Non-fictional Writings Research Articles

A Critical Discourse Review of Resistance Consciousness in The Language and Ideology of Social Change Project in Wole Soyinka’s Political Discourse

This paper discusses resistance consciousness in the language and ideology of social change project in Wole Soyinka’s political discourse. The discussion is aimed at examining Wole Soyinka’s text production strategies in his non-fictional writings. These writings weave a web of resistance ideologies that are enacted to instantiate social change on the political sphere of postcolonial states. This means that Soyinka produces texts aimed at instigating resistance consciousness in text consumers. The paper identifies the text production process for engaging the mind of the text consumer as semioticisation. The objective of Wole Soyinka’s non-fictional writings, therefore, is to arouse consciousness for social change through deliberate acts of resistance against the anti-democratic dispositions, especially among Nigerian politicians. In this paper, the critical discourse review of the resistance consciousness draws upon the theory and methodology of critical discourse analysis (CDA) propounded by Teun van Dijk (2002) and Norman Fairclough (1992) These theoretical approaches were complemented by Jacob Mey’s (2001) critical pragmatic theory and Michael A. K. Halliday’s (1985) systemic functional theory. The blend of the theories and methodologies gives the study an interdisciplinary outlook that facilitates the understanding of Wole Soyinka’s deployment of linguistic devices such as metaphor, lexicalisation, passivisation and intertextuality to produce political discourse (text) that arouses resistance consciousness for enacting social change.

Perving at Crime Scenes

This is a conversation between a law professor (Katherine Biber), a curator and researcher of crime scene photographs (Peter Doyle), and a non-fiction writer of true crime (Kate Rossmanith). The three participants have begun what we hope will be a long-term collaboration, working with a shared interest in the cultural impact of crime.

Naipaul's Women Revisited

This article is a reconsideration of V.S. Naipaul's attitude toward women, following from the author's 2005 article “Naipaul's Women.” Various recent statements Naipaul has made about female authors, including Diana Athill and Jane Austen, are examined in the light of his writings, both fact and fiction, about women in general and women writers in particular. Some consideration is also given to his relations with women in his personal life, including his sister and his wife. The final assessment is that Naipaul's impatient “off the cuff' statements about women in interviews and at public events are not reflected in his nonfiction writings.

Conrad, Efficiency, and the Varieties of Imperialism

Conrad, Efficiency, and the Varieties of Imperialism Valerie Kennedy (bio) INTRODUCTION Joseph Conrad’s attitude to the issue of imperialism is complex and contradictory. In his political essays and his letters he excoriated Russian and German imperialism, identifying Russia with life-denying autocracy and repression, and Germany with a brutal sense of racial, technological, and commercial will to power. However, he was much more moderately and ambivalently critical of British imperialism since, as I shall argue, he identified with a particular vision of English imperialism and Englishness.1 He approved of what he saw as a particularly English tradition of service—the work ethic, duty, and efficiency—especially when it was embodied in the Royal Navy and the British Merchant Navy, but when efficiency took the form of German nationalism or imperialism his admiration turned to loathing. Moreover, his endorsement of the British maritime work ethic in his non-fictional writing largely disregards the commercial role of the Royal Navy and the British Merchant Navy in imperial global capitalism (my italics). His fiction, however, as Stephen Ross and others have argued, suggests that all types of imperialism are colored by the beginnings of the system of global capitalism (see pp. 168–169 and 184–185 below).2 I shall begin by discussing the vexed question of Conrad’s attitude to Englishness, the work ethic, and efficiency, before considering some recent critical analyses of Conrad’s fiction in relation to different conceptions of imperialism and capitalism, and then analyzing his representation of Russian and German imperialism in the political essays and the somewhat more nuanced but still stereotyped and generally negative depiction of Russian and German characters in his fiction. Finally, I shall suggest that Conrad’s fiction undermines the opposition in his non-fictional writings between different types of imperialism since it [End Page 163] shows British imperialism to be governed by the same commercial imperatives as the imperialism of other nations. CONRAD, ENGLISHNESS, AND EFFICIENCY Conrad’s self- description as a “Homo duplex” (CL 3: 89), a man with a “double life” (CL 3: 491) as he tells Robert Cunninghame Graham, or as Amar Acheraïou puts it, a “dual loyalty” to both Poland and England (56–57, and see 65, 67), has received a great deal of attention. In what follows I wish to focus on Conrad’s identification with a certain version of English efficiency and service, arguing that Conrad’s claim in the “Author’s Note” to A Personal Record to have been “adopted by the genius of the [English] language” was partly but not only a means of asserting his linguistic credentials as a British writer (vii). I shall also argue that Conrad’s continued descriptions of Poland as a fundamentally Western nation–like Great Britain—enabled him to reconcile fidelity to the idea of Poland with his idea of himself as a loyal citizen of Great Britain. Conrad’s repeated denials after 1905 that, as a Pole, he was a Slav serve to differentiate him as a Pole from the members of other Slavic nations such as Russia. Conrad had a dual allegiance to Poland and Great Britain. In 1883 he reassures Stefan Buszczyński that he has never forgotten and “never will forget” his words: “‘Remember […] wherever you may sail you are sailing towards Poland’” (Conrad, CL 1: 8). Yet two years later he can say to Spiridion Kliszczewski: “When speaking, writing or thinking in English, the word Home always means for me the hospitable shores of Great Britain” (Conrad, CL 1: 12). To his Polish correspondents, he consistently claims that he is a “compatriot, in spite of my writing in English” (Conrad, CL 3: 78). To his English or American correspondents, especially in later years, he insists that being a Pole does not mean being a Slav, since Poland is fundamentally Western, and that he is faithful to both Poland and (his vision of) England. In his letters to his English friends and acquaintances Conrad identifies himself with different aspects of Englishness by using the metaphor of adoption. In his 1919 “Author’s Note” to A Personal Record, Conrad claims “the right to be believed when [he] says that if [he] had...

Beyond the subaltern syndrome: Amitav Ghosh and the crisis of the bhadrasamaj

Using some of Amitav Ghosh’s influential non-fictional writings to understand his own novels, this paper problematizes Ghosh’s works in terms of the crisis of the bhadrasamaj or the middle class makers of the nation and civil society in India. Indeed, we may detect a direct line of literary and cultural descent from the two iconic figures of recent Bangla culture, Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray, to Ghosh’s complex career. But instead of a continuity, Ghosh’s works are a record of epistemic ruptures engendered by the breakdown of grand narratives of nations and the eruption of civic violence. The crisis in Tagore is a combination of private and public failures exemplified in a text such as Nashtonir, filmed so eloquently as Charulata by Ray. A similar crisis in the private and public domain is seen in Ray’s Ganashatru and Agantuk, his last works. While versions of similar crises are visible in Ghosh’s novels including The Shadow Lines, The Calcutta Chromosome, and The Hungry Tide, I argue that instead of confronting them head on as his predecessors did, Ghosh tends to be evasive, either by not allowing them fully to develop or escaping into coincidence, “doubling”, or romanticism. Does such a retreat into narratives of exodus or romanticized celebrations of failed experiments such as the Morichjhapi settlement signify a shift in both the self-confidence and the priorities of the bhadrasamaj, whose product and representative Ghosh is?

A field guide for immersion writing: memoir, journalism, and travel

For centuries writers have used participatory experience as a lens through which to better see the world at large and as a means of exploring the self. Considering various types of participatory writing as different strains of one style immersion writing Robin Hemley offers new perspectives and practical advice for writers of this nonfiction genre. Immersion writing can be broken down into the broad categories of travel writing, immersion memoir, and immersion journalism. Using the work of such authors as Barbara Ehrenreich, Hunter S. Thompson, Ted Conover, A. J. Jacobs, Nellie Bly, Julio Cortazar, and James Agee, Hemley examines these three major types of immersion writing and further identifies the subcategories of the quest, the experiment, the investigation, the infiltration, and the reenactment. Included in the book are helpful exercises, models for immersion writing, and a chapter on one of the most fraught subjects for nonfiction writers the ethics and legalities of writing about other people. Field Guide for Immersion Writing recalibrates and redefines the way writers approach their relationship to their subjects. Suitable for beginners and advanced writers, the book provides an enlightening, provocative, and often amusing look at the ways in which nonfiction writers engage with the world around them. A Friends Fund Publication.

The Canvas and the Page

The Canvas and the Page Brad Vice (bio) Confessions of a Left-Handed Man: An Artist’s Memoir. Peter Selgin. University of Iowa Press. http://www.uiowapress.org. 194 pages; paper, $19.95. Peter Selgin, winner of the 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award for his collection Drowning Lessons, is an accomplished storywriter, novelist, and nonfiction writer. But unlike many accomplished writers, he seems to have had no burning desire to write as a young person and found his footing in the trade late in life, and even then somewhat by default after limited successes as an artist, an actor, and a musician. It is clear from his collection of autobiographical essays, Confessions of a Left- Handed Man, that Selgin is one of those artistic types whose creative batteries are always charged, but whose ability to harness that energy came only with maturity. The key to understanding Selgin’s quirky, desultory personality, and thus the key to understanding his equally quirky, desultory memoir, comes in the final essay, “The Swimming Pool.” By the end of the book, we find Selgin divorced, alone, and living as a writer-in-residence in Middleville, Georgia (home of Flannery O’Connor). Somewhat at peace with this working solitude, Selgin feels satisfied, if not exactly happy, to rise early, write through the morning, eat simple and somewhat acetic meals of fitness bread and vegetables, and finally, walk a couple of miles to the small-town pool, “an old-fashioned cement pool. . .just rough concrete poured sometime during Prohibition.” The spare quality of the pool suits Selgin’s sense of discipline: “Without discipline there can be no deep or lasting pleasure. Maybe I feel this way because as a child I wasn’t sufficiently disciplined, and now as an adult I’m forced to make up with grim determination for that which my parents failed to give me.” If Selgin’s parents failed to give him discipline, they did not fail to give him a family worth writing about. The biographical details of Selgin’s family life read like the origins of superhero or a James Bond villain. Born a sinister twin—literally, with a dexterous look-alike brother George—and being raised by an absentminded but ingenious inventor, polymath father from Italy (a former employee of the U.S. State Department), his hot-blooded but indulgent Sophia Loren-esque mother who only speaks broken English, and his doting grandmother who speaks no English at all, it is clear from the get-go that Selgin simply had no chance at being ordinary. As residents of a WASPish small town in Connecticut (specifically selected by his father to conduct experiments in secret), Selgin’s exotic family seems alien, though also warm and loving. In the essay “Dagos in Mayberry,” the author remembers with pity the ordinary food the other ordinary children were fed by their humdrum parents: “While George and I were being weaned on diluted vino rosso, they drank cow’s milk and Kool-Aid with dinner, which they called ‘supper,’ and which would typically feature such ghastly bland items as cucumbers, and which they ate at an absurdly early hour.” In the title essay, “Confessions of a Left-Handed Man,” Selgin shows how difficult it is to get a clear picture of yourself when you are always looking in a mirror, as his brother looks exactly like him (though they are far from identical): “George and I grasped at anything we could to set ourselves apart from each other…. George took on the role of bookworm, while I in turn seized upon my left-handedness as my most distinguishing trait, in spite of my grandmother doing her best to repair what she saw at worst as a freak of nature.” Though Selgin himself rejects any idea that he is somehow biologically determined by his sinister physiognomy, Selgin has to admit that he represents all of the homespun myths about left-handers: artistic, accident-prone, sickly, depressive—“Coincidences, I’m sure.” And yet, through the course of Selgin’s childhood, sibling rivalry runs wild as Selgin attempts to outdo his brother. When George gets a girlfriend, “I made sure to get a better—anyway a prettier and...

Migrating from nonfiction to fiction – a practice-led approach drawing on a literary journalist’s notional tool-box

This paper reflects on a literary journalist’s practice-led approach to migrating from nonfiction to fiction and the decision to situate a narrative about the challenges and achievements of women in Victoria’s mid-19th century goldfields in a novel in the subgenre of historiographic metafiction. It addresses the lacuna in the traditionally masculinised history of the gold rush era, opening a window onto the ‘herstory’ of the period, describing the courage of women who overcame poverty, isolation and the limited gender-based expectations of the time in which they lived to set the pattern for the social infrastructure we take for granted today. The first author’s doctoral novel ‘A Respectable Married Woman’ embodies this migration and is informed methodologically by both journalistic and creative strategies. The study focuses on the role of site visits in practice-led research as it applies to literary journalism to create a sense of ‘being there’. The interlocutory reader (Widdowson 1979) is drawn into a narrative construct which hangs evidence-based ‘fictionised truths’ in a factual framework in order to facilitate a greater understanding of a critical period in the growth of Victoria and, in particular, the contribution of women. Drawing on literary theorists including Hutcheon (1998) and Kundera (2000) and referencing writers Ricketson (2006), Sedgwick (2004) and Quindlen (2004) among others, this paper aims to encourage other nonfiction writers to make use of the literary journalist’s notional ‘tool-box’ to take an imaginative leap into the world of credible historiographic metafiction.

The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland by Sara L. Maurer (review)

Reviewed by: The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland by Sara L. Maurer Sarah McNeely (bio) The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland by Sara L. Maurer; pp. 235. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. $59.00 cloth. It seems appropriate that Sara L. Maurer’s first book, The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland, would be published in a year when Downton Abbey, a pbs television show whose plot revolves around a dilemma of ownership, has skyrocketed to fame. Downton Abbey is, of course, far from the first popular work to portray the complex ins and outs of British property ownership, a recurring feature of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction, from Jane Austen to Anthony Trollope. More important than its unlikely pop-culture relevance, though, is the model of scholarship Maurer presents in this original, insightful work, which bridges a gap between British and Irish studies. In The Dispossessed State, Maurer traces the revolution in attitudes about property rights in nineteenth-century English and Anglo-Irish narratives of ownership. In her examination of a range of nineteenth-century texts and authors who engage questions of ownership, Maurer brings together the two cultures, each holding radically different views on property and the state. In addition to examining literature and journalism, Maurer incisively draws on the political, economic, and legal theories that compelled changes in thought about the individual, property, and the state. In her discussion of the formation of Victorian ideas about property, Maurer argues that Ireland wielded a major influence on how the British conceived of their own national identity in terms of property. Though we tend to think of the Victorian British Isles in exclusively British terms, Maurer reminds us that in terms of property, inhabitants of the British Isles understood themselves not separately but as part of a complex relationship, “in terms that linked Irish and British culture” (4). This framing of the English and Irish relationship as deeply intertwined is strongly supported in the various texts Maurer surveys in her study of property, the state, and national identity. In her analysis of discourses of property and state emergent in literature of the nineteenth century, Maurer draws primarily on the fiction and non-fiction writings of Maria Edgeworth, John Stuart Mill, Anthony Trollope, George Moore, and George Meredith. In her chapter on Maria Edgeworth’s Irish fiction, Maurer begins by discussing Edgeworth’s own lack of ownership over her intellectual property. Her reading of Edgeworth’s novels is especially compelling when she explains Edgeworth’s dispossession of her own work. That Anglo-Irish and Irish right to property takes such a central position in her novels Castle Rackrent (1801), Ennui (1809), and Ormond (1817) is a fascinating connection Maurer mines, finding ultimately that Edgeworth’s literature unifies Anglo-Irish and Irish in a shared sense of dispossession. That is, Edgeworth’s view on property, apparent from her novels, is that those who own the land should rule Ireland. [End Page 211] Edgeworth’s particular view of property as a right pre-existing the state is almost directly opposed to the views articulated in John Stuart Mill’s journalism on the same question. As Maurer explains in her second chapter, Mill believed the state should create rights in property and exercise that power in Ireland. In chapter 3, Maurer discusses the appeal of indigenous property rights to Irish nationalists and others caught between the two prevailing discourses of property rights and the state in the Victorian years, represented by the previously discussed works of Edgeworth and Mill. Maurer’s succinct overview and explanation of competing narratives of property ownership in this chapter are extremely helpful to readers unfamiliar with Victorian ideas of property. Chapter 4 turns again to fiction, reading Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels in terms of property and the role of a wife, a relationship that, according to Maurer, presents a metaphor for “vicarious ownership” and enjoyment of the state by non-owners. The final chapter argues in favour of reading George Moore’s Drama in Muslin and George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways as responses to the proposal of the...

South African Social History and the New Non‐Fiction

The paper comments on Hedley Twidle’s argument which attributes the present vigour of South African non-fiction writing to the influence of the social history movement that flourished in South African academia in the 1980s. The paper supports Twidle’s view, but stresses the need to understand the specific political genealogy of the social history movement. It came out of a very distinct current of Marxist-derived intellectual endeavour, one which did not share many of the triumphalist, teleological and determinist characteristics of other forms of Marxism. In contrast to the views of another contributor to the debate, Rob Nixon, who tends to absorb social history into the broader leftist culture, the paper suggests that it was exactly where social history departed from other forms of Marxism that it proved most productive, and that it was these departures made it available for its present productive engagement by non-fiction writers. The paper especially focuses on the role of the University of the Witwatersrand’s History Workshop within social history, and responds to the criticisms of it by Andile Mngxitama. It suggests that Sarah Nutall’s notion of ‘entanglement’ is a particularly useful bridge between the concerns of social historians and literary scholars.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Colonial Revival

It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer, writes the narrator of Yellow Wall-Paper. colonial mansion, she continues, hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of felicity--but that would be asking too much of fate! (166). opening Yellow Wall-Paper with a reference to middle-class enthusiasm for ghostly colonial homes, Charlotte Perkins Gilman situates her story within late-nineteenth-century colonial revival discourses about old houses and their offer of intimacy with Anglo-American history. Gilman's take on colonial houses, however, radically revises the historical narratives those structures were imagined to bear forth. most late-nineteenth-century tales of colonial homes, moderns do, indeed, stumble upon stories of romantic felicity (166), from liaisons between colonial youths to tales of patriots' heroic lives. (1) But Gilman's narrator finds quite the opposite in her old mansion: hard-to-read traces of a brutal, gendered history that renders impossible a nostalgic view of the national past. To date, literary scholarship on Yellow Wall-Paper, while voluminous, has tended to focus on the story either as a self-contained feminist critique or as a historicized protest against nineteenth-century attitudes about female sexuality, health, and labor. (2) The prominence of Yellow Wall-Paper within Gilman studies and its role as a representative feminist text (if not the representative feminist text of the nineteenth-century United States) has, moreover, often led scholars to treat it as an isolated work, and this has tended to obscure the story's place within larger literary and historical contexts. this essay I demonstrate that Yellow Wall-Paper was the last in a sequence of three imaginative works that Gilman wrote in early 1890 that explore gender in relation to racialized national and regional histories. These include the short story Giant Wistaria and the unpublished In the Name of the A Romance (co-written with Grace Ellery Charming Stetson) (3) While In the Name of the King! has been among the Schlesinger Library's holdings since 1983, until now it has not been recognized as a part of Gilman's body of work and, accordingly, has received no critical attention. As this essay demonstrates, however, it clearly merits consideration by those seeking to understand the range of Gilman's writing and to historicize her most famous story. late February and early March 1890, just days after she participated in a colonial revival tea in Pasadena, California, Gilman noted in her diary that she and Stetson had begun work on a Colonial play (Diaries 412). This play, set in Salem, Massachusetts, became In the Name of the King! Although it was never, to my knowledge, produced, this drama marks the beginning of Gilman's exploration of white New England women's historical legacy, an intellectual terrain she continued to chart in Giant Wistaria and Yellow Wall-Paper. fact, less than a week after beginning to write this play, Gilman recorded in her diary that she was working on Giant Wistaria, a tale that explores the connections between a colonial New England woman's ghost and young urbanites of the late nineteenth century who rent a colonial mansion in the New England countryside (Diaries 412, 413). And, by early June, Gilman was writing another story that featured women from the past haunting the colonial mansion of the present: Yellow Wall-Paper. (4) Recognizing Gilman's engagement of colonial revival discourse has three significant outcomes. First, it gives new insight into Gilman's historical thinking about gender in the United States. (5) Second, it verifies Gail Bederman's claim that [Gilman's] feminism was inextricably rooted in ... white supremacism (122). As Alys Eve Weinbaum points out, it has tended to be the scholarship on Gilman's nonfiction writings that have explored and historicized the racist and nativist aspects of Gilman's theories (77). …

Re-Examining Sartre’s Reading of The Myth Of Sisyphus

One of the main obstacles in approaching the work of Albert Camus nowadays is the prevalent notion that his fictional works are somehow an illustration of a philosophy contained in his nonfiction writings. This is an idea which may be traced back to 1 942, to an influential review written of his debut novel, Stranger. review was written by Jean-Paul Sartre soon after completing Being and Nothingness, and while awaiting its publication. Recently, David Carroll has stated: existentialist interpretation Stranger had an important influence on readers of the novel and the essay [The Myth of Sisyphus] for decades. only began to be abandoned, although rarely if ever directly questioned, long after Algerian independence, with the growth postcolonial cultural criticism in the last few decades.1 purpose of this essay is to directly question how Sartre constructed his interpretation of Camus's novel, and to show that the structure of this initial review has not been so easily abandoned. In order to appreciate the prevalence Sartre's interpretative strategy over the reception of Camus's early work, it will be necessary to briefly survey some of the more recent scholarship, and some of the more prominent scholarship from the past. Richard Kamber, for example, bypasses almost all of the text of Stranger in his analysis of it, and goes straight to the final pages, where Meursault converses with the priest: meaning of this passage is critical for a philosophical critique of Stranger, since it is the only place in the novel where Meursault, the speaker and main character, attempts to give a philosophical explanation for his beliefs about the human condition. Yet the explanation presented in this passage seems incomplete in several respects. Let us examine what is missing in this formulation and try to determine how it should or could be completed.2 This is how Kamber completes the novel: The text of Stranger suggests these questions, but it does not provide the answers, he states: Camus's reflections on the importance of life itself, one must turn to Myth of Sisyphus3 Likewise, John Foley states: although we do not of course read them as a single text, if we are to read Outsider as a novel of ideas, then the severe limits imposed on the meaning of the absurd in Myth of Sisyphus need to be taken into account. For Camus, Meursault is the absurd hero par excellence4. novel is thereby circumscribed by the perceived philosophical concerns of the essay: Camus, Meursault represents the modern Sisyphus, the authentic man in a world bereft of transcendent meaning.5 work of Robert C. Solomon is a much more extreme case. He seems to bypass both the novel and the essay and goes straight to imposing a narrowly Sartrean philosophy onto Camus's work: To state my interpretation baldly, Meursault is a philosophically fantastic character who, for the first part of the novel, is an ideal Sartrean pre-reflective consciousness, pure experience without reflection. . . . But then, in the second part of the novel . . . [the] threat of imminent finally forces him into a Heideggerian celebration of the privilege of death and the happy death, which is a constant theme in Camus's novels.6 is from this position that Solomon can then comfortably trace the relationship between novel and essay: It is the movement from pure unreflective experience to reflection and philosophy. is the second part of the book [The Stranger] that carries us into the realm of Myth of Sisyphus.1 David Sherman, drawing heavily from Solomon (a former teacher, then colleague), is likewise determined to contain Camus with certain categories of philosophy, existentialism in particular. As Sherman states: Although Myth of Sisyphus was published shortly after Stranger, its exposition of the Absurd sets the philosophical stage for virtually all that follows. …

A Brief Conversation with Frank Westerman

march–april 2012 | 7 A ward-winning literary journalist Frank Westerman (b. 1964, Emmen, the Netherlands) began his career as a freelance journalist working in Africa, eastern Europe, and Latin America. In 1993 he became a correspondent in Belgrade during the war in Yugoslavia. He has published seven books, two of which are available in English: Engineers of the Soul, about Soviet writers under Stalin, and Ararat, in which Westerman considers science and religion, fact and faith, while climbing this biblical mountain on the Turkish-Armenian border. WLT: You not only cross but combine genres. Your work to date includes journalism, history, and literary journalism. In fact, one of your books, Ararat, won awards in at least three categories: literature, travel, and popular science. Do you write any fiction, or have any plans to do so? Frank Westerman: Hardly. I feel no constraints in telling true stories. I think it’s the “how-you-tell-it” that makes the story. Sticking to facts imposes only one literary limitation: thou shalt not fabricate. But you do fully depend on style, composition ,timing,suggestion,seduction,imagination.“Agoodstory tells itself”—no way! “Reality is bigger than life”—usually it is. The nonfiction writer works on the basis of Michelangelo’s old adage that the sculpture (in this case the story) is already there—you only need to free it from the rock. WLT: In your most recent book, Dier, bovendier, forthcoming in English in July as Brother Mendel’s Perfect Horse, how did you decide to tell the story of twentieth-century tragedies through the story of the Lipizzaner horse? FW: I’ve been riding and training horses, including Lipizzaners , since I was a boy. As the backbone or carrier for my book, I focused on a white stallion I once knew, and three generations of his equine ancestors. Being the Austrian emperor’s private breed, famous for performing at Vienna’s Spanish Riding School, the Lipizzaners lost their protector during World War I andhave,eversince,servedas(war)bountyforMussolini,Hitler ,Tito,andCeaușescu,insuccession.Thesewhitehorsesmirror the quest for racial purity and the nature/nurture debate, whether in the hands of fascists or communists. By following their fate through the twentieth century, I took a core sample from recent history and set out to “read” it, the way a geologist can see how the ice ages came and went in the layers of a single sample. I think I’ve come up with a kind of true fable, which, like all animal stories, is about us, humans. WLT: Who are your influences, both literary and journalistic? FW: Jorge Luis Borges, for how he molds exactness into language; Ryszard Kapuściński, for his ability to give specific incidents a universal glow; and Curzio Malaparte, for his superb style. WLT: What new projects are you working on now? FW: I’m currently writing a book “on the origin of stories .” I think I have a clear-cut case that started with its own big bang: the explosion of a mountain lake in west Cameroon in 1986 that wiped out all human and animal life in the valley below. There was no damage to property or plants, but 1,833 people died. Today, twenty-five years later, three different, conflicting stories have sprouted from this enigmatic event. The first one emerged among the many volcanologists who continue to study the lake for clues. The second version is the incorporation of this collective death into the doctrine of the suffering of Christ, by Catholic and evangelical missionaries. The third story has been created by the survivors, based on their own, existing myths of vengeful ancestors who live in the afterworld at the bottom of the numerous deep lakes in the area. My take on it: how do words and phrases cluster to stories and eventually legends? I’m not aiming to weigh the three different accounts in the balance; that’s up to the reader. However, I believe our quintessential need for stories surpasses the “who’s right” issue. I do aim at writing a suspensful nonfiction account that deals a blow to Europe’s new and fashionable ethnocentrism. A Brief Conversation with Frank Westerman notebook photo...

“In a Country where You couldn’t Make this Shit up”?: Literary Non‐Fiction in South Africa

In the last few years, several critics have suggested that the most significant contemporary writing in South Africa is emerging in non-fictional modes. The work of authors like Antony Altbeker, Antjie Krog, Jonny Steinberg and Ivan Vladislavić ‘almost convinces one’, in the words of one acclaimed novelist, ‘that fiction has become redundant in this country’. This piece sets out to ask why such claims are being made now, and what they can tell us about the status of the literary in contemporary South Africa. From Tom Wolfe’s The New Journalism (1973)to J. M. Coetzee’s ‘The Novel Today’ (1988) – and, more recently, David Shields’s Reality Hunger (2010) – the relation between ambitious non-fiction and the serious novel has often been portrayed as one of antagonism and rivalry. Yet while not wanting to dismantle the different kinds of truth-claim made by fictive and documentary modes, I suggest that instances of fiction and non-fiction from South Africa have in fact for a long time been in an unusually intense, intimate and one might even say constitutive dialogue with each other. Offering a survey of how various critics have tried to conceptualise the space of the literary in South Africa – whether as ‘field’, ‘archipelago’, ‘dream topography’, ‘marketplace’ or ‘seam’ – the piece argues for the need to read novels, poems, plays and other traditionally ‘literary’ forms alongside more topical, documentary modes. I deepen these lines of enquiry by examining two encounters: the first a panel on non-fiction at the 2010 Cape Town International Book Fair (from which the chapter takes its name), and the second a revealing reading, or as I will argue, misreading, of J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace by the acclaimed non-fiction writer Jonny Steinberg.

A Brief Conversation with Frank Westerman

march–april 2012 | 7 A ward-winning literary journalist Frank Westerman (b. 1964, Emmen, the Netherlands) began his career as a freelance journalist working in Africa, eastern Europe, and Latin America. In 1993 he became a correspondent in Belgrade during the war in Yugoslavia. He has published seven books, two of which are available in English: Engineers of the Soul, about Soviet writers under Stalin, and Ararat, in which Westerman considers science and religion, fact and faith, while climbing this biblical mountain on the Turkish-Armenian border. WLT: You not only cross but combine genres. Your work to date includes journalism, history, and literary journalism. In fact, one of your books, Ararat, won awards in at least three categories: literature, travel, and popular science. Do you write any fiction, or have any plans to do so? Frank Westerman: Hardly. I feel no constraints in telling true stories. I think it’s the “how-you-tell-it” that makes the story. Sticking to facts imposes only one literary limitation: thou shalt not fabricate. But you do fully depend on style, composition ,timing,suggestion,seduction,imagination.“Agoodstory tells itself”—no way! “Reality is bigger than life”—usually it is. The nonfiction writer works on the basis of Michelangelo’s old adage that the sculpture (in this case the story) is already there—you only need to free it from the rock. WLT: In your most recent book, Dier, bovendier, forthcoming in English in July as Brother Mendel’s Perfect Horse, how did you decide to tell the story of twentieth-century tragedies through the story of the Lipizzaner horse? FW: I’ve been riding and training horses, including Lipizzaners , since I was a boy. As the backbone or carrier for my book, I focused on a white stallion I once knew, and three generations of his equine ancestors. Being the Austrian emperor’s private breed, famous for performing at Vienna’s Spanish Riding School, the Lipizzaners lost their protector during World War I andhave,eversince,servedas(war)bountyforMussolini,Hitler ,Tito,andCeaușescu,insuccession.Thesewhitehorsesmirror the quest for racial purity and the nature/nurture debate, whether in the hands of fascists or communists. By following their fate through the twentieth century, I took a core sample from recent history and set out to “read” it, the way a geologist can see how the ice ages came and went in the layers of a single sample. I think I’ve come up with a kind of true fable, which, like all animal stories, is about us, humans. WLT: Who are your influences, both literary and journalistic? FW: Jorge Luis Borges, for how he molds exactness into language; Ryszard Kapuściński, for his ability to give specific incidents a universal glow; and Curzio Malaparte, for his superb style. WLT: What new projects are you working on now? FW: I’m currently writing a book “on the origin of stories .” I think I have a clear-cut case that started with its own big bang: the explosion of a mountain lake in west Cameroon in 1986 that wiped out all human and animal life in the valley below. There was no damage to property or plants, but 1,833 people died. Today, twenty-five years later, three different, conflicting stories have sprouted from this enigmatic event. The first one emerged among the many volcanologists who continue to study the lake for clues. The second version is the incorporation of this collective death into the doctrine of the suffering of Christ, by Catholic and evangelical missionaries. The third story has been created by the survivors, based on their own, existing myths of vengeful ancestors who live in the afterworld at the bottom of the numerous deep lakes in the area. My take on it: how do words and phrases cluster to stories and eventually legends? I’m not aiming to weigh the three different accounts in the balance; that’s up to the reader. However, I believe our quintessential need for stories surpasses the “who’s right” issue. I do aim at writing a suspensful nonfiction account that deals a blow to Europe’s new and fashionable ethnocentrism. A Brief Conversation with Frank Westerman notebook photo...

Paul Bowles' knowledge of Arabic: personal observations

It is generally recognised that Paul Bowles (1910–99) has been instrumental in generating a world-wide interest in Morocco and its culture both as a creative writer and translator. To paraphrase a remark made by Allen Hibbard (2004), Bowles is so closely linked to Morocco, his adopted home, that his name, for many in the West or elsewhere, cannot be invoked without thinking of Morocco. Bowles is specifically credited for his pioneering effort to promote numerous Moroccan works he translated or adapted from Arabic and the Moroccan vernacular or ‘Moghrebi’ as he called it. What is unique about his role is the fact that he had no knowledge of Arabic and the fact that his command of Moroccan Arabic was questionable or less than adequate for him to undertake his translation projects without the use of an intermediary language. This essay will address both issues mainly on the basis of personal conversations I had with Mr Bowles in Tangier and a review of the Arabic words or phrases he used in his works. It will show that because of his lack of knowledge of Arabic, Bowles was led to maintain distorted views of the Arabic language and its literary and cultural heritage. That's why his extensive non-fictional writings exhibit a glaring omission of substantive references to Arab/Muslim culture in general.

Embattled Home Fronts: Domestic Politics and the American Novel of World War I

Book Review| December 01 2011 Embattled Home Fronts: Domestic Politics and the American Novel of World War I Embattled Home Fronts: Domestic Politics and the American Novel of World War I. By Piep, Karsten H. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 2009. xi, 310 pp. Paper, $96.00.Masculinity in Vietnam War Narratives: A Critical Study of Fiction, Films, and Nonfiction Writings. By Boyle, Brenda M.. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. 2009. ix, 201 pp. Paper, $45.00. Kathleen McClancy Kathleen McClancy Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2011) 83 (4): 875–877. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-1437306 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Kathleen McClancy; Embattled Home Fronts: Domestic Politics and the American Novel of World War I. American Literature 1 December 2011; 83 (4): 875–877. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-1437306 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2011 by Duke University Press2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Literature and Environment

Since prehistory, literature and the arts have been drawn to portrayals of physical environments and human-environment interactions. The modern environmentalist movement as it emerged first in the late-nineteenth century and, in its more recent incarnation, in the 1960s, gave rise to a rich array of fictional and nonfictional writings concerned with humans' changing relationship to the natural world. Only since the early 1990s, however, has the long-standing interest of literature studies in these matters generated the initiative most commonly known as “ecocriticism,” an eclectic and loosely coordinated movement whose contributions thus far have been most visible within its home discipline of literature but whose interests and alliances extend across various art forms and media. In such areas as the study of narrative and image, ecocriticism converges with its sister disciplines in the humanities: environmental anthropology, environmental history, and environmental philosophy. In the first two sections, we begin with a brief overview of the nature, significance, and evolution of literature-environment studies. We then summarize in more detail six specific centers of interest: (a) the imagination of place and place-attachment, (b) the enlistment and critique of models of scientific inquiry in the study of literature and the arts, (c) the examination of the significance of gender difference and environmental representation, (d) the cross-pollination of ecocritical and postcolonial scholarship as ecocriticism has extended its horizons beyond its original focus on Anglo-American imagination, (e) ecocriticism's evolving interest in indigenous art and thought, and (f) ecocri-ticism's no less keen and complex attentiveness to artistic representation and the ethics of relations between humans and animals.

Tracing Vaishnava Strains in Tagore

The religio-cultural milieu of urban and rural Bengal within which Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) lived was variegated and dynamic with multiple Indian and foreign streams converging on Calcutta, then the capital of British India. One of the more popular but also more refined of the indigenous Bengali Indian streams was the religio-literary Vaishnava tradition of devotion (bhakti) to God Krishna and his human manifestation Chaitanya (1486–1533). Although Rabindranath was exposed to this tradition from his childhood, scholars, especially those writing in English, have tended to neglect this aspect of his experience and formation. The present article provides a corrective to this neglect by showing how Rabindranath treats Vaishnava matters in his fictional and non-fictional prose writings, including personal correspondence, and by examining how passages from his poetry resonate with basic Vaishnava themes, sentiments, and values. In summation, the article confirms that Rabindranath was well informed about the Vaishnava tradition in Bengal and that at the level of aesthetic and spiritual sensibilities, especially as expressed in poetry and song, he shared much with that tradition despite being critical of its restrictive dogmatic tendencies and alleged organisational distortions of the genuine spirituality that he would call the ‘religion of man’.

Ayn Rand's Economic Thought

Abstract This article explicates Ayn Rand's economic thought as expressed in her nonfiction and fiction writings. It concludes that Rand's formal knowledge of economics was relatively limited and that her case for the free market economy is almost entirely ethical and political. Nevertheless, her insight into the complexity of such an economy was acute and her view that true human flourishing is only possible in a laissez-faire context rested on the recognition that it is the only context that can completely liberate the creative potential of the human mind.