Language And Literary Form In French Caribbean Writing

This book links postcolonial theory with structuralism and poststructuralism to show how analysis of the textual illuminates the political and ideological positions of French Caribbean writers.

This title links postcolonial theory with structuralism and poststructuralism to show how analysis of the textual illuminates the political and ideological positions of writers.

This book is the first major study of French Caribbean literature in light of the concept of postcoloniality. Postcolonial theory debates have developed in the anglophone domain, and have not as yet referred prominently to francophone literature. Jeannie Suk investigates how the literature of Martinique and Guadeloupe provides a kaleidescopic view of the paradoxes at the heart of postcoloniality. Through subtle and provocative readings of Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, Baudelaire, Freud, and others, she illuminates how the development of French Caribbean literature and debates about négritude, antillanité, and creolité contribute to theories of in-betweenness and incompleteness central to postcolonial modes. In each chapter, lively and detailed analyses of literary and critical texts reveal connections between key thematic, conceptual, rhetorical, and psychic issues that form the interface of Caribbean and postcolonial concerns. The first part paves theoretical ground, focusing on readings of two seminal texts, Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal and Glissant's Discours antillais; the second part concentrates on Maryse Condé's exemplary work. Lucidly articulating the overlap and interplay of the distance of oceanic crossing, the discontinuities of allegorical signification, and the gap at the heart of trauma, Suk probes the paradoxical dynamic of impossible yet inevitable returns in space, time, and the psyche. She shows how literal and metaphorical "crossings" both produce and impede history and representation. The result is a new framework for understanding the intersection of postcolonial, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, and French Caribbean problems in a language attentive to improbable recurrences across theories and registers. Postcolonial Paradoxes is a major contribution to criticism and theory, of interest to scholars and students of postcolonialism, Caribbean and African diaspora literature, French literature, and psychoanalysis.

In Caribbean writing, place is intimately inflected by displacement - place and displacement are not dichotomous; every 'here' invariably implies a 'there'. In line with this extreme imbrication of (dis)location, Caribbean writing in French explores questions of increasing global pertinence such as the relation between writing and displacement, local and distant space, text and place, identity and migration, passage and transformation. Contributions range across genres and the work of writers such as Aimé Césaire, Patrick Chamoiseau, René Dépestre, Édouard Glissant, Émile Ollivier, Gisèle Pineau, Simone Schwarz-Bart and Ernest Pépin. Topics explored include the poetics of dwelling space, the postmodern or postcolonial dynamic of the Creole town, and the textualization of place and displacement. Also included are essays on the drama of distance, the metamorphosis of recent Haitian writing, the literary reverberations of the figure of Toussaint L'Ouverture, and links between Ireland and the French Caribbean.

The essays in this volume consider various literary and linguistic aspects of the francophone Caribbean at the beginning of the twenty-first century, focusing particularly on the French Overseas Departments of Martinique and Guadeloupe, and the independent islands of Haiti and Dominica. The literary chapters are devoted to new voices in the region and the Caribbean diaspora, or to recent works by established authors. Contributors offer fresh interpretations of Caribbean literary movements and explore relevant nonliterary issues, such as socio-political developments which have influenced the writers of today. The linguistic chapters examine the dynamics of the respective roles of Creole and the European standard language and consider the present viability of Creole as a literary medium.

A far-reaching and critical study of the role of education in shaping Caribbean identity. Perceptive studies of the literature and scholarship of French Caribbean writers are framed in the context of the foreign educational curriculum imposed on the people of these islands. Original research and literature analysis are combined in this syncretic approach to the development of the Caribbean identity. Book jacket.

In recent years, critical interest in francophone literature has become increasingly pronounced. In the case of the French Caribbean, the work of several writers (Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, for example) has gained international recognition, and has formed a vital part of more general debates on history, culture, language and identity in the post colonial world. The majority of such writers, however, have been male and, perhaps recalling the preference that France has always shown for the island, have come in large part from Martinique. Mapping a Tradition: Francophone Women's Writing from Guadeloupe aims to explore a different side of francophone Caribbean writing through the examination of selected novels by Jacqueline Manicom, Michele Lacrosil, Maryse Conde, Simone Schwarz-Bart and Dany Bebel-Gisler. Placing the work of these writers in the context of that of their better-known, male counterparts, this study argues that it has provided an important mode of intervention in, and disruption of, a literary tradition which has failed to address questions of sexual difference and has often excluded issues relating to French Caribbean women. At the same time, this study suggests that Guadeloupean women's writing of the last thirty years may he seen to constitute a 'tradition' in itself, replete with its own influences and inheritances. At once within, and outside the 'dominant' tradition, women's writing from Guadeloupe - and Martinique - has come to occupy a position at the forefront of contemporary efforts to expand and redefine a still-burgeoning corpus of literary and theoretical work.

Multilingual Literature as World Literature examines and adjusts current theories and practices of world literature, particularly the conceptions of world, global and local, reflecting on the ways that multilingualism opens up the borders of language, nation and genre, and makes visible different modes of circulation across languages, nations, media and cultures. The contributors to Multilingual Literature as World Literature examine four major areas of critical research. First, by looking at how engaging with multilingualism as a mode of reading makes visible the multiple pathways of circulation, including as aesthetics or poetics emerging in the literary world when languages come into contact with each other. Second, by exploring how politics and ethics contribute to shaping multilingual texts at a particular time and place, with a focus on the local as a site for the interrogation of global concerns and a call for diversity. Third, by engaging with translation and untranslatability in order to consider the ways in which ideas and concepts elude capture in one language but must be read comparatively across multiple languages. And finally, by proposing a new vision for linguistic creativity beyond the binary structure of monolingualism versus multilingualism.