Search results for ""Author Djelal Kadir""

Memos from the Besieged City argues for the institutional and cultural relevance of literary study through foundational figures, from the 1200s to today, who defied precarious circumstances to make significant contributions to literacy and civilization in the face of infelicitous human acts. Focusing on historically vital crossroads—Baghdad, Florence, Byzantium, Istanbul, Rome, Paris, New York, Mexico City, Jerusalem, Beijing, Stockholm, Warsaw—Kadir looks at how unconventional and nonconformist writings define literacy, culture, and intellectual commitment. Inspired by political refugee and literary scholar Erich Auerbach's path-breaking Mimesis, and informed by late twentieth-century ideological and methodological upheavals, the book reflects on literacy and dissidence at a moment when literary disciplines, canons, and theories are being reassessed under the pressure of globalization and transculturation. At the forefront of an ethical turn in the comparative analysis of cultures and their literary legacies, it reminds us of the best humanity can produce.

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Memos from the Besieged City argues for the institutional and cultural relevance of literary study through foundational figures, from the 1200s to today, who defied precarious circumstances to make significant contributions to literacy and civilization in the face of infelicitous human acts. Focusing on historically vital crossroads—Baghdad, Florence, Byzantium, Istanbul, Rome, Paris, New York, Mexico City, Jerusalem, Beijing, Stockholm, Warsaw—Kadir looks at how unconventional and nonconformist writings define literacy, culture, and intellectual commitment. Inspired by political refugee and literary scholar Erich Auerbach's path-breaking Mimesis, and informed by late twentieth-century ideological and methodological upheavals, the book reflects on literacy and dissidence at a moment when literary disciplines, canons, and theories are being reassessed under the pressure of globalization and transculturation. At the forefront of an ethical turn in the comparative analysis of cultures and their literary legacies, it reminds us of the best humanity can produce.

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Columbus is the first blazing star in a constellation of European adventurers whose right to claim and conquer each land mass they encountered was absolutely unquestioned by their countrymen. How a system of religious beliefs made the taking of the New World possible and laudable is the focus of Kadir's timely review of the founding doctrines of empire. The language of prophecy and divine predestination fills the pronouncements of those who ventured across the Atlantic. The effects of such language and their implications for current theoretical debates about colonialism and decolonization are legion. Kadir suggests that in this supposedly postcolonial era, richer nations and the privileged still manipulate the rhetoric of conquest to justify and serve their own worldly ends. For colonized peoples who live today at the "ends of the earth," the age of exploitation may be no different from the age of exploration.

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Questing Fictions was first published in 1986. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.Questing Fictions analyzes twentieth-century Latin American fiction in the light of contemporary literary theory. Djelal Kadir examines key works by several writers—including Jorges Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Lezama Lima, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, and Carlos Fuentes—and demonstrates how these writers are obliged to invent their own reality and how their successors inevitably must continue that inventive tradition. In a larger sense, Kadir describes how works of literature originate and, in turn, generate other literary works.Aiming at the specific nature of discourse written from the perspective of non-European cultures, Questing Fictions identifies and focuses on the predicament of writers caught between the cultural domination of Europe and the need to strive for cultural autonomy. Kadir explains that this predicament is shared by all Latin American authors and may well characterize all recently emergent literatures. He traces the problems of continuity and rupture within the Latin American tradition and addresses, as well, deeper questions of narrative and narration. In the process, Kadir reveals the interrelatedness of the continent's principal fables and shows their relationship to the larger Western tradition. Finally, Questing Fictions posits that Latin American narratives cannot escape the the quest for an identity that they can never fully attain.

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