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Directions Home
The latest work from pioneering scholar George Elliott Clarke, Directions Home is the most comprehensive analysis of African-Canadian texts and writers to date. Building on the discoveries of his critically acclaimed Odysseys Home , Clarke passionately analyses the beautiful complexities and haunting conundrums of this important body of literature.
Directions Home explores the trajectories and tendencies of African-Canadian literature within the Canadian canon and the socio-cultural traditions of the African Diaspora. Clarke showcases the importance of little-known texts, including church histories and slave narratives, and offers studies of autobiography, crime and punishment, jazz poetics, and musical composition. The collection also includes studies of significant contemporary writers such as George Boyd and Dionne Brand, and trailblazing African-Canadian intellectuals like A.B. Walker and Anna Minerva Henderson.
With its national, bilingual, and historical perspectives, Directions Home is an essential guide to African-Canadian literature.
eBook
The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic
Taking as its point of departure recent insights about the performative nature of genre, The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic challenges the critical tendency to accept at face value that gothic literature is mainly about fear. Instead, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet argues that the American Gothic, and gothic literature in general, is also about judgment: how to judge and what happens when judgment is confronted with situations that defy its limits. Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Gilman, and James all shared a concern with the political and ideological debates of their time, but tended to approach these debates indirectly. Thus, Monnet suggests, while slavery and race are not the explicit subject matter of antebellum works by Poe and Hawthorne, they nevertheless permeate it through suggestive analogies and tacit references. Similarly, Melville, Gilman, and James use the gothic to explore the categories of gender and sexuality that were being renegotiated during the latter half of the century. Focusing on \"The Fall of the House of Usher,\" The Marble Faun, Pierre, The Turn of the Screw, and \"The Yellow Wallpaper,\" Monnet brings to bear minor texts by the same authors that further enrich her innovative readings of these canonical works. At the same time, her study persuasively argues that the Gothic's endurance and ubiquity are in large part related to its being uniquely adapted to rehearse questions about judgment and justice that continue to fascinate and disturb.
Contents: Introduction; Unreliable narrators and 'unnatural sensations': irony and conscience in Edgar Allan Poe; 'Everywhere ... a cross - and nastiness at the foot of it': history, ethics, and slavery in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun; 'Thy catching nobleness unsexes me, my brother': queer knowledge in Herman Melville's Pierre; 'I was queer company enough - quite as queer as the company I received': the queer Gothic of Henry James and Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Bibliography; Index.
Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet is Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.
eBook
Dark ecology and the representation of canids in Deon Meyer’s Fever
Deon Meyer’s post-apocalyptic novel, Fever, opens with Nico Storm, the narrator, and his father being attacked by dogs. Nico is only thirteen years old, but is forced to shoot the dogs to rescue his father. This incident sets the scene for the rest of the novel. It characterises Nico and his father and their relationship. It also informs the reader about the world in which the novel is set. Fever opens a few months after ninety-five percent of the world’s population died as the result of a mysterious virus—one engineered in an attempt to redress ecological imbalances. In this article, the representation of dogs and other canids in Fever is used as a departure point to bring the worldviews of the various characters into dialogue with Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology. It is argued that the different worldviews (and the place accorded to canids in each) have political and ecological implications. Most of the worldviews can be understood in terms of what Morton calls the “agrilogistic loop” because they are based on the assumption that humans can and should manipulate the nonhuman. Two characters’ view of canids are, however, closer to what Morton terms “ecognosis”, because they acknowledge humans’ (and canids’) entanglement with the rest of nature. ment with the rest of nature.
Journal Article