How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms - Couverture rigide

Livre 45 sur 118: Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture

Caplan, Marc

 
9780804774765: How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms
Couverture rigide
ISBN 10 : 0804774765 ISBN 13 : 9780804774765
Editeur : Stanford University Press, 2011

Synopsis

In this book, Marc Caplan argues that the literatures of ostensibly marginal modern cultures are key to understanding modernism. Caplan undertakes an unprecedented comparison of nineteenth-century Yiddish literature and twentieth-century Anglophone and Francophone African literature and reveals unexpected similarities between them. These literatures were created under imperial regimes that brought with them processes of modernization that were already well advanced elsewhere. Yiddish and African writers reacted to the liberating potential of modernity and the burdens of imperial authority by choosing similar narrative genres, typically reminiscent of early-modern European literatures: the picaresque, the pseudo-autobiography, satire, and the Bildungsroman. Both display analogous anxieties toward language, caught as they were between imperial, "global" languages and stigmatized native vernaculars, and between traditions of writing and orality. Through comparative readings of narratives by Reb Nakhman of Breslov, Amos Tutuola, Yisroel Aksenfeld, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Isaac Meyer Dik, Camara Laye, Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Wole Soyinka, Y. Y. Linetski, and Ahmadou Karouma, Caplan demonstrates that these literatures' "belated" relationship to modernization suggests their potential to anticipate subsequent crises in the modernity and post-modernity of metropolitan cultures. This, in turn, leads him to propose a new theoretical model, peripheral modernism, which incorporates both a new understanding of "periphery" and "center" in modernity and a new methodology for comparative literary criticism and theory.

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À propos de l?auteur

Marc Caplan is the Zelda and Myer Tandetnik Professor of Yiddish Literature, Language, and Culture in the Department of German and Romance Languages of the Johns Hopkins University.

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Éditeur
Stanford University Press
Date d'édition
2011
Langue
anglais
ISBN 10 
0804774765
ISBN 13 
9780804774765
Reliure
Relié
Nombre de pages
360
Coordonnées du fabricant
non disponible
Personne responsable
non disponible