| |
 |
|
 |
|
Puro Border: Dispatches, Snapshots & Graffiti from La Frontera,Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, John William Byrd, Bobby Byrd.
The proverbial tortilla curtain is that very real boundary etched across lands that divide North American and Mexican peoples. It is also a place of complex experience and multiform cultural expression. The dozens of photo-journalistic, investigative, and personal essays along with testimonials and fictional vignettes that make up Puro Border reflect such a lived borderland space.
Latinos Remaking America. Eds. Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco and Mariela M. Páez.
The 2002 census proved without a doubt that Latinos have become the largest minority group in the U.S. It proved that for our public policy and legislations to ignore the thirty-eight-plus million documented Latinos (Chicanos, Mexicanos, Latin Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban, and Dominicans) would be akin to grand-scale social suicide.
Red Matters; Arnold Krupat, Grave Concerns, Trickster Turns: The Novels of Louis Owens; Chris LaLonde
Arnold Krupat's Red Matters and Chris LaLonde's Grave Concerns, Trickster Turns: The Novels of Louis Owens seek to emplace centrally Native Indian literature and cultural production within American studies. While Krupat addresses a variety of Native texts--from the narratives of Sherman Alexie, Charles Easton, and Mourning Dove to oral histories, and translation theory--and LaLonde focuses exclusively on the novels of mixed-blood author, Louis Owens, their goal is the same: To use a variety of theoretical methods from Derridean informed poststructuralism to formulations of trickster metafictional techniques to enrich and complicate our understanding of Native identity and experience.
Gang Nation Review by Frederick Luis Aldama
Monica Brown's Gang Nation powerfully explores novels, autobiography, and drama by and about Chicano and Puerto Rican gangs to expand the range of U.S. ethnic scholarly criticism and to complicate the mainstream's misconceptions of the young and disenfranchised urban dweller.
New Critical Directions in Comparative Literary Studies By Frederick Luis Aldama
Tectonic shifts are fracturing old models of literary analysis and pushing forward approaches anew. Lacanian psychoanalysis, post-Marxist Marxism, Foucaultian new historicism, and Derridean deconstructionism are being radically revised--or discarded all together.
The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion
In spite the hustle-bustle of our everyday, we still take pause to read novels, watch films, t.v. shows, and/or to hear someone recount a story. Storytelling in all its shapes and sizes continues to perform a vital function in the everyday lives of peoples worldwide. In The Mind and its Stories Patrick Colm Hogan begins to explore this aspect of our quotidian existence--and much more.
Postindependence Voices in South Asian Writings. Alamgir Hashmi, Lalashiri Lal, Victor Ramraj, eds. Islamabad, Pakistan. Alhamra. 2001 (released 2002). Rs450. 320 pages. ISBN 969-516-093-X
POSTINDEPENDENCE VOICES IN SOUTH ASIAN WRITINGS brings together literary scholarship, author interviews, and creative non-fiction to reflect the vital and ever-expanding sphere of contemporary South Asian letters.
Rohinton Mistry. Family Matters. New York. Knopf. 2002. $26. 434 pages. ISBN 0-375-40373-6
IN FAMILY MATTERS, Rohinton Mistry beautifully colors a contemporary Bombay peopled with characters whose lives are filled with mundane-but no less grand-struggles and accomplishments. As with his earlier short-story collection, Tales from Firozsha Baag, and novel, Such a Long Journey, Mistry carefully crafts a narrative that heightens our sense of the vital life of a Parsi family-one filled with sibling rivalries, lost loves, secrets, and also the growth pains of the young alongside the deep sufferings of the old.
Anita Rau Badami. Tamarind Woman. Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Algonquin. 2002. 266 pages. $23.95. ISBN 1-56512-335-2
IN HER SECOND NOVEL, Tamarind Woman, Anita Rau Badami once again proves to be a wonderfully gifted storyteller. In a dramatic turn from her male-centered bildungsroman, A Hero's Walk (2001; see WLT 76:1, p. 134), Badami plunges her readers deep into the coming-of-age trials and tribulations of her young character, Kamini.
Chitra Banerjee Divakarani, The Vine of Desire. New York. Doubleday. 2002. 373 pages. $23.95. ISBN 0-385-49729-6
"IN THE BEGINNING WAS PAIN. Or perhaps it was the end that was suffused with pain, its distinctive indigo tint. Color of old bruises, color of broken pottery, of crumpled maps in evening light." So begins Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's novel The Vine of Desire.
Vijay Tendulkar. Mitrachi Goshta: A Friend's Story. Gowri Ramnarayan, tr. New Delhi. Oxford University Press. 2001. xv + 78 pages. Rs295/$10.95. ISBN 0-19-565317-3
SINCE THE APPEARANCE of cross-dressing male actors in Patanjali's Mahabhasya (ca. 150 B.C.E.), India's dramatic productions have been characterized by a fluid role-playing of gender. Of course, having all-women and/or all-men performances was intended to prevent transgressive heterosexual couplings. For others, however, it became a space where same-sex desire and couplings could flourish. In the play Mitrachi Goshta: A Friend's Story, preeminent playwright Vijay Tendulkar more than alludes to this long tradition of same-sex gender performing in theater; indeed, he uses it to foreground the coming-out story of Sumitra Dev-a fictional character based on a real woman whose promising acting career was stunted after her affair with a young woman turned into a great scandal. Tendulkar's three-act play fictionalizes the life-changing moments in Mitra's struggle to cope with being "different."
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni The Unknown Errors of Our Lives New York. Doubleday. 2001. 268 pages $23.95. ISBN 0-385-49727-X
IN THE UNKNOWN Errors of Our Lives Chitra Divakaruni uses the short-story form to bring to life a complex array of South Asian characters and their struggles to survive within the restrictive social conditions of a rural and urban India and a suburban USA. Characters at the social margins take center stage in these stories.
Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko Ellen L. Arnold, ed. Jackson. University Press of Mississippi. 2000. xvi + 200 pages. $45 ($18 paper) ISBN 1-57806-300-0 (301-9 paper)
FOR THE LAGUNA Pueblo Indians in New Mexico, the sense of being within history and culture passes down through a strong oral storytelling tradition. Fitting, then, that editor Ellen Arnold culls fifteen interviews from a twenty-five-year period to weave a complex portrait of Laguna Pueblo-born and -raised novelist and prose poet Leslie Mormon Silko.
Leslie Marmon Silko. Gardens in the Dunes. New York. Simon & Schuster. 1999. 479 pages. $25. ISBN 0-684-8ii54-5
As Indigo and Sister Salt set out on their different paths, they encounter a panoply of colorful, uprooted characters who seek a similar sense of belonging. Indigo stumbles into the lives of a protofeminist, Hattie, and her experimental botanist husband Edward (in a handy metaphor, he is cross-fertilizing orange with lemon to create a new, more robust hybrid fruit). Tucked under Hattie's wing, Indigo travels to England, Corsica, and Italy as well as the U.S. Southwest.
Anita Desai. Fasting, Feasting. London. Chatto & Windus.1999. 228 pages. 14.99. ISBN o-701-I6894-3
Anita Desai's novels typically gravitate around women (mostly middleclass South Asians) who come of age in the sweltering clime of India's outback and within households heavy with patriarchal oppression. In her new novel, Fasting, Feasting, the protagonist Uma, much like Desai's earlier characters Nanda Kaul in Fire on the Mountain (1977) and Bimla in Clear Light of Day (i98o), dares to dream of a life beyond her estate's closed gates. Unfortunately, also like her predecessors, Uma finds that her desires - "A career. Leaving home. Living alone" - meet with unscalable walls at every turn.
HanifKureishi. Intimacy. Scribner, 1999.
Explosive--and justifiable--controversy surrounds the 1998 British best-seller Intimacy by Anglo/Indian Hanif Kureishi. Light to hand at barely a hundred pages, the novel weighs heavy with macho attitude. Too, while it is Kureishi's most autobiographically confessional work to date, it tiptoes most lightly of his works around issues of racial and sexual identity formation. Intimacy records a sour night in the life of Jay--a fortysomething man who, not so unlike the author, leaves his partner, foodianado and publisher Susan, and their two ABC-age sons.
Why Does Literature Matter?
Indeed, why does literature matter? Plato and Aristotle had quite a bit to say on the subject, and latter the Classical and Medieval theoreticians of rhetoric even turned it into the central theme of their taxonomies and structural explanations. Moreover, this has been a question posed continuously and everywhere since the nineteenth century, and not only by readers in general but above all, by academics that study and teach literature as a discipline.
Why Does Literature Matter?
Indeed, why does literature matter? Plato and Aristotle had quite a bit to say on the subject, and latter the Classical and Medieval theoreticians of rhetoric even turned it into the central theme of their taxonomies and structural explanations. Moreover, this has been a question posed continuously and everywhere since the nineteenth century, and not only by readers in general but above all, by academics that study and teach literature as a discipline.
Hanif Kureishi. My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father
Set out to draft a contemplative essay on the influence of authors and other matters, upon opening one of his late father's unpublished novels, Hanif Kureishi steers a radically different course. The result: the vividly textured, brutally honest, and complex biographical meditation, My Ear at His Heart.
|
|
 |
|
Why Does Literature Matter?
FONT SIZE: BIGGER | SMALLER | DOWNLOAD
AS RTF DOCUMENT
Last updated: 27-Feb-2005 | Author: Frederick Luis Aldama
Why Does Literature Matter? Frank B. Farrell. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. 288 pages. Cloth,
$39.95. ISBN 0801441803
Indeed, why does literature matter? Plato and Aristotle had quite a bit
to say on the subject, and latter the Classical and Medieval theoreticians of
rhetoric even turned it into the central theme of their taxonomies and structural
explanations. Moreover, this has been a question posed continuously and everywhere
since the nineteenth century, and not only by readers in general but above all,
by academics that study and teach literature as a discipline. And yet, given
the actually complex nature of this many-sided question, it does not come as a
surprise to learn that it is so fraught with unmanageable (and perhaps insurmountable)
problems that it has received very few solid answers. To start with, not many
scholars even agree on what literature is, let alone on what literature does and on why that should matter. It is under such inauspicious augur that philosopher Frank B.
Farrell has recently rushed in where angels might well fear to tread. But whoever
accompanies him in his scholarly journey (and we hope the readers of this, his
latest book, will be numerous) is bound to feel much contentment and satisfaction.
The reason is that Farrell offers a meticulous analysis of the problems involved,
and that the solutions he proposes are carefully argued, and clearly and artfully
stated. Furthermore, Farrell is attentive to important developments in the philosophy
of language, as well as in literary theory, and he does not neglect consideration
(albeit a critical one) of post-structural thinking, of postcolonial studies,
and of cultural studies.
Nevertheless, when all things are considered, Farrell’s views about why
literature matters remain confined within the opinion, often posited as empirical
fact inside and outside of academia, that literature is a species in the genus
“didactic cum edifying endeavor” aimed at the betterment of human life. Stated
briefly, Farrell’s main thesis is that literature--and above all, the works of
its most gifted exponents--is destined essentially to provide readers with a means
and a forum for reflecting more wisely and more fully on the self and on the world
we happen to inhabit. Thus, according to Farrell, authors such as Virginia Woolf
and James Joyce, Dante and Shakespeare, Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett, to name
a few in what would necessarily be a very long list, come to be singled out because
their writings successfully and artfully portray those "subtle and hard-to-grasp
patterns that make human relationships what they are" (12). Their works have
eventually become an essential part of a durable world canon because, as Farrell
states, in line with all "exceptional works of literature”, they “require us to
form a more complicated selfhood" (152). Resisting the "postmodern thinning out
of the social world" (152-153), Farrell considers that, by delving deeply into
the “self-formation” of characters or by engaging with the depths of their "rituals
of self-undermining" (240), the reader reaches a perspective (the "stance" designed
by the author) that will allow him or her to move self-reflexively inwards as
well as outwards, each time seeing himself or herself and the world in new, richer
ways. When this happens, literature has accomplished its proper task.
This, of course, is not the end of the story. As I said, Farrell’s book
develops a resourceful and complex argument that I have obviously simplified to
an extreme; nonetheless I believe I have shown what its essential point is. Now,
to add a few more comments on the nature of the enterprise Farrell is pursuing
here, let us accept as valid a very general definition of the word “literature”,
for instance a definition easily found in a dictionary. Then, roughly speaking,
literature would be characterized as a body of writing in any language of the
world that (a) has been given a metered or an unmetered form (verse or prose or
a mixture of both), that (b) is usually arranged in so-called genres and subgenres
or in either of their various combinations (fiction, drama, and poetry; novel,
long story, short story, tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, and melodrama; essay, biography,
and autobiography, to mention the most common classifications), and that (c) because
of many different reasons is preserved, valued, and deemed worthy of study. These
three factors, together or in isolation, are at the source of the many complex
kinds of expectations and gratifications experienced by the reader.
I imagine everyone would agree that reading literature matters above all
because it is fun, that is, because it engages the imagination and sets off many
sorts of emotional and cognitive reactions that are lively and pleasurable, at
the same time that it does not demand any specific action nor does it impose any
kind of more or less forced behavior. This being said, one may ascribe importance
to literature on many grounds. Farrell, for example, underlines those features
of literature that may heighten our perceptions, our experience, and our knowledge
of the world and other humans, through formal and thematic means that make reading
and re-reading a uniquely gratifying and enlightening activity. He also insists
on the relevance of literature as an imaginative exploration of worldviews, circumstances,
and psychological characters. And he never looses sight of the aesthetic devises
(and what I have called elsewhere “the will to style” of the author) that are
brought into play each time in a unique way in order to create a significant and
lasting work.
On the other hand, many people consider that literature matters because it
“reflects” an epoch, or a people, or a certain way of perceiving the world in
a particular circumstance. Others restrict this assumed mirroring effect of literature
to certain demographic groups considered politically or socially significant within
a population. The notions of “Orientalism”, “postcolonialism”, “nation-building”
through literature, “ethnic identity” or “gender” as literary constructs, as well
as many others still circulating in academia are based on this idea that literature
somehow not only represents (and distorts) reality but creates it. Literature
in this case is given the tremendous power once assigned to social classes and
to the state and its institutions. It becomes the Gnostic Demiurge, the creator
and controller of the material world. It is turned also into the only remaining
instrument of critique, at least in the minds of those who withhold such notions.
So the choice of answers to the question Why Does Literature Matter? is very large indeed. My own pick I have not mentioned in this harvest.
Frederick Luis Aldama
Professor of English and Comparative Studies
The Ohio State University.
|
|
 |
