Sadia Abbas
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780823257850
- eISBN:
- 9780823261604
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823257850.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This chapter examines the work of Nadeem Aslam. Aslam almost compulsively engages the divisions within Cold War Islam and is attentive to their swirled and ruptured (post)colonial histories. The ...
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This chapter examines the work of Nadeem Aslam. Aslam almost compulsively engages the divisions within Cold War Islam and is attentive to their swirled and ruptured (post)colonial histories. The crisis engendered by imperial-theological geopolitics is present in every one of his novels, Season of the Rainbirds (1993), Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), and The Wasted Vigil (2008). In Aslam’s novels baroque is a form of exacerbation and of hyper-aestheticism. It is a principle of lateness, of repetition, and of rereading. Cold War histories, devotional aesthetics, literary forms are infolded, inverted, revealed to be caught in a cycle of seemingly inescapable yet endlessly torqued iteration.Less
This chapter examines the work of Nadeem Aslam. Aslam almost compulsively engages the divisions within Cold War Islam and is attentive to their swirled and ruptured (post)colonial histories. The crisis engendered by imperial-theological geopolitics is present in every one of his novels, Season of the Rainbirds (1993), Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), and The Wasted Vigil (2008). In Aslam’s novels baroque is a form of exacerbation and of hyper-aestheticism. It is a principle of lateness, of repetition, and of rereading. Cold War histories, devotional aesthetics, literary forms are infolded, inverted, revealed to be caught in a cycle of seemingly inescapable yet endlessly torqued iteration.
Alex Houen
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- August 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198806516
- eISBN:
- 9780191844126
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198806516.003.0016
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This chapter examines how novelists and poets explore the sacrificial reckonings of the ‘war on terror’ in terms of relations between faith (social and religious), sympathy, and bearing witness. It ...
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This chapter examines how novelists and poets explore the sacrificial reckonings of the ‘war on terror’ in terms of relations between faith (social and religious), sympathy, and bearing witness. It discusses Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005) and two books of poetry: Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004) and Juliana Spahr’s this connection of everyone with lungs (2005). Both poems balance matters of aesthetics and ethics by comparing modes of bearing witness: watching spectacles of war through television, and testifying to responsibility for others’ lives. The chapter relates those to the contrasting kinds of sacrifice attributed to armed services personnel and jihadi ‘martyrs’. It then discusses how these modes of sacrifice and witnessing are examined in recent novels: Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil (2008) and The Blind Man’s Garden (2013); Lorraine Adams’s The Room and the Chair (2010); and James Meek’s We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (2008).Less
This chapter examines how novelists and poets explore the sacrificial reckonings of the ‘war on terror’ in terms of relations between faith (social and religious), sympathy, and bearing witness. It discusses Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005) and two books of poetry: Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004) and Juliana Spahr’s this connection of everyone with lungs (2005). Both poems balance matters of aesthetics and ethics by comparing modes of bearing witness: watching spectacles of war through television, and testifying to responsibility for others’ lives. The chapter relates those to the contrasting kinds of sacrifice attributed to armed services personnel and jihadi ‘martyrs’. It then discusses how these modes of sacrifice and witnessing are examined in recent novels: Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil (2008) and The Blind Man’s Garden (2013); Lorraine Adams’s The Room and the Chair (2010); and James Meek’s We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (2008).
