Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
21
result(s) for
"Melas, Natalie"
Sort by:
Merely Comparative
When one has so general and comprehensive an intention one can at first do nothing. —Erich Auerbach Comparison was once supremely a matter of method. ernest renan in his pensées de 1848 called comparison “the great instrument of criticism” (296). Echoing the sentiment some two decades later, Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett asserted that “we may call consciously comparative thinking the great glory of our nineteenth century” (76). Comparison had been extensively deployed as an analytic tool before the nineteenth century—to produce, for instance, the massive taxonomies that lay the foundations for natural history and in the gathering of the concordances and chronologies of universal histories. What sharply distinguished the comparative method, what made it in effect a specific method, for nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century scholars, by their own account, was the principle of development. This underlying temporal unity allowed for the most disparate entities to be set into meaningful relation. In words from an 1871 lecture by an early and enthusiastic proponent of comparative literature: [T]he method in which this study can be best pursued is that which is pursued in anatomy, in language, in mythology…, namely, the comparative. The literary productions of all ages and peoples can be classed, can be brought into comparison and contrast, can be taken out of their isolation as belonging to one nation, or one separate era, and be brought under divisions as the embodiment of the same aesthetic principles, the universal laws of mental, social and moral development (Shackford 42)
Journal Article
LOSING CÉSAIRE
\"7 There is a selfloathing encounter with a black man on a tram, memorably echoed in Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks; there is even a love poem: \"come water ovaries where the future wiggles its little heads / come wolves who pasture in the wild orifices of the body and the time when in the ecliptic inn my moon meets your sun. Receiving Négritude Emerging in the ferment of diaspora encounters and black political movements in Paris during the 1930s, Négritude for Césaire owed a great deal to his discovery of African American literature as well as to his encounter with Africans.10 Published in its initial formin an obscure review in late 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II, the Notebook did not begin to find its audience until the late forties and early fifties, when it was published in significantly expanded form. Following his lead and also raising the ante, the Créolistes (chiefly Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant) after him develop a localist postcolonial aesthetic that strenuously contests the heroic representational disposition of the poet in Césaire and faults him for ignoring the value of local culture and the Creole language.Moreover, a substantial body of scholarship around Césaire's poetry and to a lesser extent his plays arose in the U.S. academy during the last two decades of the twentieth century, in part fueled by the rise of postcolonial studies, itself a late legacy of anticolonialism. Among other works, Lam provided a frontispiece dated 1939 for the first full French edition of the Notebook published in 1947 and Picasso provided aquatint illustrations and an engraving as a frontispiece for a limited edition of Césaire's collection of poems entitled Lost Body published in 1950.15 Césaire knew Lam well and crossed paths with Picasso on many occasions, particularly in their common dealings with the French Communist Party, though it is not clear how well they might have known each other.
Journal Article
Pays rêvé, pays réel
The idea of diaspora has undergone a stark transvaluation in recent cultural criticism. From the Greek and meaning “to scatter throughout, or far and wide,” the term “diaspora” originally referred to the dispersal of the Jewish people in the Babylonian exile and after. It signified the continuity of a culture and a people despite displacement from the land of origin and indeed despite the lack of coincidence between the culture and the territory upon which it is lived. This notion of diaspora relies for its unity on an unchanging, stable, ancestral cultural identity, fundamentally resistant to the vicissitudes of secular
Book Chapter
FORGETTABLE VACATIONS AND METAPHOR IN RUINS
It is difficult to take up Derek Walcott's book-length poem Omeros without saying of it, as critics regularly do, that it is a monumental achievement. Melas examines Walcott's Omeros, arguing that it is precisely the tourist's presence and particularly his and her depropriating gaze that makes the epic form necessary to commemorate a disappearing life in a place that is on the brink of forgettability, in the true sense of the word.
Journal Article