Recherche multi-critères

[Fiche] Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka’s novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida tells the story of a war photographer, gambler and closeted gay in Colombo during the 1980s civil war. One day, he wakes up in a bureaucratic afterlife while his body is sinking in the Beira Lake, and he is given seven moons to figure out how he died. The novel addresses the issue of transgression, whether it concerns Maali’s personal identity, his photographs which hold the subversive power to bring to light political violence, or the intersection of an unusual second-person narrative and dark humor.

In Americanah, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie tells the story of high school lovers Ifemelu and Obinze, their experiences of migration to the US and the UK, and their reunion 13 years later back in Nigeria. Through the means of defamiliarization and the depiction of Ifemelu’s sense of alienation in the US, Adichie sheds new light on America’s relationship with race and racism.

Even before winning the prestigious Booker Prize in 2019, Bernardine Evaristo had been an integral part of the British literary landscape, not only because of her experimental style, but also due to her activism and wish to cut down discrimination in the literary institution. In Girl, Woman, Other, the British writer with Nigerian and Irish roots, attempts to give a voice to Black British women, who have long been invisible and voiceless in the public sphere.

In this talk given at the ENS Lyon, Christine Froula (Northwestern University), author of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity (2005), Modernism's Body: Sex Culture and Joyce (1996) and To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound's Cantos (1985), explores the interplay of inherited literary forms and conventions, contingent features of modernity and aesthetic imagination in the forging of the formally innovative modernist poetics of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931), and Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos (1948).

Every year, the English-speaking writers invited to the Assises Internationales du Roman write the definition of a word of their choice.

Joshua Cohen is an American writer and literary critic, whose first collection of essays, ATTENTION: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction (2019) explores the notion of attention in today's society. In this interview, Joshua Cohen talks about writing for a global readership, being a novelist in the age of non-fiction, the effects of #MeToo on literary production and the invention of facts.

Every year, the English-speaking writers invited to the Assises Internationales du Roman write the definition of a word of their choice.

Amitava Kumar is an Indian writer and journalist who teaches literature at Vassar College. In this interview, he talks about his collection of essays Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate (2004) and his novel Immigrant, Montana (2017), and focuses on the notion of "home", immigration, the caste system and the political situation in India.

This article examines two Indian novels Clear Light of Day (1980) by Anita Desai and The Shadow Lines (1988) by Amitav Ghosh along with Burnt Shadows (2009) by Anglo-Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie, books written about the Partition of India that accompanied independence in 1947. Partition led to violence on an enormous scale; the exact number of people who were killed has never been ascertained, and estimates vary between one and two million. Partition also caused massive displacements of population, estimated between 12 and 18 million. This paper examines the way in which space – national, familial and communal – was divided and then reshaped by and through Partition. After discussing the fractures, ruptures and uprooting brought about by this trauma, I will consider the way in which diasporic writers devise fictional maps of memory of the past that foster exchanges across geographical borders.

In reporter and columnist Adelle Waldman’s first, highly touted novel, La Vie amoureuse de Nathaniel P., the author describes with subtlety and irony the meanderings of Nate Piven, a popular writer moving up in the elite literary circles of Brooklyn. He is also a young lover drunk with his success with women. In this astute novel of manners, Waldman brilliantly paints the portrait of a modern, imperfect and narcissistic male with a troubled love life.

How do writers succeed in submerging us in situations so unlike our own lives? I would argue that, as a reader, I have yet to encounter a situation in literature "unlike" my life. The demographic details may differ: Charlotte is a spider, I am a human; Teju Cole's narrators are men, I am a woman; many of Toni Morrison's characters are mothers, I am not. The list of things that I am not is long: white, male, a parent, a soldier, Chinese-speaking, South American, a witness to any war.

“Only the words break the silence, all other sounds have ceased,” writes Beckett in his Texts for Nothing. Or does he sing it? If words were the only sounds, then a sentence would be the only melody. We might never understand which came first—the words or the melody. Perhaps the first humans knew how to sing long before they knew how to talk. In this Dionysian vision of antiquity, all mortals were originally musicians. Music was the only thing that mattered. People understood each other by inventing mimetic melodies and singing together in tune. They appeared, loved, suffered, worshipped the gods and died like opera singers on stage.

Born in north-eastern India in 1970, Siddhartha Deb is the recipient of grants from the Society of Authors in the UK and has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University. His latest book, a work of narrative nonfiction, ((The Beautiful and the Damned)), was a finalist for the Orwell Prize in the UK and the winner of the PEN Open award in the United States. His journalism, essays, and reviews have appeared in Harpers, The Guardian, The Observer, The New York Times, Bookforum, The Daily Telegraph, The Nation, n+1, and The Times Literary Supplement.

What is the place of the writer in the literary field of the home country? What contribution can this writer make to the literary field of the target or host country? It's important to understand that the answers to these questions will often be different: a writer can be a marginal figure in his home country and become a vital figure in another country. More often, of course, the reverse is true.

A Londoner by adoption, Kate O’Riordan grew up in the small city of Bantry on the west coast of Ireland. With Le Garçon dans la lune, published in 2008 and Pierres de mémoire, in 2009, O’Riordan signed two new remarkable opuses in which she questions family relationships. A novelist and short-story writer, Kate O’Riordan also writes for the cinema and continues to confirm her legitimate place among Irish authors who count. She came to the Villa Gillet to take part in a discussion on 'Ireland by Irish writers'.

About five years ago I started working on a book that I planned to call ALONE IN AMERICA. My original idea was to write a book that would sound an alarm about a disturbing trend: the unprecedented rise of living alone. I was motivated by my belief that the rise of living alone is a profound social change – the greatest change of the past 60 years that we have failed to name or identify. Consider that, until the 1950s, not a single human society in the history of our species sustained large numbers of people living alone for long periods of time. Today, however, living alone is ubiquitous in affluent, open societies. In some nations, one-person households are now more common than nuclear families who share the same roof. Consider America. In 1950, only 22 percent of American adults were single, and only 9 percent of all households had just one occupant. Today, 49 percent of American adults are single, and 28 percent of all households have one, solitary resident.

The idea that novels, theater, or poetry often help us live, that they help us feel cleansed or feel stronger, more energized, more alive, or that they at least help us survive by giving us the boost we need to hang on a little longer, is not simply a constant topos of literature, be it western, eastern, or universal. It is an indisputable truth for those who make use of it, whether they write it, read it, comment on it, or transform it into a first-aid kid of maxim-prescriptions and citation-medicines to use as needed.

Identity and family legacy are partially formed by the family “memory narrative”—a family member, usually our mother or father, tells us stories about what happened before we were born or when we were too young to remember momentous events. But what happens when that narrator in the family is mentally ill, or a compulsive liar? In my case, my schizophrenic mother was the unreliable narrator of our family history. And my alcoholic father, a gifted writer who left when I was four, told my mother’s family grandiose lies about his own past.

As women, we are often identified through our choice of sexual partners. When an “attractive” woman has sex with an ugly man, it is a descent into “abjection.” But why? Clearly, it is because as women, we are still believed to attain most of our identities through sexuality. In the present assimilationist climate, any non-monogamous, non-relational sexual act is read as a symptom of emotional damage. Our culture persists in believing that sex holds the magic key to a person’s identity — which is, of course, wrong — and in behaving as if female writers are uniquely charged with upholding the sacred intimacy of the sexual act.