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

Marc Caplan

ISBN 10: 0804774765 / ISBN 13: 9780804774765

Editore: Stanford University Press Sep 2011, 2011

Riguardo questo articolo

Neuware - This is a revolutionary work in the study of Yiddish literature and post-colonial theory, offering a new methodology for comparative research, a new definition of literary modernism, and an unprecedented juxtaposition of Jewish Studies with African literature.

Codice articolo 9780804774765

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: How Strange the Change : Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms
• Editore: Stanford University Press Sep 2011
• Data di pubblicazione: 2011
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0804774765
• ISBN 13: 9780804774765
• Rilegatura: Buch
• Condizione: Neu
• Dimensioni: 231 L x 155 A x 25 P (millimetri) 231 millimetri di larghezza per 155 millimetri di altezza per 25 millimetri di profondità
• Peso: 635 grammi

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

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.

Informazioni sull?autore

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.