Academic literature on the topic 'Negritude (Literary movement) – History and criticism'

This paper discusses the emergence of Negritude and its contribution to the early development of African theology. The Negritude movement of the 1930s and 40s understands itself as a literary and philosophical movement that responds to colonial domination. It awakened a cultural voice African priests used to become legible in the discipline of Christian theology. Negritude was a contested category. For some, it was nothing more than a nativist philosophy that promoted a metaphysic of race; for others, Negritude was an initiative to recover African cultural values. This paper traces the Senghorian tradition of Negritude that began as a philosophy of black identity but evolved into a mode of thought that inspired blacks to reimagine African alternatives to the colonial state. Senghor's proposal of African socialism was a component of the broader struggle that influenced the development of a theology of liberation in Africa.

This essay examines how Orestes Brownson used literary criticism as a medium to distance himself from the Transcendentalist movement. It argues that Brownson's qualified rejection of Transcendentalism played a crucial role in the formation of his professional identity as a literary critic and public intellectual in the mid-nineteenth-century literary sphere.

In the context of a renewed interest in Marxism outside biblical studies, this article surveys and critiques the background and current status of a similar renewal in biblical studies. It begins with a consideration of the background of current studies in liberation, materialist and political theologies, and moves on to note the division between literary and social scientific uses of Marxist theories. While those who used Marxist literary methods were initially inspired by Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson, more recent work has begun to make use of a whole tradition of Marxist literary criticism largely ignored in biblical studies. More consistent work, however, has taken place in the social sciences in both Hebrew Bible and New Testament studies. In Hebrew Bible studies, debates focus on the question of mode of production, especially the domestic or household mode of production, while in New Testament studies, the concerns have been with reconstructing the context of the Jesus movement and, more recently, the Pauline correspondence. I close with a number of questions concerning the division into different areas of what is really a holistic approach to texts and history.

Michael Warner, a literary critic with a keen sense of history, wrote in 1987 that “New Historicism is a label that historians don't like very much because they understand something different by historicism. But nobody's asking historians….” This essay is an answer to questions nobody asked me, questions about interdisciplinarity and the differences between literary critical and historical practices. A return to historically informed literary criticism, which many critics still consider a dominant trend in the profession, emerged in the early 1980s following the publication of Stephen Greenblatt's acclaimed Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980). Reacting as it did against the decontextualized abstractions of New Criticism and Deconstruction, the movement soon labeled New Historicism sought to breathe new life into canonical texts by relating them to non-literary texts and social practices of their day. This historicist inclination should have formed the basis for a coming together of the movement's practitioners with historians interested in literary representations. But no such merger has occurred: New Historicists evince little interest in the systematic, archivally based study of history, and historians have at best shown indifference to the work of Greenblatt and his followers.

This article seeks to cultivate a better understanding of the influence of agriculture and farming on literary modernism. It begins with a brief analysis of agriculture in the work of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, before exploring the significance of farming in relation to Ford Madox Ford, John Middleton Murry and T. S. Eliot. Following on from this initial consideration of literary modernism and agriculture, it then proceeds to investigate Ezra Pound's position within environmental modernism, through exploring the influence of the organic husbandry movement on his social and political criticism. In particular, it examines Pound's active engagement with notable organic magazines of the period including the New English Weekly (to which Pound contributed over 200 pieces between 1932–1940 and authored its ‘American Notes’ in 1935) and the Townsman. Through an examination of Pound's affiliation with the organic movement, it will illustrate that their mutual agricultural concerns were invariably connected to the wider financial considerations of economic and monetary reform, including the social credit theories of Major C. H. Douglas.

This paper, originally given as a lecture at the IWL, considers the fundamental importance of translation in the movement of texts across cultures and questions why it has taken so long for literary criticism to recognise this, despite the growing international interest in translation in the twenty-first century. Through a range of examples, the paper makes the case for translation as a vital force in intercultural communication and as a shaping force in literary history.

Abstract New books by Shelley Streeby, Robert Marzec, and Ashley Dawson point the way toward a cultural criticism for the climate change era. In its own way, each seeks to change the methods of literary and cultural studies, to change the form of the academic monograph, and to encourage a just transition from the radically unequal and ecologically injured world of the now. All three can be seen as contributing to the social and academic movement known as Environmental Justice or Critical Environmental Justice. All three evoke, to some extent, earlier, experimental scholarly works influenced by or generative for the Occupy movement, writings by theorists and practitioners of tactical media like McKenzie Wark and Ricardo Dominguez, and such popular radical thinkers as Mike Davis, Rebecca Solnit, Naomi Klein, and Winona LaDuke. Finally, all three books emerge, somewhat unexpectedly, from literature departments, raising the question of what we mean by literary and cultural studies at this moment in the eclipse of humanism by planetary geology and posthumanist philosophical thought.

The article considers the problem of correlation of aesthetic form and social content in contemporary poetry through the prism of contemporary poetry criticism, in particular, the New Lyric Studies of 2008 (M. Perloff, Y. Prins, R. Terada, V. Jackson, etc.). A representation of the lyrics as a genre of poetry, in which historically structured subjectivism and identity of author are interrelated with poetic writing, is at the center of the New Lyric Studies. In this context the lyrics is relative and volatile but also is the closest genre to the poetic nature, that allows to merge an autonomous entity of poetry with ‘agendas’ in the poem, which were difficult to connect in either too formal or too contextual critical approaches to the poetry in the 20th century. This became possible in the conditions of New Lyric critics speaking up against a substitution of poetry and literary criticism for historical, anthropological and cultural criticism because of the high popularity of cultural studies in the 1990s and the ensuing incorporation of interdisciplinarity in literary studies. Despite the objective of New Lyric critics to revitalize a theoretical study of poetry in the spirit of academic criticism of the New Criticism, the modifications in the methods for producing, existence and broadcasting of poetry and therefore in poetry of the last 50 years, poetry itself prevented the New Lyric from becoming the regressive movement. Some representatives of the New Lyric Studies subsequently expressed the need to study poetry in terms of new historical poetics and to create different methods capable to analyze the relations between culture and poetic form – between the social and the aesthetic. Having considered advantages and limitations of the New Lyric studies in the context of contemporary poetry discourse, reflecting not only the nature of contemporary criticism, but also perhaps the history of poetry criticism of 20-21th centuries, which is the dynamical coexistence and the mutual succession of different movements, the author draws a conclusion that this movement defines the right vector for the reconciliation of the long-standing struggle of formalism and contextualism in the poetry criticism as well as social and aesthetic components which poetic work includes.

Orientador: Robert Wayne Andrew Slenes
Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas
Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-18T03:47:10Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Durao_GustavodeAndrade_M.pdf: 1012006 bytes, checksum: b54e80dc86e928419564dd9588ba5334 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011
Resumo: Este trabalho propõe-se analisar a trajetória do escritor senegalês Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2001) no que tange à criação e participação ativa no movimento artístico e literário conhecido como Negritude. As movimentações literárias dos escritores norte-americanos e a valorização das formas de arte associadas ao negro-africano serão fundamentais para a formação dos alicerces teóricos da Negritude. A escolha da obra de Senghor "Liberté I: Négritude et Humanisme? contém interpretações importantes do seu pensamento na defesa e divulgação dos valores dos povos negro-africanos. Através desta obra se pretende compreender melhor o que foi o movimento da Negritude e o que ele representou para os escritores negros perante a realidade colonial francesa. Diante disso, este trabalho propõe um recorte temático temporal que vai de 1920 até 1945, quando Senghor e os próprios criadores da Negritude direcionam o conceito e a noção de negritude como sendo algo que vai legitimar a luta política em oposição ao colonialismo francês
Resumé: L'objectif de ce travail est d'analyser la trajectoire de l'écrivain sénégalais Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2001) en ce qui concerne sa création et engagement au mouvement artistique et littéraire connu sous le nom de Négritude. La prise de conscience des écrivains nord-américains et la valorisation de toutes les formes d'art liées au noir-africain seront mise en étude comme la base théorique de la Négritude. L'oeuvre de Senghor "Liberté I: Négritude et Humanisme? montre des interprétations importantes de sa pensée en défense et diffusion des valeurs des peuples Noirs africains. A partir de cette oeuvre, on cherche à mieux comprendre le mouvement de la Négritude et son importance par rapport aux écrivains noirs du contexte colonial français. Ainsi, ce travail propose un extrait thématique de 1920 jusqu'à 1945, quand Senghor et les créateurs de la Négritude mènent le concept et la notion de négritude vers la légitimation de la lutte politique en opposition au colonialisme français
Abstract: This study proposes to examine the trajectory of the Senegalese writer Leopold Sedar Senghor (1906-200 I) regarding the establishment and active participation in artistic and literary movement known as Blackness. The awareness of North-American writers and appreciation of art forms associated with black African will be related to the theoretical foundations of Blackness. The choice of the masterpiece of Senghor 'Liberti 1: Negritude et Humanisme' contains important interpretations of his thought in upholding and disseminating the values of the Black African people. Through this work is intended to better understand what was the Blackness movement and what he represented for black writers before the French colonial reality. Thus, this paper proposes a temporal thematic focus that goes from 1920 until1945, when Senghor and the creators themselves drive the concept of Blackness and the notion of blackness as something that will legitimize the political struggle in opposition to French colonialism
Mestrado
Historia Social
Mestre em História

In this thesis, we examine theories of reading as they apply to three examples of the French New Novel. We begin with a detailed theoretical expose in which we compare and attempt to reconcile the reading models of Umberto Eco, Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish, Bertrand Gervais and Richard Saint-Gelais. The hybrid theory thus obtained is then tested on three works in order to underscore the modalities of reading that are particular to the New Novel, while insisting on these modalities' inherent variability. We focus on the reader's reconstructing of the narrative in L'Emploi du temps , on the impossibility of structuring the plot in La Maison de rendez-vous, and on the paradigmatic mode of reading La Bataille de Pharsale. In so doing, we hope to demonstrate how an analysis of the reading process allows for a heightened appreciation of the essential indeterminacy of the New Novel, of its fundamental otherness. We conclude with tentative remarks on the heuristic function of these texts.

Cette étude porte sur le fait littéraire afro-antillais de l’ère coloniale (1920-1960). Il s’agit d’examiner les stratégies des agents à partir des cas de René Maran, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant et Mongo Beti et de percevoir comment ils se définissent leur identité littéraire et sociale.

Pour ce faire, notre démarche s’articule en deux temps :(1) examiner les conditions de possibilité d’un champ littéraire afro-antillais à Paris (colonisation française et ses effets, configuration d’un champ littéraire pré-institutionnalisé, etc.) ;(2) analyser les processus de consolidation du champ, ainsi que les luttes internes qui opposent deux tendances émergentes représentées d’abord par Senghor et Césaire, ensuite par Beti et Glissant, dont les prises de position littéraires mettent en œuvre des « modèles empiriques » ;ceux-ci régulent et unifient leurs rapports au monde et à l’Afrique.

This study relates to afro-carribean literature in colonial period (1920-1960). We want to examine the strategies of agents like René Maran, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant and Mongo Beti ;and we want to understand how they invente literary and social identity.

Our approach is structured in two steps: we shall analyse (1) the conditions for an afro-carribean literary field to appear in Paris (french colonialism and its consequences, configuration of literay field.) ;(2) the consolidation of this field and the internal struggles between two tendances represented by Senghor and Césaire, by Glissant and Beti whose literary practice shows the “empirical model” that regularizes and consolidates their relation with the world and Africa.
Doctorat en philosophie et lettres, Orientation langue et littérature
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The thesis sets out to do two things. It seeks first of all to describe the revival of interest in the Caroline era which defines the nature of an "English Tradition" in the Eighteen Nineties. Secondly, in doing so it seeks to reappraise three significant poets of that era, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and Francis Thompson, in terms of their participation in this revival. The first chapter, "Craving Viaticum", deals with the general background of the Eighteen Nineties period. It suggests that the Symbolist movement equates with the Decadent one in a more direct way than has often been allowed, and deals with the era's enthusiasm for nostalgia and past ages as part of its reaction against current society. It also explores the period's allegiance to hero-figures. The second chapter, "The French Connection: Pater's Part", deals with Walter Pater, and evaluates him in terms of his art and criticism, suggesting how these develop from a nostalgic desire to re-create past ages in the image of his present ideals. The more exaggerated claims made by critics of his work for the influence of French writers on him are questioned, and Pater's relation to the "English Tradition" is discussed. In the third chapter, "The French Connection: Other Approaches", the tendentiousness of those critics who attempt to define the entire Decadent era in Britain in terms of French influences is discussed and exposed. The fourth chapter, "New Births of Decadence: The English Tradition and the Seventeenth Century", deals with the relation of the literature of the period to the Caroline era in detail, and the fifth chapter, "Of Academic Interest", is concerned with analysing this relationship through discussion of both contemporary and present-day critics, adducing statistical evidence to prove a resurgence of interest in the writers of the Caroline era in the period 1880-1910. The sixth chapter, "By the Statue of King Charles: The Jacobite Revival" deals with the political and religious aspects of the Caroline revival, and charts the growth of neo-Jacobitism in the Eighteen Nineties and its relation to literary history. The seventh chapter, "Against Nature: Defining Decadence", suggests that the root of Decadent thinking is myth, and that the counterpart of Symbolism in the world of decadent nostalgia was the iconic religious and political culture of the court of King Charles I, a convenient archetype for Decadent myths of ritual, aristocracy, and martyrdom. This discussion closes the first part of the thesis. "Francis Thompson, Faithful Decadent: Catholics and Criticism" is Chapter Eight. It discusses Francis Thompson in relation to his critics, and the manner in which views of his work have been polarised between two main schools of criticism. Chapter Nine, "Faithful in my Fashion", suggests a resolution of this historically polarised critical discussion by assessing Thompson's poetry in close relationship with the work of the seventeenth-century sacred poets. The tenth chapter, "Waif of Romance: The Poetry of Ernest Christopher Dowson", assesses Dowson in relation to Herrick and the Cavalier lyrists, discussing also how he stands as a type in relation to his age. The eleventh chapter, "Lionel Johnson: One of Those Who Fall: His Life and Ideas", is concerned with the crisis in Johnson's thought over the natures of guilt and beauty, and how this is illustrated in his poetry. The twelfth and final chapter, "The Life and Work of Lionel Johnson: A Long Blast Upon the Horn: His Work and Themes", assesses Johnson's nostalgia for the Stuart era in terms of a resolution of his present poetic crisis through past values. His intellectual and intertextual relationships with Ben Jonson and Marvell are also discussed. The thesis closes with an assessment of Johnson's achievement based on his allegiance to the Caroline revival with which the argument throughout has been concerned.

This Ph. D. thesis investigates the use of fantasy by British and Irish 'Decadent' authors and illustrators, including Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, Aubrey Beardsley, 'Vernon Lee' (Violet Paget), Ernest Dowson, and Charles Ricketts. Furthermore, this study demonstrates why fantasy was an apposite form for literary Decadence, which is defined in this thesis as a supra-generic mode characterized by its anti-mimetic impulse, its view of language as autonomous and artificial, its frequent use of parody and pastiche, and its transgression of boundaries between art forms. Literary Decadence in the United Kingdom derives its view of autonomous language from Anglo-German Romantic philology and literature, consequently being distinguished from French Decadence by its resistance to realism and Naturalism, which assume language's power to signify the 'real world'. Understanding language to be inorganic, Decadent writers blithely countermand notions of linguistic fitness and employ devices such as catachresis, paradox, and tautology, which in turn emphasize the self-referentiality of Decadent texts. Fantasy furthers the Decadent argument about language because works of fantasy bear no specific relationship to 'reality'; they can express anything evocable within language, as J.R.R. Tolkien demonstrates with his example of "the green sun" (a phrase that can exist independent of the sun's actually being green). The thesis argues that fantasy's usefulness in underscoring arguments about linguistic autonomy explains its widespread presence in Decadent prose and visual art, especially in genres that had become associated with realism and Naturalism, such as the novel (Chapter 1), the short story (Chapter 3), drama (Chapter 4), and textual illustration (Chapter 2). The thesis also analyzes Decadents' use of a wholly non-realistic genre, the fairy tale (see Chapter 5), in order to delineate the consequences of their use of fantasy for the construction of character and gender within their texts.

En 1888, une communauté de peintres s’associe sous l’appellation « Nabis ». Ce terme, issu de l’hébreu, signifie à la fois les « prophètes » et les « initiés ». Paul Sérusier qui vécut sa rencontre avec Paul Gauguin comme une révélation est à l’origine de la formation du groupe. Une année auparavant, le symbolisme littéraire triomphe en France et suscite l’émulation parmi une nouvelle génération d’écrivains qui se cristallise autour de /La Revue Blanche/ et le /Mercure de France/. Entre les Nabis et les symbolistes s’établit dès lors un intense réseau de collaborations. Tant dans l’élaboration des décors et programmes du Théâtre de l’œuvre de Lugné-Poe que dans l’illustration d’ouvrages d’André Gide, d’Alfred Jarry ou encore de Jules Renard, les Nabis participent activement à la vie littéraire de leur temps tout en s’incarnant volontairement comme une avant-garde picturale. Les échanges nombreux entre peintres et écrivains sont alors loin de se limiter à de simples commandes. Ils aboutissent souvent à des amitiés durables comme celles qui unirent Gide à Maurice Denis et Jarry à Pierre Bonnard. La recherche s’interroge sur la motivation de cette nouvelle génération d’écrivains qui sollicita le groupe nabi, ainsi que sur la nature des projets qui les unirent. Les revues littéraires occupent une place importante dans le rassemblement entre les écrivains et ce groupe de peintres. La volonté d'identifier une aile picturale qui fasse écho dans le champ artistique au désir d'innover dans le champ littéraire stimule les sollicitations des écrivains de la seconde génération symboliste. Les Nabis, qui se méfient toutefois d'une soumission trop grande au fait littéraire, induisent par leurs développements artistiques et leurs théories les paramètres d'une nouvelle relation entre peintres et écrivains dans laquelle ces derniers ne recherchent plus la domination stratégique de l'art littéraire sur la peinture.

Outre ces considérations historiques, le rapprochement souhaité entre les deux groupes fut tel que la production littéraire ne put qu’être influencée par les théories des Nabis. La tendance "formaliste" représentée par ce groupe pictural a souvent conduit les chercheurs à prendre acte de l'autonomie tant du littéraire que du pictural dans les échanges entre Nabis et écrivains. Les influences sont cependant nombreuses de la peinture vers la littérature. Il est toutefois nécessaire de prendre en compte des écrivains oubliés par l'histoire littéraire, tels Romain Coolus, Gabriel Trarieux ou Louis Lormel, pour percevoir les effets de cette influence picturale. La reprise d'un dispositif de couleurs, exaltées ou déformées, le jeu poétique sur le thème de la ligne ou de l'arabesque fondent une recherche d'effet visuel dans l'écriture qui entend renouveler les images poétiques. Ce constat entre en résonance avec la rénovation picturale revendiquée par les Nabis. Des esthétiques communes entre peintres et écrivains, tournant autour des notions de synthèse, simplicité, de la référence à l'enfance ou à la fantaisie humoristique rassemblent Nabis et poètes qui les soutiennent dans une communauté d'initiés à l'art nouveau.
Doctorat en Langues et lettres
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

French Feminism has little to do with feminism in France. While in the U.S. this now canonical body of work designates almost exclusively the work of three theorists—Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva—in France, these same thinkers are actually associated with the rejection of feminism. If some scholars have on this basis passionately denounced French Feminism as an American invention, there exists to date no comprehensive analysis of that invention or of its effects. Why did theorists who were at best marginal to feminist thought and political practice in France galvanize feminist scholars working in the United States? Why does French Feminism provoke such an intense affective response in France to this date? Drawing on the fields of feminist and queer studies, literary studies, and history, “Inventing ‘French Feminism:’ A Critical History” offers a transnational account of the emergence and impact of one of U.S. academic feminism’s most influential bodies of work. The first half of the dissertation argues that, although French Feminism has now been dismissed for being biologically essentialist and falsely universal, feminists working in the U.S. academy of the 1980s, particularly feminist literary critics and postcolonial feminist critics, deployed the work of Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva to displace what they perceived as U.S. feminist literary criticism’s essentialist reliance on the biological sex of the author and to challenge U.S. academic feminism’s inattention to racial differences between women. French Feminism thus found traction among feminist scholars to the extent that it was perceived as addressing some of U.S. feminism’s most pressing political issues. The second half of the dissertation traces French feminist scholars’ vehement rejection of French Feminism to an affectively charged split in the French women’s liberation movement of the 1970s and shows that this split has resulted in an entrenched opposition between sexual difference and materialist feminism, an opposition that continues to structure French feminist debates to this day. “Inventing ‘French Feminism:’ A Critical History” ends by arguing that in so far as the U.S. invention of French Feminism has contributed to the emergence of U.S. queer theory, it has also impeded its uptake in France. Taken as a whole, this dissertation thus implicitly argues that the transnational circulation of ideas is simultaneously generative and disabling.

Dissertation

This chapter examines the development of funk as a distinct concept in black vernacular culture, and explains how blues artists, modern jazz musicians, and political attitudes during the civil rights movement combined to establish the foundation for the musical genre of funk as well as the non-conformist aesthetics and attitudes the music expressed. The central argument is therefore two-fold: that blues artists formulated the concept now known as funk, and that funk became the epistemic centerpiece of a broader cultural aesthetics in black working-class environments. As with the previous chapter, “Blue Funk: The Ugly Beauty of Stank ” foregrounds the central role of kinesthesia in blues-oriented approaches to music-making. Using insights and methods from multiple areas of scholarship, including musicology, ethnomusicology, philosophy, literary criticism, dance criticism, and art history, Bolden explains how the concept of funk and/or precepts associated with funk were not only exemplified in several black musical genres but also dancing, literature, and visual art as well. In this way, black artists working in several mediums contributed to the transformation of “funky” from a stigmatizing signification, that is, a negative, stereotypical expression into a metaphor of black cultural affirmation.