Man Booker Prize Research Articles

Narrative Judgments on the Love and Friendship in Julian Barnes’ <i>The Sense of an Ending</i>

Julian Barnes is famous in contemporary literary world. His works have attracted many readers all over the world for his variety of writing style and his unceasing exploration of the truth of history and memory. As the Man Booker Prize winning novel in 2011, <i>The Sense of an Ending</i> mainly tells the story of the protagonist Tony Webster’s love relationship with Veronica Ford and his friendship with Adrian Finn through recalling the past. Taking the changing relationship among Tony, Veronica and Adrian as the main line, this paper mainly analyzes the different interpretive, ethical and aesthetic judgments and re-judgments made by Tony, the protagonist and the first person narrator, and the reader on the love and friendship in the novel in the light of James Phelan’s theory of narrative judgments. Through analysis, this paper shows the organic connections between the three types of narrative judgments, which not only promotes the narrative progression of the novel, but also realizes the perfect integration of the novel in narrative form, narrative ethics and narrative aesthetics. This process shows Barnes’ doubts about the reliability of human memory, which provides a better way for readers to understand the novel and appreciate Barnes’ superb narrative art.

Two Francophone Poems

POETRY Alain Mabanckou, from Congo-Brazzaville, is considered one of francophone Africa’s most prolific contemporary writers. Twice a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, his work has garnered a multitude of awards, including the prestigious Grand Prix de la Littérature from the Académie Française. Nancy Naomi Carlson, poet and translator, received an NEA fellowship to translate Mabanckou’s poetry. The New York Times called her latest collection “new and noteworthy.” Two Francophone Poems by Alain Mabanckou [draw your strength] draw your strength from the lifeless leaf break all bonds until you can tie your fate to the baobab trunk don’t hold within yourself any dream discounted on the public square don’t look at the will-o’-the-wisp constantly climb back up the slope even if steep the voices arriving from the other hill are only echoes [let’s ask the stone] let’s ask the stone where to find Truth it will tell us it’s in this earthly world and only here it’s in this earthly world where wind stirs oceans twist and turn waterways split it’s in this earthly world where dreams straddle borders pierce invisible walls Translations from the French By Nancy Naomi Carlson WORLDLIT.ORG 49 PHOTO: GLENN RUBEN BERG / UNSPLASH ...

Revisiting the Past: A Thematic Study of Man Booker Prize Winning Novel Wolf Hall Written by Hilary Mantel

Revisiting the Past: A Thematic Study of Man Booker Prize Winning Novel Wolf Hall Written by Hilary Mantel

Luhrmann, Baz. The Great Gatsby. EUA, 2013, 2h 23 min

A resenha versa acerca das escolhas tradutórias feitas na adaptação fílmica realizada por Baz Luhrman, em 2013, da obra literária The Great Gatsby, publicada por F. Scott Fitzgerald em 1925. Trazendo considerações de estudiosos como Even-Zohar (1990), Xavier (2003), Lucas (2007), entre outros, de a modo a expor como o contexto histórico-social interfere no processo tradutório de uma obra para as telas.

The Moment and Technique of Milkman

WRITING IN THE GUARDIAN a few hours after Anna Burns’s Milkman was awarded the Man Booker Prize, Claire Armitstead announced that the jury had ‘delivered a bombshell’ by awarding the prize to a ‘boldly experimental’ work which was ‘not the best novel in contention this year’ and a ‘consistent outsider in the bookies’ odds’.1 Book prizes are designed to elicit such indignant responses. But it soon became apparent that Armitstead’s views did not represent much of a consensus. Milkman has proved popular with readers. The publishers have described demand for the work as ‘astonishing’ and attributed it to the ‘pure quality of the book’ as well as to ‘genuine public affection’ for Burns herself.2 But few predicted or foresaw Milkman’s triumph. It was published by Faber & Faber in May 2018. Writing for the Irish Times, Adrian McGinty was first to review the work, describing Burns...

Придумати Шотландію: шотландська література другої половини ХХ – початку ХХІ століття від націоналізму до космополітизму

The paper studies the tendencies of contemporary Scottish prose in the recent three decades (starting from 1980s and up to now). Scotland is seen as an imaginary construct produced in the result of both literary and political discourses that are extremely interwoven. The research’s starting point is the problem of devolution, Scottish nationalism and their apparitions in literary texts. Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, and Irvine Welsh’s novels represent the ground for experiments with an idea of both national literature, and national identity. Scottish devolution and the apparitions of Scotland are seen through the predominantly fading white male masculinity within the context of class and self-identification. The motifs of loss, disorientation, instability, and macabre rebellion in the novels of devolution writers are inherently representational of the political scene at the time. The problem of identity is studied via the new narrative techniques introduced by Kelman and developed later by Welsh. Defying Standard English as a means of narrator’s control over characters’ discourses Kelman is thus trying to overthrow not only literary hierarchies, but also class and national ones. Kelman’s Glasgow Patter becomes a turning point in revealing the breeches in hierarchies within the institutions called the Great Britain and British literature. The scandal caused by Kelman’s novel How Late It Was, How Late that won Man Booker Prize in 1996 voiced not only literary, but also linguistic, national, and self-identification incongruities inscribed into the anglocentric political and literary hegemony. Moreover, paper concentrates on the humanist and ethic turn that Scottish prose takes closer to fin de siècle. Predominantly, this research deals with the texts of A. L. Kennedy and Jackie Kay. The issues of solipsism in a vibrant postmodern world, as well as the problems of policing race, gender, marriage come to the front of Scottish prose at the beginning of the epoch of naughts. The new images of Scotland are projected through the myriads of subjective mirrors of consciousnesses belonging to the unstable and quite exhausted individuals of any race, class, or sexuality. The cosmopolitan and inclusive Scotland arises from the pages of contemporary Scottish novels. At times, this is the Scotland that never calls itself as such, or mentions itself, let alone pondering on any national issues rather than the issue of common human cause of survival.

Russian Booker – 25: Materials on the history of the prize

The book assists in profound understanding of the development processes of the novel as a genre, and offers a nuanced overview of the annual events around the Booker Prize awarded for the best novel in Russia and the UK. Introducing the book is an article by Sir Michael Caine (1927—1999), who initiated the Russian Booker Prize and chaired its advisory committee. The publication is an extract from the historical essay ‘The Booker Story’. The first section, ‘Twenty five years in the Booker mirror’, opens with a story about the origins and history of the Russian Booker. In ‘Between the two cultures. A story told by documents and reminiscences of the participants (1992—1996)’, Russian Booker’s committee secretary Igor Shaytanov describes it as the first independent literary prize in the new Russia, free of any ties to the state policy. The second section is devoted to the UK’s Man Booker Prize. In his article ‘The British Booker: a portrait of an era’ Alastair Niven describes the events that culminate in creation of a portrait of the British literature spanning fifty years. The book’s third section is titled ‘The chronicle of the Booker events 1992—2016’.

Community and the Individual: A Note on Rohinton Mistry's Family Matters

Rohinton Mistry was born in 1952 in Mumbai, but settled in Canada, is a well known contemporary postcolonial writer. His novels portray modern India, focusing on conflicting situations and redemptive moments. His works Such a Long Journey (1991) A Fine Balance (1996) and Family Matters (2002) emphasize poverty, corruption and injustice intertwined with humour and tragic beauty highlighting the perception of life of the urban poor. Mistry uses both myriad and mixed experiences of a particular family to present the brokenness of modern society which is compounded by various and different memories and feelings. The paper throws light on community and the individual in Family Matters, it was published in 2002, and is Mistry’s third novel. It has been rightly acclaimed as a masterpiece and also shortlisted for Man Booker Prize in 2003. The writer’s humanity and compassion towards human beings relations and problems have been delicately portrayed. Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters focuses upon the problems of un- belongingness and preservation of family values. The novel reveals the mutual equation of family members and family politics in the post modern society. The novelist delineates the importance of belongingness and preservation of family values through the most trustworthy institution named family and reflects the psychological stance of the members of family towards their aging and dying elders. The novel is a representation of harsh realities and selfish human nature of the characters who expresses the status of an individual in relation to family, community and society.

“I am interested in the metaphysics of being and existence”: Chigozie Obioma in conversation with Kunle Ajibade

On Sunday, 24 March 2019, P.A.G.E. Book Connoisseurs organized an evening of reading and conversation with Chigozie Obioma whose second novel, An Orchestra of Minorities, was just published in Nigeria by Parresia. It was a very rewarding encounter with Obioma, who was born in Akure, Ondo State, to an Igbo family of 12 children. He read English Literature at Cyprus International University (CIU), Northern Cyprus. Because he made a first class in his set, he was chosen as the student commencement speaker on 23 June, 2011. In his speech, Obioma spoke eloquently about the necessity for courage, diligence, hard-work, and gratitude. He made a solemn promise to make good use of all he had learnt at CIU. As a story-teller, he has been steadily fulfilling that promise. He was 27 years old in 2015 when his first novel, The Fishermen, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Among other prizes, the novel has won NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, The Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction, and Nebraska Book Award for Fiction. Before then, he was in Ledig House in New York for a residency and at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he completed an MFA in creative writing. He writes occasionally for The Guardian of London and New Statesman, among other publications. Chigozie Obioma is an Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA. In the course of our conversation, Professor Wole Soyinka, the 1986 Nobel Laureate in Literature, made a video call to the gathering, congratulating the author on his second novel, and his literary achievements so far. Obioma was grateful for Soyinka’s kind words. The edited transcript has been supplemented with an earlier email interview conducted on 10 March 2019.

Naomi Shihab NyeThe Tiny Journalist

characters who dreamed of migrating to the United States in some way, shape, or form. The Other Americans follows up on those dreams and gives nuance to previously articulated depictions of migration to America. Additionally, although the plotline of the text is fictitious, elements of Lalami’s nonfiction work (e.g., her New York Times essay “What Does It Take to ‘Assimilate’ in America?”) are readily discernible in the story arc she creates throughout the novel. Overall, The Other Americans is a thrill to read. It theorizes the “American Dream” by putting it into conversation with racial and socioeconomic categories. It questions the role of family loyalty. It introduces us to the struggles of Americans on the margins, and it wraps everything up neatly around the story’s pivotal moment: an accident that may or may not have been a crime. Lalami ’s finely tuned analysis of contemporary America is insightful and, at times, biting in its critique. Jocelyn Frelier Sam Houston State University Naomi Shihab Nye The Tiny Journalist Rochester, New York. BOA Editions. 2019. 128 pages. Whether a product of the twenty-four-hour news cycle or an ancient survival mechanism , it is exceedingly easy for us to cordon ourselves off from the suffering of others. Before reading The Tiny Journalist, I was thoroughly cordoned off from the IsraeliBooks in Review Marlon James Black Leopard, Red Wolf New York. Riverhead Books. 2019. 640 pages. Fantasy, as we’re familiar with it in the global genre market, is a primarily Western -centric affair shaped by the writing of white men with many initials—J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, G. R. R. Martin— and circulated further through successful film and TV adaptations. (China, too, is a major player in fantasy, but its texts have had little influence outside the sinophone world.) Decades of arguments about what constitutes fantasy aside, there is no doubt that fantasy is a matter of great importance to world literature and culture and that fantasy from the postcolonial world has tended to be received in the literary market under the name “magical realism.” Jamaican writer Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf is not magical realism. Winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize for his historical novel A Brief History of Seven Killings (about Jamaica, reggae, and the geopolitics of crack in the 1970s–1990s), James has written a work of epic fantasy that draws on African stories and traditions, on the textual and material worlds of subSaharan Africa, and on a century of literary, generic, and popular-cultural influences to bring a bold, violent, and challenging world to life. Black Leopard, Red Wolf tells the sixhundred -plus-page story of Tracker and his search for a missing child with a company of adventurers (friendly and otherwise), including the werecat Leopard, the giant Sadogo, and the witch Sogolon. In response to James’s “experiment” slumming with epic fantasy, critics have repeatedly (and happily) cited similarities with Tolkien, Martin, and Robert E. Howard (creator of pulp fantasy hero Conan) and noted that James brings his literary flare for experimentation, poetic language, and the vulgar grittiness of reality to their fantasy worlds. They aren’t wrong, but the discourse is telling. James’s success setting the literary world abuzz about a fantasy novel, of all things, suggests what many have long known: in some ways, the old boundaries between genre and literature have become more fluid; in others, they have become more rigid. Repeated comparisons to Tolkien, Martin, and Howard betray a shallow understanding of contemporary fantasy and ignore the lengthy history of Afrofantasy that has run parallel to the now-popular Afrofuturism. What’s more, James’s novel fits best with the hope-effacing tone of grimdark, though even there it is somewhat out of place, proffering a sly, self-besmirching nihilism in place of grimdark’s typically bleak one. In this fantastic Africa, Tracker and Leopard at times seriously proclaim, and occasionally mock, their shared motto that MARLON JAMES 80 WLT SPRING 2019 Rae Armantrout Wobble Wesleyan University Press Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and California native Rae Armantrout’s provocative collection of poetry, Wobble, was a nominee for the 2018 National Book Awards and...

Samanta SchweblinMouthful of Birds

Rosella Postorino At the Wolf’s Table Trans. Leah Janeczko Flatiron Books Rosella Postorino’s novel, translated from the Italian and winner of the distinguished Premio Campiello prize, has become an international best-seller. At the Wolf’s Table is a gripping account of a young German girl during World War II begrudgingly chosen to help ensure Adolf Hitler’s survival. Postorino’s prose is honest and precise; breathing life into her characters, she takes readers back in time and down into some of the darkest depths in human history. Kiriti Sengupta Rituals Hawakal This smartly designed collection pairs Sengupta’s airy aphoristic poems with Partha Pratim Das’s blocky but stylish illustrations. Many of the poems in the collection have a kind of koanlike quality to them but draw deeply from Indian mythology and ritual, evoking spiritual atmospherics to foreground the mundanity of the everyday. Nota Bene Born into a middle-class family in 1905, he became an early leader of a liberal-progressive movement to free the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir of its monarchic repressions long before it was carved in half between India and Pakistan. The personal history of this seminal force for Kashmiri liberation is well documented elsewhere; this book contains a compendium of Abdullah’s letters, lectures, and press articles, which carefully document his laws-into-sausages struggle to achieve a free, independent Kashmir based on pluralism , a rejection of the religious split between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs that ultimately truncated South Asia into endlessly combative , nationalistic, and regressive regimes. Often, Barack Obama being an example, a leader with progressive principles who works tirelessly to achieve compromises to improve conditions, while avoiding backlash wars, is destined to be reviled in doctrinaire quarters as a centrist, a neoliberal, or even a traitor to certain principles. Ideological purists will never fail to find some fault in those leaders tasked on the ground with making democracy work in a world where political divisiveness is as rampant as domestic conflict and divorce. Both in Khan’s insightful introduction and concluding remarks, and in Sheikh Abdullah’s own words, it is clear that he was determined never to sell out any constituents and always to keep their true—only apparently disparate —interests in tandem. Whereas we yet have no account of Obama’s struggles in steering a snaking course for America’s spaceship of state, reading this book and its compendium of Sheikh Abdullah’s resonant, unflagging, and articulate pursuit of Kashmiri welfare would perhaps enlighten those who delude themselves into thinking that achieving freedom and a vibrant democracy means hacking a straight line through the tangled jungle of competing interests and egos that is real politics. Abdullah struggled for real accord between all religious, ethnic, and political groups and was rewarded with long years in prison followed by roller-coaster years as Jammu and Kashmir’s prime minister and chief minister, and throughout his life he enjoyed the adulation of the ordinary people whose cause he adopted. Abdullah’s path thus provides a stellar analog to Nelson Mandela’s. Both negotiated without bitterness with those who had incarcerated them to further their just aspirations. Sheikh Abdullah never focused on enemies , but always on Kashmiri agency. This book is an intuitive primer in democracy for anyone who would take a practical, holistic view of the democratic enterprise. Jim Drummond Round Rock, Texas Samanta Schweblin Mouthful of Birds Trans. Megan McDowell. New York. Riverhead Books. 2019. 240 pages. Following up on her 2014 novel Fever Dream (nominated for the 2017 International Man Booker Prize), Samanta Schweblin’s collection of short stories, Mouthful of Birds, takes readers on a road trip full of surprising and surreal pit stops, populated with characters that hover on the edge of familiarity. WORLDLIT.ORG 103 Books in Review The minimalistic and uncanny stories contain enough of everyday life—french fries, ailing parents, exact change—to make the incursions of strange figures like a merman , or a teenager who eats only live birds, seem acceptable, even plausible. Often compared to her compatriots Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges, Schweblin does share their mastery of short fiction. Her eerie, not-quite-right settings, however, hearken...

Marlon JamesBlack Leopard, Red Wolf

characters who dreamed of migrating to the United States in some way, shape, or form. The Other Americans follows up on those dreams and gives nuance to previously articulated depictions of migration to America. Additionally, although the plotline of the text is fictitious, elements of Lalami’s nonfiction work (e.g., her New York Times essay “What Does It Take to ‘Assimilate’ in America?”) are readily discernible in the story arc she creates throughout the novel. Overall, The Other Americans is a thrill to read. It theorizes the “American Dream” by putting it into conversation with racial and socioeconomic categories. It questions the role of family loyalty. It introduces us to the struggles of Americans on the margins, and it wraps everything up neatly around the story’s pivotal moment: an accident that may or may not have been a crime. Lalami ’s finely tuned analysis of contemporary America is insightful and, at times, biting in its critique. Jocelyn Frelier Sam Houston State University Naomi Shihab Nye The Tiny Journalist Rochester, New York. BOA Editions. 2019. 128 pages. Whether a product of the twenty-four-hour news cycle or an ancient survival mechanism , it is exceedingly easy for us to cordon ourselves off from the suffering of others. Before reading The Tiny Journalist, I was thoroughly cordoned off from the IsraeliBooks in Review Marlon James Black Leopard, Red Wolf New York. Riverhead Books. 2019. 640 pages. Fantasy, as we’re familiar with it in the global genre market, is a primarily Western -centric affair shaped by the writing of white men with many initials—J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, G. R. R. Martin— and circulated further through successful film and TV adaptations. (China, too, is a major player in fantasy, but its texts have had little influence outside the sinophone world.) Decades of arguments about what constitutes fantasy aside, there is no doubt that fantasy is a matter of great importance to world literature and culture and that fantasy from the postcolonial world has tended to be received in the literary market under the name “magical realism.” Jamaican writer Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf is not magical realism. Winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize for his historical novel A Brief History of Seven Killings (about Jamaica, reggae, and the geopolitics of crack in the 1970s–1990s), James has written a work of epic fantasy that draws on African stories and traditions, on the textual and material worlds of subSaharan Africa, and on a century of literary, generic, and popular-cultural influences to bring a bold, violent, and challenging world to life. Black Leopard, Red Wolf tells the sixhundred -plus-page story of Tracker and his search for a missing child with a company of adventurers (friendly and otherwise), including the werecat Leopard, the giant Sadogo, and the witch Sogolon. In response to James’s “experiment” slumming with epic fantasy, critics have repeatedly (and happily) cited similarities with Tolkien, Martin, and Robert E. Howard (creator of pulp fantasy hero Conan) and noted that James brings his literary flare for experimentation, poetic language, and the vulgar grittiness of reality to their fantasy worlds. They aren’t wrong, but the discourse is telling. James’s success setting the literary world abuzz about a fantasy novel, of all things, suggests what many have long known: in some ways, the old boundaries between genre and literature have become more fluid; in others, they have become more rigid. Repeated comparisons to Tolkien, Martin, and Howard betray a shallow understanding of contemporary fantasy and ignore the lengthy history of Afrofantasy that has run parallel to the now-popular Afrofuturism. What’s more, James’s novel fits best with the hope-effacing tone of grimdark, though even there it is somewhat out of place, proffering a sly, self-besmirching nihilism in place of grimdark’s typically bleak one. In this fantastic Africa, Tracker and Leopard at times seriously proclaim, and occasionally mock, their shared motto that MARLON JAMES 80 WLT SPRING 2019 Rae Armantrout Wobble Wesleyan University Press Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and California native Rae Armantrout’s provocative collection of poetry, Wobble, was a nominee for the 2018 National Book Awards and...

The White Tiger, The Black Humor: Representation of class Struggle and the Sentiment of Servitude in Arvind Adiga's Text

Although bonded labor is outlawed in India, but in practice, it is far from over. Be it agricultural work, household or any other chore, the Indian society is still clearly stratified in classes. Now, the division of the society in India dates back to time immemorial where the society was divided among sections. The basis of these division was work allocation. Slowly with time, the divisions became sacrosanct and rigid, which led to social evils such as untouchability, bonded labor, semi bonded labor and other ghastly forms of servitude. The upper strata (or castes) of the society became affluent with time by possessing more and more land and the lower strata was “trained” to serve. The servitude is effectively perpetual, often going on for generations. Bring up the subject with the elite or the middle class and they would argue totally against its existence in any form. The White Tiger in a sincere attempt brought about a storm in the tea cup of the Indian elite; and thereby drew some serious criticism for portraying the dark side of a fast developing Indian society-nevertheless, the author won a Man Booker prize. For a fiction, the storyline is not very fictitious-it is believable and sadly true. The ordeal of the protagonist is something one reads about in statistics of development surveys. The best form of literature on human rights is considered the one which comes from someone who has been through it and then expresses the same. At any point, Adiga (who comes from an affluent Indian upper middle class), does not overshadow the raw narrative of BalramHalwai. The text is nowhere artificial or decorated. To the very best of its ability, Adiga successfully shows an open wound to the Indian elite think tank.

On the 2018 Man Booker Prize

On the 2018 Man Booker Prize

Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture ed. by Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno, and Inés Ordiz

Reviewed by: Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture ed. by Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno, and Inés Ordiz Juan Pablo Dabove Casanova-Vizcaíno, Sandra, and Inés Ordiz, editors. Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture. Routledge, 2017. 269 pp. This timely volume attests to the undeniable ascendancy of the Gothic as an object of inquiry within Latin American Studies. This ascendancy is itself an echo of the increasing prestige and dominance of the Gothic in Latin America and the larger global cultural arena. Consider a telling example: two of the most visible—and talented—Latin American writers today, the Argentines Samanta Schweblin and Mariana Enriquez, jumped to global fame on the strengths of two Gothic books, the nouvelle Fever Dream (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize), and the short story collection Things We Lost in the Fire (translated, so far, into more than twenty languages). In Latin America, as the editors of this volume correctly point out, the label gótico coexists with others: horror, terror, fantástico (closer to the French fantastique than to the English fantasy). This plurality poses in itself an interesting question, that speaks to the traditionally dubious prestige of the Gothic, and to how literature, as an institution in Latin America, was conceived until quite recently. This erasure poses a number of tasks for scholars: 1) to explain why the Gothic has not, until recently, assumed its own name as such and why it does now; 2) to reconstruct a lineage of the Gothic in Latin America; 3) to define Gothic's preoccupations, topics, and formal traits; and 4) to assess its specificity, both at the regional level (for example, what does the Gothic have in common throughout Latin America, and what differentiates it from metropolitan instances of the Gothic, or the more deterritorialized global Gothic?) and within particular areas or nations (e.g. how is the Argentine Gothic different from, let's say, Mexican or Caribbean Gothic?). These are not easy tasks: the object of inquiry is conceptually—and perhaps inherently—ill-defined. Is the Gothic a genre defined by specific topics, themes, and narrative twists, is it a mode, or is it just a constellation of tropes—such as the past that returns, pollution, the creature in-between, and so forth—that inflects multiple discursive practices, both fictional and non-fictional? Since the object is arduous to define, the corpus to be studied is therefore not easily isolated. Furthermore, the problems that could define the Gothic in the Latin American context are only now becoming visible. Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture is one of the first books, and probably the most comprehensive so far, to tackle these challenges. The seventeen contributors in this volume are particularly adept to the tasks at hand: this is [End Page 786] not a hastily assembled group of academics, who jumped on the bandwagon of a fashionable topic. For the most part, the contributors are scholars who have been working and publishing on different aspects of the topic for years, and who have been interacting with each other at conferences and publications. They, therefore, bring a collective depth of knowledge to the volume in their respective geographical areas or topics. This, and the carefully balanced regional/national distribution of the chapters, gives Latin American Gothic a coherence that is rare in these types of enterprises, and for this, the editors should be congratulated. After the well-thought-out introduction, in which the editors establish the theoretical parameters of the volume, there are a few well-defined preoccupations that permeate the book's chapters. Several engage deliberately in the partial or comprehensive reconstruction of Gothic lineages, mostly (but not exclusively) at the national level, such as Inés Ordiz and Soledad Quereillac's consideration of Argentina, Olga Ries's of Chile, Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez's of Colombia, and Rosa María Díez Cobo's of Peru. Of course, to a certain degree, most of the articles engage in such a task, even when focusing on specific authors or works. Some examples are Antonio Alcalá Rodríguez's work on Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, Adriana Gordillo's study of Carlos Fuentes...

Intermediate text and the canonicity of world literature

The notion “intermediate text” refers to a somewhat neglected genre or type of text emerging through the mutual interaction between local literatures and world literature. “Intermediate text” as a category comprises texts from a local literature influenced by the hypercanon of world literature, yet at the same time approaching the canon from a critical and local perspective. Such intermediate texts play a role as critical mediators between the local and the global, also assuming the function of a contestatory canon from a local point of view as well as forming a “shadow canon” on the global scene. In this article, intermediate texts will be characterized by three features: historicity, mediation, and absorption. The primary texts are works by Mo Yan and Julian Barnes, both of whom, as a Nobel Prize winner and a Man Booker Prize winner, have a potential for acquiring both local and international canonicity. Inspired by William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, Mo Yan builds on an international canon, while also creating works with strong Chinese elements. Unlike Mo Yan's intermediate texts, Julian Barnes's novels situate themselves within the network of canonical writers such as Gustave Flaubert, yet without “writing back” on local conditions.

Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending : The Uneasy Coexistence of Historical Responsibility and the Narcissistic Narrative of an Isolated Individual

본 논문은 2011년에 출판되어 부커상을 수상한 반즈의 소설 『끝남의 의미』에 나타난 ‘역사’의 의미에 초점을 맞춘다. 많은 경우에 반즈의 소설은 포스트모던 역사성의 맥락에서 이해되고 해석되어 왔다. 추상화된 담론인 거시사적 역사서술에 대항하면서 등장한 미시사적 관점은 개인들 간의 상호관계나 개인의 역사 속에 담긴 여러 겹의 가능성을 드러낸다는 점에서 긍정적으로 평가받고 있다. 문제는 역사학의 접근방법인 거시사와 미시사의 틀을 소설의 주인공인 토니의 개인사에 그대로 적용할 때 발생하는 듯하다. 역사학과 달리 소설은 태생적으로 인물들이 구체적인 현실 속에서 어떻게 살아 움직이는지를 포착하려고 노력해왔다는 점에서 이미, 항상 미시사적 접근을 해왔다고 할 수 있다. 달리 말하면, 토니의 개인사에 집중하는 『끝남의 의미』를 역사학의 미시사적 관점에서 긍정적으로만 평가할 수 있는가 하는 것이 논문의 문제의식이다. 이런 측면에서 논문은 『끝남의 의미』와 관련하여 자주 논의되는 ‘포스트모던 미시사’라는 비평틀을 반즈 소설에 적용하는 것이 얼마나 타당한지를 검토해 볼 것이다. 또한 의식과 시간에만 집중하는 것이 서사 전체에서 사회적 맥락을 지우는 것과 어떤 관련이 있는지 알아보기 위해 바우만의 『액체근대』와 관련하여 소설을 읽어보겠다.This article delves into the nature of ‘history’ presented in Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2011. Many critics have read the novel in the light of the post-modern historicity closely related to microhistory. The microhistory, looming up against an abstract discourse of macrohistory, has been considered effective in revealing the multi-layered history of a person. But problems seems to occur when the microhistorical approach is directly applied to Anthony Webster’s personal history in the novel. It can be said that the novel, unlike historical studies, has already and always adopted microhistorical approaches in understanding the history of a person as well as a period by representing a character struggling through time. Thus, this article asks the question of how persuasive it is to read the ‘isolated’ history of Tony very positively from a microhistorical view. This reading also entails examining how the narrative preoccupation with time and consciousness is related to the removal of social contexts in the novel.

Interview with Will Self

Will Self is a renowned British author, cultural thinker, journalist, broadcaster, and psychogeographer. He has authored ten novels, most recently Shark (2014) and Phone (2017); five collections of shorter fiction, and several volumes of nonfiction, most recently The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker (2012). Self has been translated into over 20 languages. His novel Umbrella (2012) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He has frequently published in many periodicals including the Guardian, Harper's, the New York Times, the New Statesman, and London Review of Books. He is a regular presenter or panelist on BBC television shows and BBC Radio 4. His first book of short fiction, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991) won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He won the Agha Khan Prize for Fiction for Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (1998), and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction for The Butt (2008).In 2007, M. Hunter Hayes published Understanding Will Self on the subject of his life and work. Self is Professor of Contemporary Thought at Brunel University, London.This interview was conducted at the bar of the India Club Restaurant, Strand Continental Hotel, London.

Revisiting New York as an Existential Metaphor in Paul Auster's THE NEW YORK TRILOGY

With recent events diverting our attention to New York and this year's shortlist for the Man Booker Prize announced (including Paul Auster's latest novel 4 3 2 1), one finds a renewed fascination w...

The Geography of Prestige: Prizes, Nigerian Writers, and World Literature

The Geography of Prestige:Prizes, Nigerian Writers, and World Literature Nathan Suhr-Sytsma More than a decade ago, James F. English identified an emerging "deterritorialization of prestige, an uncoupling of cultural prizes, and even of symbolic fields as such, from particular cities, nations, even clearly defined regions."1 In his account, the power of national cultural fields, especially, has declined since the mid-twentieth-century heyday of anticolonial cultural nationalism. Since awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature to Nigerian writer and activist Wole Soyinka in 1986, the Swedish Academy has been at the forefront of defining a "global" or "world" literature—for English, the terms are interchangeable—that inevitably alters or even undermines "national literary hierarchies and systems of value," the ways in which writers are appraised by their compatriots (EP, 304). At the same time, English indicates, the Nobel does not float free altogether of specific geographies: even as nations command less symbolic significance, the Nobel has inaugurated a "conscious strategy aimed at honoring writers of world literature who could nonetheless and simultaneously be identified with local roots or sites of production, and indeed whose place within world literature was a function of their particular relationship to those local roots" (EP, 303, emphasis original). In the press release announcing the winner of the 1986 prize, the Swedish Academy emphasized Soyinka's "roots in the Yoruba people's myths, rites and cultural patterns," and it drew attention to poetry and prose he had written out of his imprisonment by the Nigerian government during the Nigerian-Biafran War; the Academy foregrounded Soyinka's loyalties to a subnational "people" and his individual conscience rather than to Nigeria as a nation.2 The proliferation of prizes that English traces across the twentieth century is an inescapable feature of African literature in the twenty-first century. The "deterritorialization of prestige" does not quite do justice, though, to the workings and effects of African literary prizes today. Preeminent among those prizes is the Caine Prize for African Writing, of which Soyinka, along with fellow Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee, is a Patron. Named for Sir Michael Caine, who helped establish the Booker (now Man Booker) Prize for Fiction while an executive [End Page 1093] at Booker plc, the Caine Prize is based in London and presented at a ceremony in Oxford. Since 2000, it has awarded £10,000 each year "to a short story by an African writer published in English."3 Building on the cachet of the Booker Prize by inviting 1991 Booker winner Ben Okri to chair its first judging panel, the Caine Prize has made itself an inescapable part of the machinery for selecting and publicizing early career writers of anglophone African fiction. The prize has launched the careers of such leading figures of contemporary African literature as Helon Habila (2001 winner), Binyavanga Wainaina (2002 winner), and NoViolet Bulawayo (2011 winner), whose first novel, We Need New Names, was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize. It has become even more important with the discontinuation of other major literary prizes for African writers, including the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa in 2009 and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2011. There are some prizes with a similar pan-African remit and larger award amounts, such as the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa (first awarded in 2006) and the 9mobile Prize for Literature (formerly Etisalat Prize for Literature, first awarded in 2013), both based in Lagos, Nigeria. Yet the Caine Prize commands a terrain between these continent-based prizes, which attract limited attention outside Africa, and rich international prizes administered in the Global North like the Man Booker, the Dublin International Literary Award, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the Windham Campbell Prizes, of which Habila was a recipient in 2015. Due partly to its ties to the London publishing scene and partly to the "dynamic canonization" afforded by an annual prize, the Caine Prize has a catalytic effect on African writers' reputations and careers outside their countries of origin.4 As a result, it exerts an outsized influence on discussions about an emerging canon of twenty-first-century African literature. Contrasting the Africa-wide ambitions of the Caine Prize...