Whiting out Algeria: On the Limits of Assia Djebar'sLe Blanc de l'Algérieas Post-Traumatic Liturgy

CounterText ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 212-235
Author(s):  
Edwige Tamalet Talbayev
Keyword(s):  
Collective Trauma ◽  
Narrative Voice ◽  
Literary Practice ◽  
Multiple Voices ◽  
Living Together ◽  
New Models ◽  
Post Traumatic ◽  
Bear Witness ◽  
The Way

This essay reflects on Assia Djebar's mode of memorialisation of the symbolic and aesthetic aftermath of the Algerian Black Decade – and of the forms of collective trauma that it instigated. It probes Djebar's ‘writing after’ aesthetics in Le Blanc de l'Algérie (1995): a counter-political, afterwardly literary idiom dedicated to deflating ready-made forms of memorialisation. It examines the way in which Djebar avails herself of a post-literary, utopian language – her ‘poetics of white’ – to adequately attend to the multiple voices of Algeria. By recovering those vanishing testimonies in their singularity, Djebar's retrospective vision of the legacy of violence recasts the present as aftermath. Providing a deep-reaching reflection on the appropriate liturgy befitting her future-oriented memorial project, one tethered to ‘a nation seeking its own ceremonial’, Djebar illuminates the purview of the post-literary to bear witness to the origin of the violence, ‘the why of yesterday's funerals, those of the Algerian utopia’, with the aim of excavating new models of living together. However, Djebar's text falls prey to hermeneutic limits that mark out the narrator's disintegration and her inability to truly lend a voice to those bereft of their own. The example of Djebar's ‘poetics of white’ thus offers a reflection on the effects of narrative dissolution – here the dissolution of the narrative voice – in memorial mediations of the afterwardly. Can a countertextual literary practice, one aiming at speaking against coercive political forms, move beyond the aporetically singular? Can it ever fulfil a collective project, or is it doomed to dissolution and expatriation?

Memory that ‘owes nothing to fact’: Friel's Implausible Missionary Priest in Dancing at Lughnasa

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-249
Author(s):  
Stephanie Boeninger
Keyword(s):  
Historical Records ◽  
Living Together ◽  
The Way

Dancing at Lughnasa has been widely discussed as a memory play. Critics frequently analyze the way Michael's narration shapes the story he tells of five unmarried sisters living together in 1930's Donegal. Fewer critics, however, focus on Michael's representation of Father Jack, the missionary priest who returns after twenty-five years in Uganda. A surprisingly articulate anthropological observer who is more changed by the Ugandans than they by him, Father Jack defies the image of the missionary imperialist. Indeed, his portrayal conflicts with historical records. Father Jack's heterodox beliefs distress his family, but they find favor with postmodern audiences, eager to see Irish characters resist their part in the colonial enterprise. Friel's portrayal of Father Jack thus implicates the audience, not just Michael, in the play's selective memory.

scholarly journals Memoria e storia nelle narrazioni postcoloniali di Regina di fiori e di perle di Gabriella Ghermandi e Memorie di una principessa etiope di Martha Nasibù

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 30-42
Author(s):  
Barbara Kornacka
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Voice ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
The Voice ◽  
The Way

The aim of thise paper is to show how the setting out of the narrative voice determines the historical discourse. The analysis of the narrative voice leads to some considerations about memory and to the examination of recollection in these two novels. That, in turn, allows an exploration of the way in which the historical discourse is constructed. In those cases where the voice in the historical discourse is given to subaltern subjects, they contribute to a more plural history.

scholarly journals Ruin philosophy, poetic discourse and the collapse of meta-narratives in Aleksandr Kushner's poetry of the 1970s

Nordlit ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Schönle
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Poetic Discourse ◽  
Philosophical Background ◽  
The Face ◽  
Creative Forces ◽  
Bear Witness ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
The Way

This article offers an analysis of the trope of ruin in the poetry of Aleksandr Kushner (born 1936), in particular through a close reading of two of his poems: “In a slippery graveyard, alone” and “Ruins”. The analysis of these poems is preceded by an overview of ruin philosophy from Burke and Diderot to Simmel and Benjamin, with particular emphasis on the way the trope of ruin contemplation stages a confrontation between the self and what transcends it (death, history, nature, etc.). This philosophical background serves as a heuristic tool to shed light on the poetry of Kushner. Through the trope of ruin, Kushner explores the legitimacy of poetic speech after the collapse of all meta-narratives. Kushner has no truck with Diderot's solipsism, nor with Hegel's bold narrative of progress, nor with Simmel's peaceful reconciliation with the creative forces of nature. Nor, really, does he intend to bear witness to history, the way Benjamin does in the faint anticipation of some miracle. Instead, Kushner posits the endurance of a community united not around a grand project, but around the idea of carrying on in the face of everything, muddling through despite the lack of hopes for a transformational future and making the most of fleeting moments of positivity that emerge out of the fundamental serendipity of history.

A Sacred Communion

2018 ◽  
pp. 67-108
Author(s):  
Erin Michael Salius
Keyword(s):  
Spirit Possession ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Narrative Voice ◽  
The Way

Chapter 2 focuses on another trope that upsets the realist and rationalist discourse of slavery: spirit possession. Whereas existing scholarship stresses the postmodernist resonances of this trope, the chapter argues that Catholicism serves to frame—and even to facilitate—the antirealist effect that spirit possession has on two contemporary narratives of slavery. First is Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which is one of the earliest examples of the genre and a novel rarely associated with either spirit possession or Catholicism. By highlighting where Jane’s narrative voice is possessed by other speakers, this chapter documents how the Catholic characters in the novel enable it to engage radically antirealist views about history without ultimately endorsing them. The second part of the chapter focuses on Leon Forrest’s critically acclaimed but insufficiently studied novel Two Wings to Veil My Face, which also figures storytelling as a kind of spirit possession. Despite its obvious skepticism towards organized religion, the novel depicts these spiritual intercessions as Catholic sacraments: rituals of eating and drinking that recall the Eucharist. Thus, Catholicism is implicated in the way the narrator remembers slavery and in the parts of his history that are “beyond understanding.”

scholarly journals The Challenge of Teaching Mobile Journalism through MOOCs: A Case Study

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (13) ◽  
pp. 5307 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Cervi ◽  
José Manuel Pérez Tornero ◽  
Santiago Tejedor
Keyword(s):  
Online Courses ◽  
Pilot Project ◽  
Massive Open Online Courses ◽  
Open Learning ◽  
Massive Open Online ◽  
Current Challenge ◽  
New Models ◽  
Journalistic Practice ◽  
The Way

Smartphones have become a key social tool: They have changed the way people consume, receive and produce information, providing potentially anyone with the opportunity to create and share content through a variety of platforms. The use of smartphones for gathering, producing, editing and disseminating news gave birth to a new journalistic practice, mobile journalism. Incorporating mobile journalism is, thus, the current challenge for journalism educators. Our article aims at discovering whether new models of education, such as massive online courses, can help mobile journalism training. The research focuses on the first pilot project of a massive open online courses (MOOC) on mobile journalism, the Y-NEX MOOC. By assessing structure, functioning and participants’ opinion, the objective is to discover if MOOCs prove to be useful tools in mobile journalism training. Results show that this model of distance open learning can be helpful for mobile journalism training, providing some recommendations for improvement.

Signs and Meanings in the Representations of their Home City by the School Pupils of Daugavpils

2012 ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Mairita Folkmane ◽  
Ilva Skulte
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Living Together ◽  
Ethnic Schools ◽  
The City ◽  
The Way

Daugavpils historically was the place where different ethnic groups are living together, interacting on the public spaces. The mixture of cultures is represented in the city landscape - home to every inhabitant, still having differents accents, figures and symbolical meanings. The following paper is based on the semiotic analysis of the pictures made by the pupils of different (ethnic) schools of Daugavpils, in order to understand what and how cildren "see" their city - what are the signs they use to construct the message about their city together and what do they mean - how different is a pictorial message. To do the analysis collection of the children drawings was made for an exhibition in the hall of the city munipality of Daugavpils - a material for our research. The findings show that besides of expected reference to different cultural traditions and some aestetical preferences, no difference exists between the way children represent their city. Diversity of cultural footprints in the landscape of the city and the pride for their city is present in the works of children coming from different ethnic, linguistic and cultural environments.

scholarly journals Sir Peter Medawar: science, creativity and the popularization of Karl Popper

2013 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 301-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Calver
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Karl Popper ◽  
Literary Practice ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
The Public ◽  
Self Image ◽  
Public Role ◽  
The Two Cultures ◽  
The Way

Sir Peter Medawar was respected by scientists and literati alike. It was perhaps not surprising, then, that he would choose to involve himself in the ‘two cultures’ debate of 1959 and beyond. The focus of his intervention was the philosophy of Sir Karl Popper. However, Medawar's Popper was not the guru of falsification familiar from philosophy textbooks. Medawar's distinctive interpretation of Popper treated him instead as the source of insights into the role of creativity and imagination in scientific inquiry. This paper traces the context for Medawar's adoption of Popperian philosophy, together with its application before the debate. It then examines, within the context of the debate itself, the way in which Medawar attempted to reconcile scientific inquiry with literary practice. Medawar became increasingly convinced that not only was induction epistemologically unsound, but it was also damaging to the public role of the scientist. His construction of Popperianism would, he envisaged, provide a worthy alternative for scientists’ self-image.

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