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Academic Essay
Bakhtin, in his theories of the Carnivalesque celebrates among other things the lower strata bodily functions. He believes that one of the spirits of the carnival is to celebrate the low, the banal, the popular as opposed to the classic and mainstream. This Bakhtinian notion brought to my mind a joke in the form of an angry exchange among several parts of the body, brain, heart, lungs, stomach, and rectum, each disputing its right to the leadership of the body: the brain declares its right to lead on the merit of its superior functionality and its capability for reasoning;
We broke up over six kids—that’s how I always told the story. But of course that was no story. I don’t mean that it wasn’t fiction (although it wasn’t ), just that it wasn’t narrative. It was only the prelude to a punch line. Six kids? the person to whom I had said this would ask. What kids?
Kids we didn’t have.
Then the laugh. And we’d move on.
Sahar Khalifeh, a Palestinian academician and novelist, explores in her narratives, among other things, the impact of occupation on the day-to-day life of Palestinians in their cities and villages. In her 1980 Sunflower, Khalifeh vividly portrays the city of Nablus from the viewpoints of several male and female characters who see the city and themselves under occupation from the perspectives of class, gender, ethnicity and situatedness. Cut off from the outside by military occupation, cordoned by hostile settlements, and impaired sexually and emotionally, the city and its inhabitants in Khalifeh’s narrative suffer from excessive atrophy.
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Wayne Booth wrote some of the most influential and engaging criticism of our
time, most notably the 1961 classic The Rhetoric of Fiction, a book that
transformed literary criticism and became the standard reference point for
advanced discussions of how fiction works, how authors make novels accessible,
and how readers re-create texts.
While Booth’s work was formative to the study of literature, his essential
writings have never been collected in a single volume—until now. Selected by
Walter Jost in collaboration with Booth himself, the texts anthologized here
present a picture of this indispensable critic’s contributions to literary and
rhetorical studies. The selections range from memorable readings of Macbeth,
Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Henry James to engagements with Booth’s
intellectual heroes, such as Richard McKeon and Mikhail Bakhtin. But rhetoric,
Booth’s abiding concern as a critic and thinker, provides the organizing
principle of the anthology.
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