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result(s) for
"Naipaul, V. S. 1932-2018 Criticism and interpretation."
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V.S. Naipaul's journeys : from periphery to center
\"Krishnan rereads Naipaul's work to offer ... perspectives on his achievements, shortcomings, trajectory, and complicated legacy. While recognizing the flaws and prejudices that shaped and limited Naipaul's life and art, this book challenges the binaries that have restricted discussions of his writing. Krishnan reads Naipaul as self-subverting and self-critical, engaged in describing his own implication in what he saw as the malaise of the postcolonial world. Krishnan brings together close readings of major novels with considerations of Naipaul's work as a united project, as well as ... assessments of Naipaul's political commentary on ethnic nationalism and religious fundamentalism\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
RIVAGES
Le rivage évoque pour certains écrivains nostalgiques une destination lointaine, mystique, voire édénique. Le simple terme rivage apparaît comme un élément saillant de la topographie littéraire pour devenir un thème à part entière dans l'imagerie du voyage et de l'exploration. Dans la dualité de l'espace, le rivage délimite un lieu de tension, de transformation, un seuil métaphorique, un tremplin rendant possible le voyage introspectif. Aboutissements d'une quête spirituelle, les rivages sublimes des romans peuvent conjurer l'influence malfaisante du passé, apaiser les traumatismes de l'enfance.
eBook
From Cannibals to Radicals
In this fascinating analysis, Roger Célestin examines the concept of exoticism from a historical and literary perspective. Through close readings of works by Montaigne, Diderot, Flaubert, Barthes, and Naipaul, Célestin examines the way these writers have challenged representations of cultural identity in their time.
eBook
London Calling
Challenging the popular view that Naipaul is a literary mediator between First and Third World experience in the post-colonial era, this study argues that his work articulates a set of values that perpetuates political interests that have their origin in the Imperial age.
eBook
Naipaul's strangers
From his reporting on Islamic true believers to his descriptions of the postcolonial world, V. S. Naipaul has been a controversial figure in contemporary letters. Winner of the Nobel Prize, Naipaul has traveled throughout the world, looking at its varied cultures and seeking out others' stories, recording and transforming them. His engagement with postcolonial cultures informs his novels, such as Guerrillas and A Bend in the River. However, it is his documentaries (such as Among the Believers and Beyond Belief) and his works that combine actual and fictional histories and memories (Finding the Center, The Enigma of Arrival, and A Way in the World) that best exhibit a growing awareness of the complexities of cultural difference -- and the incompleteness and uncertainty of understanding \"strangers.\" In this book, Dagmar Barnouw explores the sophisticated strategies and experimentations that Naipaul employs in his cultural critique and in his enterprise of learning about and documenting the enduring strangeness of this world.
eBook
Four contemporary novelists : Angus Wilson, Brian Moore, John Fowles, V.S. Naipaul
Four Contemporary Novelists offer accounts of the fiction of Angus Wilson, Brian Moore, John Fowles, and V. S. Naipaul. The author has charted the development of each writer; identified dominant themes, controlling techniques, and informing sensibility; explained what each has tried to accomplish and compare theory to practice; provided an appropriate context for appreciation and evaluation of all parts of each canon; and made qualitative discriminations.
eBook
Topological Tropology of V.S. Naipaul’s Islamic Travelogues and Daniel Pipes’ Islamic History: Ahistorical Historicism
Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul's (1932-2018) first Islamic travelogue Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) contains his experience of a visit from August 1979 to February 1980 to the four non-Arab Muslim-majority countries--Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Similarly, his last Islamic travelogue Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998) has a description of another visit to the same countries for five-month in 1995. Concurrently, Daniel Pipes (1949-), an American historian, published his doctoral dissertation, Slave Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis of a Military System (1981), which represents Islamic culture as the first instigator of military slavery in the world. Then, he wrote an analysis of modern Islamic history In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power (1983), which historicizes Islam as a politically failed force all over the world. These travelogues and history are generically different. But a common topological relationality can be mapped in the anecdotes of Naipaul's travelogues and the historiography of Pipes' history, as they use identical tropological configurations to historicize Islamic cultures. This similar tropological historiography, this article argues, is covertly an offshoot of the contemporary spatiotemporal context in which they were produced. The context was networked by certain ideological implications, ethnocentrism, and some cultural misapprehensions regarding Islamic/Muslim culture, making the historicism of both Naipaul and Pipes seem ahistorical.
Journal Article
Writing Is Not “Anti-African”: How Naipaul “See(s) Much” About Africa
Many critics have harshly criticized V.S. Naipaul's works, both fiction and trip memoirs on the postcolonial sociocultural milieu of Africa, for being racially objectionable. The indictment apparently has a rationale too in the sense that his writings- In a Free State (1971), A Band in the River (1979) and Masque of Africa for instance- outright seem to be intestinal butchery of the African life, past and present, without any sense of mercy. However, he has countered all the critics often to defend his writings. In fact, this stand of Naipaul on his writings prompts this paper for a scrutiny and apparently, it seems that, as it will be explored, his defense stands; he has seen “much” about Africa, its future. Paradoxically, in his internal butchery he is neither “anti-African” nor “anti-Negro.” His African discourse, though supposed to be they do not have any such offensive, butchery agenda in nature, rather seems to have a tendency of seeing “much” future possibilities in the postcolonial paradox with a spiral into its past. Although the African post-colonial paradox is colonial, he also understands it as a part of another form of ups and downs in the history of African civilization. This is more apparent in his writings and more perceptible in the context of the postcolonial viewpoint on displacement and dislocation. Postcolonial discourse usually emphasizes a crisis in its perspectives. However, for Naipaul, they are also, just like every other civilization, the nature of the history of the African civilization. It is in this understanding, being explored, he sees “much” possibilities, an enabling phenomenon, rather than a crisis in the African paradox.
Journal Article
Travellers' Tales of Wonder
Exploring travellers’ tales of wonder in contemporary literature, this study challenges a sensibility of disenchantment with travel. It reassesses travel writing as an aesthetically and ethically innovative form in contemporary international literature, and demonstrates the crucial role of wonder in the travel narratives of writers such as Bruce Chatwin, V.S. Naipaul, and W.G. Sebald. Their ‘travellers’ tales of wonder’ are read as a challenge to the hubris of thinking the world too well known, and an invitation to encounter the world – including its most troubling histories – with a sense of wonder.
eBook
At Home in the Body: Cosmopolitanism in Naipaul's \One out of Many\
V. S. Naipaul's call for realistic cosmopolitanism is discussed. In \"One out of Many,\" Naipaul pointedly reflects on the failure of two contrasting cosmopolitanisms on the individual: the Indian version of cosmopolitanism accommodates otherness on the basis of the enforced reduction of personal space and individuality for social solidarity, whereas the American mode retains a stubborn, almost obdurate sense of individuality, obscuring the basic importance of distinctive culture milieu and social relationship. Examining cosmopolitanism from its opposite, Naipaul questions about what can make cosmopolitanism really socially viable. The old notion of a borderless cosmopolitan community is obviously inadequate, for although the encounter with others and their culture may be a matter of people's free choice in the contemporary global world, the imbalance in power relations makes the negotiation not so favorable.
Journal Article