This is the first book-length study of how three important European thinkers-Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot-use the Binding of Isaac to illuminate the sacrificial situation of the literary writer. Danta shows that literature plays a vital and heretical role in these three writers' highly idiosyncratic accounts of the Akedah. His claim is twofold: firstly, that all three authors choose to respond to the Genesis narrative by manifesting literature; and, secondly, that each heretically endow...

This new collection of essays on Coetzee examines how his novels create and unsettle literary authority. Its unique contribution is to show how Coetzee provokes us into reconsidering certain basic formal and existential questions such as the nature of literary realism, the authority of the author and the constitution of the human self in a posthumanist setting by consciously revealing the literary-theoretical seams of his work. Strong Opinions makes the innovative claim that Coetzee's work...

In the last few decades, literary critics have increasingly drawn insights from cognitive neuroscience to deepen and clarify our understanding of literary representations of mind. This cognitive turn has been equally generative and contentious. While cognitive literary studies has reinforced how central the concept of mind is to aesthetic practice from the classical period to the present, critics have questioned its literalism and selective borrowing of scientific authority. Mindful Ae...

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s original, groundbreaking study explores the relationship between the African and African-American vernacular traditions and black literature, elaborating a new critical approach located within this tradition that allows the black voice to speak for itself. Examining the ancient poetry and myths found in African, Latin American, and Caribbean culture, and particularly the Yoruba trickster figure of Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey whose myths help art...

Yoruba Legendsby M. I. Ogumefu"The Yoruba people are descendants from a variety of West African communities. They are united by Geography, History, Religion and most importantly Language... They all speak Yoruba.In present day West Africa, the main countries where Yoruba speaking people live are Nigeria, Togo and Benin. These countries are very close together.Many years ago, before African slavery, the Yoruba people inhabited an area which stretched, alo...

Novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o has been a force in African literature for decades: Since the 1970s, when he gave up the English language to commit himself to writing in African languages, his foremost concern has been the critical importance of language to culture. In Something Torn and New, Ngugi explores Africa's historical, economic, and cultural fragmentation by slavery, colonialism, and globalization. Throughout this tragic history, a constant and irrepressible force was Europhon...

A one-of-a-kind collection showcasing the energy of new African literatureComing at a time when Africa and African writers are in the midst of a remarkable renaissance, Gods and Soldiers captures the vitality and urgency of African writing today. With stories from northern Arabic-speaking to southern Zulu-speaking writers, this collection conveys thirty different ways of approaching what it means to be African. Whether about life in the new urban melting p...

This essay will discuss Hutcheon's theory about “historiographic metafiction” in order to explain the meanings of Djebar's work; it will introduce Djebar's approach to history from a gender and post-colonized point of view; finally, issues related to language and history will be addressed.

An insightful literary biography of the Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee’s, illuminating the creation of his extraordinary novelsJ. M. Coetzee is one of the most renowned yet elusive authors of our time. Now, in J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, David Attwell explores the extraordinary creative process behind Coetzee's work, from Dusklands to The Childhood of Jesus. Drawing on Coetzee's manuscripts, notebooks and research papers housed at the Harr...

Writing "Out of all the Camps": J. M. Coetzee's Narratives of Displacement is an interdisciplinary examination--combining ethical, postcolonial, performance, gender-based, and environmental theory--of the ways that 2003 Nobel Prize-winning South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, primarily through his voicing of a female subject position and his presentation of a voiceless subjectivity, the animal, displaces both the narrative and authorial voice in his works of fiction. Coetzee's wo...

Anglophone postcolonial studies has been characterized by its secular nature. Yet as the first generation of scholars grapples with mortality, a yearning for spiritual meaning is emerging in many texts. This study synthesizes the sacred language used in these texts with critical theory in order to create a holistic frame for interpretive analysis.

In this volume, Nashef looks at J.M. Coetzee's concern with universal suffering and the inevitable humiliation of the human being as manifest in his novels. Though several theorists have referred to the theme of human degradation in Coetzee’s work, no detailed study has been made of this area of concern especially with respect to how pervasive it is across Coetzee’s literary output to date. This study examines what J.M. Coetzee's novels portray as the circumstances that contribute to the h...