Description
Book SynopsisA polemical reaction against a trend in global modernist studies which still privileges European and Anglophone texts. Existing studies of literary modernism generally read Anglophone Atlantic texts through the lens of critical theories emanating from Europe and North America. In Modernism after Postcolonialism, Mara de Gennaro undertakes a comparative Anglophone-Francophone study, invoking theoretical frameworks from Gayatri Spivak, Édouard Glissant, Françoise Vergès, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and others. Examining transnational poetics of comparison that contest the comparative practices of colonialist, racist, and ethno-nationalist discourses, the book treats these poetics as models for a creolist critical method of reading, one that searches out unpredictable, mutually generative textual relations obscured by geographic and linguistic divides. In each chapter, de Gennaro pairs a canonical English-language modernist writer (Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Fors
Trade ReviewMara de Gennaro's study is ambitious and impressive. It pursues a rich variety of ideas, it chooses texts for reasons familiar to modernist and postcolonial scholars but pairs them in surprising ways, and its innovative close readings justify these pairings.
—Jesse Wolfe, California State University,
Comparative Literature StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction. Anxious Mastery and the Forms It Takes
Chapter 1. Troubling Classifications: Unspeakable Figures of Métissage in "Melanctha" and Disgrace
Chapter 2. Troubling Sovereignties: Intimations of Relation in The Waste Land and Cahier d'un retour au pays natal
Chapter 3. Traversing Bounds of Historical Memory: Dethroning the Narrator and Creolizing Testimony in A Passage to India and Texaco
Chapter 4. Traversing Bounds of Solidarity: Poor Analogies and Painful Negotiations in Three Guineas and The Farming of Bones
Conclusion. The Beauty of a Trembling World
Notes
Index
