Calibrations : reading for the social / Ato Quayson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Quayson, Ato.

Series:

Public worlds ; v. 12.

Public worlds ; v. 12

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African literature--20th century--History and criticism.

African literature.

Marxist criticism.

Mimesis in literature.

Postcolonialism in literature.

Physical Description:

xl, 179 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2003]

Summary:

Proposes an entirely new socially and politically conscious way of reading. Ato Quayson explores a practice of reading that oscillates rapidly between domains--the literary-aesthetic, the social, the cultural, and the political--in order to uncover the mutually illuminating nature of these domains. He does this not to assert the often repeated postmodernist view that there is nothing outside the text, but to outline a method of reading he calls calibrations: a form of close reading of literature with what lies beyond it as a way of understanding structures of transformation, process, and contradiction that inform both literature and society. Quayson surveys a wide array of texts--ranging from Bob Marley lyrics, Toni Morrison's work, Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History, and Althusser's reflections on political economy--and treats a broad range of themes: the comparative structures of alienation in literature and anthropology, cultural heroism as a trope in African society and politics, literary tragedy as a template for reading the life and activism of Ken Saro-Wiwa, trauma and the status of citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa, representations of physical disability, and the clash between enchanted and disenchanted time in postcolonial texts.

Contents:

Literature, anthropology, and history in Ghosh's in an antique land

Social imaginaries in transition: culture heroism and the genres of everyday life

African postcolonial relations through a prism of tragedy

Symbolization compulsions: Freud, African literature, and South Africa's process of truth and reconciliation

Disability and contingency

Literature and the parables of time.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 165-174) and index.

ISBN:

081663839X

0816638403

OCLC:

51586857