Working Through the Archive: Trauma and History in Alejandro Morales's The Rag Doll Plagues

PMLA ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 120 (2) ◽  
pp. 375-387 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dean Franco
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Century ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Working Through ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Historical Moment

Alejandro Morales's The Rag Doll Plagues is a metafictional novel that comments on literary history. In its three books, Dr. Gregory Revueltas battles a mysterious and ravaging plague, during the 1780s, 1980s, and mid–twenty-first century. In each book he leaves a legacy of writing for the next Gregory to read. By reading and writing this archive, or library of cultural knowledge, the final Gregory develops a historical consciousness that helps him see beyond his episteme's limited science and derive a cure for the recurring plague. His confronting the plague by reading his own writing both intimately and critically is an allegory for the efficacy of literature as a response to historical trauma. Gregory does not gain agency over history, but through the self-conscious reading of his archive he is able to place himself in a cultural trajectory otherwise inaccessible in each book's bracketed historical moment.

Minorities in the Contemporary Egyptian Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Youssef
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Robust Analysis ◽  
Specific Approach ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Context Specific ◽  
Historical Moment

This book examines questions of identity, nationalism, and marginalization in the contemporary Egyptian novel from a postcolonial lens. Under colonial rule, the Egyptian novel invoked a sovereign nation-state by basking in its perceived unity. After independence, the novel professed disenchantment with state practices and unequal class and gender relations, without disrupting the nation’s imagined racial and ethno-religious homogeneity. This book identifies a trend in the twenty-first-century Egyptian novel that shatters this singular view, with the rise of a new consciousness that presents Egypt as fundamentally heterogeneous. Through a robust analysis of “new-consciousness” novels by authors like Idris ᶜAli, Bahaᵓ Tahir, Miral al-Tahawi, and Yusuf Zaydan, the author argues that this new consciousness does not only respond to predominant discourses of difference and practices of differentiation along the axes of race, ethno-religion, class, and gender by bringing the experiences of Nubian, Amazigh, Bedouin, Coptic, Jewish, and women minorities to the fore of Egypt’s literary imaginary, but also heralds the cacophony of voices that collectively cried for social justice from Tahrir Square in Egypt’s 2011-uprising. This study responds to the changing iconographic, semiotic, and formal features of the Egyptian novel. It fulfills the critical task of identifying an emergent novelistic genre and develops historically reflexive methodologies that interpret new-consciousness novels and their mediatory role in formalizing and articulating their historical moment. By adopting this context-specific approach to studying novelistic evolution, this book locates some of the strands that have been missing from the complex whole of Egypt’s culture and literary history.

Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Century ◽  
Care Of The Self ◽  
The West ◽  
City Life ◽  
Good Citizen ◽  
The Past ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Point Of Departure

What does it mean to be a good citizen today? What are practices of citizenship? And what can we learn from the past about these practices to better engage in city life in the twenty-first century? Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West: Care of the Self is a collection of papers that examine these questions. The contributors come from a variety of different disciplines, including architecture, urbanism, philosophy, and history, and their essays make comparative examinations of the practices of citizenship from the ancient world to the present day in both the East and the West. The papers’ comparative approaches, between East and West, and ancient and modern, leads to a greater understanding of the challenges facing citizens in the urbanized twenty-first century, and by looking at past examples, suggests ways of addressing them. While the book’s point of departure is philosophical, its key aim is to examine how philosophy can be applied to everyday life for the betterment of citizens in cities not just in Asia and the West but everywhere.

Love works: Reading and writing romance in the twenty-first century

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-261
Author(s):  
Jane Armstrong ◽  
Liz Byrski ◽  
Helen Merrick
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Twenty First Century

The New Territory

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Ralph Ellison ◽  
First Century ◽  
Invisible Man ◽  
Interpretive Study ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Original Essays ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Historical Moment

The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century offers fifteen original essays that seek to examine and re-examine Ellison’s life and work in the context of their meanings for our own age, the early 21st century, the age of Obama and of a nation that is simultaneously post-racial and all-too-racial. Following a careful introduction that situates Ellison’s writings in the context of new approaches and abiding interest in his work, while also exploring the affinity between Ralph Ellison’s fiction and commentary and Barack Obama’s political and literary sensibilities, the book offers four new essays examining Ellison’s 1952 masterpiece, Invisible Man. It then turns to his unfinished second novel, Three Days Before the Shooting . . . , with five detailed chapters exploring that powerful and elusive narrative—the first sustained, book-length treatment of that multi-faceted work (the source of the shorter, edited novel Juneteenth). The New Territory concludes with five chapters that discuss Ellison’s political, cultural, and historical significance, asking how Ellison speaks to the America of 2016 and beyond. In The New Territory, we see how clearly Ellison foresaw and articulated both the challenges and the possibilities of America in the 21st century. Together, these chapters offer a thorough and penetrating assessment of Ellison at this crucial historical moment and the most comprehensive interpretive study of the writer best suited to act as the cultural prophet of 21st-century America.

Wieland; or, The Transformation of American Literary History

2019 ◽  
pp. 47-60
Author(s):  
Duncan Faherty
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
First Century ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Early American ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Early American Novel

By considering the centrality of Wieland in the development of American literary history, this chapter moves to reaffirm its importance for students of US literature. The chapter begins by surveying the major editions of Wieland, from the first modern edition in 1926 through the scholarly editions in the early twenty-first century. In so doing, the chapter charts how scholars have often recursively positioned Wieland as a bellwether text in the formation of narratives about the development of American literary history, a practice that is often predicated on positioning the text as either the first or the first noteworthy early American novel. In tracing the evolution of the critical reception of the text, the chapter moves to underscore how Wieland’s enduring contribution to our understanding of the development of American literature and culture remains Brown’s insistence on the fallibility of isolationist narratives to register accurate genealogies or histories.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document