Findings from the literary analysis identified an additional phase within the original institutional cycle. Also, the finding that policy rhetoric extolling the advantages of deinstitutionalization are not affirmed in novels published within the reform phase of the cycle (1960-1986) suggests that the social inclusion of people of with mental disabilities is far from assured in a post-institutional era. The research findings documented in this report support a contention that ongoing exploration of relationships between policy and literary constructions of identity may help explain other historical social policy patterns or cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]