Vai al contenuto principale della pagina

Prose of the world : modernism and the banality of empire / / Saikat Majumdar



(Visualizza in formato marc)    (Visualizza in BIBFRAME)

Autore: Majumdar Saikat Visualizza persona
Titolo: Prose of the world : modernism and the banality of empire / / Saikat Majumdar Visualizza cluster
Pubblicazione: New York, : Columbia University Press, 2013
Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (249 p.)
Disciplina: 823/.909
Soggetto topico: Commonwealth fiction (English) - 20th century - History and criticism
Banality (Philosophy) in literature
Place (Philosophy) in literature
Narration (Rhetoric)
Literature and society - Commonwealth countries - History - 20th century
Classificazione: HM 1071
Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Nota di contenuto: Introduction: poetics of the prosaic -- James Joyce and the banality of refusal -- Katherine Mansfield and the fragility of Pakeha boredom -- The dailiness of trauma and liberation in Zoe Wicomb -- Amit Chaudhuri and the materiality of the mundane -- Epilogue: The uneventful.
Sommario/riassunto: Everyday life in the far outposts of empire can be static, empty of the excitement of progress. A pervading sense of banality and boredom are, therefore, common elements of the daily experience for people living on the colonial periphery. Saikat Majumdar suggests that this impoverished affective experience of colonial modernity significantly shapes the innovative aesthetics of modernist fiction. Prose of the World explores the global life of this narrative aesthetic, from late-colonial modernism to the present day, focusing on a writer each from Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and India. Ranging from James Joyce's deflated epiphanies to Amit Chaudhuri's disavowal of the grand spectacle of postcolonial national allegories, Majumdar foregrounds the banal as a key instinct of modern and contemporary fiction-one that nevertheless remains submerged because of its antithetical relation to literature's intuitive function to engage or excite. Majumdar asks us to rethink the assumption that banality merely indicates an aesthetic failure. If narrative is traditionally enabled by the tremor, velocity, and excitement of the event, the historical and affective lack implied by the banal produces a narrative force that is radically new precisely because it suspends the conventional impulses of narration.
Titolo autorizzato: Prose of the world  Visualizza cluster
ISBN: 0-231-52767-5
Formato: Materiale a stampa
Livello bibliografico Monografia
Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
Record Nr.: 9910809468203321
Lo trovi qui: Univ. Federico II
Opac: Controlla la disponibilità qui