Description
Book SynopsisTells the story of the relationship between catastrophe, in the senses of 'downturn' and 'break', and narration as 'recounting' in the senses suggested by the French term recit in selected texts by three leading writers from Africa.
Trade Review"A powerful emerging scholarly voice in West African literary criticism, Qader offers a provocative study of a contemporary theme, catastrophe... Masterful in its expose of significant texts, this study raises more questions than it answers, particularly on the role of memory in storytelling and feminist intervention and reinvention in the recit." -Choice "Too often, African literature is read from the perspective of anthropology or politics, the texts by which it is constituted being then reduced to documents. Nasrin Qader eloquently argues here that such a way of passing through the text towards what it is thought to represent, precisely misses its presence as writing. Against such a misrepresentation, her book reclaims African literary texts as literature, by advocating with force and intelligence a simple posture: attentiveness to what writing means." -- -Souleymane Bachir Diagne Columbia University "Fills a jarring gap in the critical discourse on one of the most important and neglected areas in world literature." -- -Hedi Abdel Jaouad Skidmore College "Analyzes novels by Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop and the Moroccan writers Tahar ben Jelloun and Abdelkebir Khatibi." -The Chronicle of Higher Education "Narratives of Catastrophe gives a new and appealing answer to a basic problem confronting many literary critics-namely: How are we to judge the political or ethical claims made in works of fiction? Qader's book is a unique blend of close reading and philosophical speculation." -- -Steven Winspur University of Wisconsin-Madison
