Joanne Lipson Freed
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781501713767
- eISBN:
- 9781501713828
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501713767.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The two works addressed in Chapter 4, Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, look toward a future that is haunted by the unrealized hopes of the past. ...
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The two works addressed in Chapter 4, Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, look toward a future that is haunted by the unrealized hopes of the past. Writing in places and historical moments in which imagining a different and better future seems both urgently necessary and impossibly compromised—decolonizing Ghana, and post-9/11 New York—both Armah and DeLillo create dystopian texts that transfer that responsibility onto their future readers through their cyclical structure and ambiguous, open-ended narrative. Resisting simplistic forms of optimism, these texts refuse to take up the flawed rhetorics available to them and remain committed to carrying out clear-eyed social critique. But by leaving their representations of societies in crisis open to reinterpretation and rereading, the novels allow for the possibility that the future might offer hopeful visions that are impossible in the present.Less
The two works addressed in Chapter 4, Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, look toward a future that is haunted by the unrealized hopes of the past. Writing in places and historical moments in which imagining a different and better future seems both urgently necessary and impossibly compromised—decolonizing Ghana, and post-9/11 New York—both Armah and DeLillo create dystopian texts that transfer that responsibility onto their future readers through their cyclical structure and ambiguous, open-ended narrative. Resisting simplistic forms of optimism, these texts refuse to take up the flawed rhetorics available to them and remain committed to carrying out clear-eyed social critique. But by leaving their representations of societies in crisis open to reinterpretation and rereading, the novels allow for the possibility that the future might offer hopeful visions that are impossible in the present.
Peter J. Kalliney
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199977970
- eISBN:
- 9780199346189
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199977970.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, Criticism/Theory
Chapter Six examines Heinemann Educational Book's African Writers Series, the preeminent literary institution of anglophone Africa. Critics have repeatedly asked whether the series is fundamentally ...
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Chapter Six examines Heinemann Educational Book's African Writers Series, the preeminent literary institution of anglophone Africa. Critics have repeatedly asked whether the series is fundamentally imperialist - because of its links to the metropolitan publishing industry - or anti-imperialist - because it gave voice to so many politically engaged writers. This chapter, by contrast, places the series in the context of global changes in English studies. In the US and in metropolitan Britain, the series seemed to be participating in the fragmentation of the discipline: the breakup of Leavis's Great Tradition and the incorporation of minority writers into the canon. In Africa, however, it is possible to read the series as a part of an expansion and consolidation of English language and literary studies. How the series managed this apparent contradiction is the main topic of the chapter.Less
Chapter Six examines Heinemann Educational Book's African Writers Series, the preeminent literary institution of anglophone Africa. Critics have repeatedly asked whether the series is fundamentally imperialist - because of its links to the metropolitan publishing industry - or anti-imperialist - because it gave voice to so many politically engaged writers. This chapter, by contrast, places the series in the context of global changes in English studies. In the US and in metropolitan Britain, the series seemed to be participating in the fragmentation of the discipline: the breakup of Leavis's Great Tradition and the incorporation of minority writers into the canon. In Africa, however, it is possible to read the series as a part of an expansion and consolidation of English language and literary studies. How the series managed this apparent contradiction is the main topic of the chapter.
