Starting from José Itzigsohn and Karida L. Brown’s 2020 book, The Sociology of W. E. B. Du Bois, this article discusses the contribution of Du Boisian sociology to the field of postcolonial literary studies, arguing that his main concepts and his methodology might help untangle some of postcolonialism’s current debates.
This paper looks at the relationship between post and decolonialism, two critical movements rooted in political theory and literary studies alike. It considers their similarities and their common ethical stance, while also investigating the reasons for the very necessity of decolonialism as a discipline. The main purpose of the subsequent metacritic analysis (which compares Edward Said’s line of inquiry with recent works by Revathi Krishnaswamy, Walter Mignolo and Sylvia Marcos) is to highlight the methodological evolution that took place especially in the field of literary criticism. Finally, the essay takes into consideration the problematic connections that are being established between European schools of thought and their indigenous counterparts, trying to find ways in which comparatism will not lead to theoretical uniformization, but rather to a set of strategies for reading peripheral literatures and for including them in academic debates on theory.
This article analyzes the role of cultural sociology and elements of pop culture when exploring the current relationship between Romanian literature and the world literary system. I use Mihai Iovănel’s work (his recent History, as well as previous research) as a springboard into a discussion about the paradoxes and the disputes characterizing contemporary World Literature studies and I argue that his employment of materialism and cultural sociology alike helps move past some of the blind spots of the discipline. The final section of the article then shows that Iovănel’s focus on popular culture also informs his understanding of literary circulation, highlighting its unpredictable and non-linear nature.
This article discusses three books about the 1994 genocide against Rwandan Tutsis, all of which belong to the “Writing as a Duty to Memory” project: two novels by Boubacar Boris Diop and Abdourahman Waberi respectively, and a travel journal by Véronique Tadjo. It looks at the performance of a new sense of community after a traumatic event which invalidated traditional notions of ethnicity, national unity and historical continuity, contrasting the social and ethical function assigned to storytelling in the wake of genocide with the description of politically engaged, marginal literatures in the work of Pascale Casanova, as well as Franco Moretti’s distinction between premodern and modern literature. More precisely, the Rwandan case presents an alternative to the teleological patterns of literary evolution drawn by some World Literature scholars, as this moment in literary history was shaped by collective trauma and ethical imperatives rather than Rwanda’s peripheral status in the literary world-system or its so-called “delay” in terms of written culture.
This article aims to investigate the depiction of living space(s) and architecture in the Romanian novel between 1844 and 1947. It has a descriptive dimension, discussing the construction of fictional worlds through a series of key-issues: a fascination with urban spaces (with the centralization/ provincialization of urban imagery), the function allowed to women vs. men in various social spheres (certain rooms, certain public fora), the disintegration of urban families, precarious living on the fringes of urban society etc. The authors map the occurrence of such new phenomena or spatial mutations, commenting on their historical context and scope (through statistical analysis). At the same time, there is a more reflexive, theoretical side to our research. Drawing on the work of theorists like Bertrand Westphal, Henri Lefebvre, Nirmal Puwar, and Habermas (to name but a few), this article asks many vital questions pertaining to geocriticism and sociocriticism alike: what is the difference between a place and fictional space; how can we define the public and the private sphere in the Romanian novel through issues like political participation and representation, exclusion, agency, and the right to leisure; how exactly do social norms and relationships contribute to the construction and the organisation of novelistic space?
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