Vor der Zeit

More than a quarter of a century living away from the country she grew up in, the author finds she is constantly revisiting her native land, when often only inside her head. It is a journey which never seems to end. This collection of poems and short stories about visits, real or imaginary, to or within Northern Ireland spans an “ex-Paddy’s” lifetime from childhood, through troubled times and on into middle age.

Gianluca Delfino’s study is based on the assumption that Wilson Harris’s works as a whole show a remarkable unity of thought rooted in their author’s complex imagination. As a valuable contribution to Caribbean Literature and Philosophy, Harris’s imaginative approach to reality is discussed in relation to the categories of history and time with reference to several novels, from Palace of The Peacock to The Mask of the Beggar, with a special focus on The Infinite Rehearsal, Jonestown and The Dark Jester, spanning more than forty years of his vast literary production, encompassing critical perspectives ranging from African philosophy to Jungian readings through historiography and anthropology. As a result, the cross-cultural quality of Harris’s thought emerges as a healing outcome of the traumatic colonial encounter, bringing together elements of Amerindian, African and European origin in an ongoing dialogue with time, nature, and the psyche. The outcome of an extensive research into Harris’s world, Delfino’s study comes as a contribution to late Hena Maes-Jelinek’s critical enterprise by expanding philosophical and psychological readings, with the addition of anthropological perspectives that appeal to those who were captured by Harris’s intricacy and rescued by Maes-Jelinek’s illuminating interpretations. The attempt at the reconstruction of a unifying frame around Harris’s body of work suggests a new way of looking at one of the Caribbean’s most controversial authors.

Nadia Anwar presents a compelling reading framework for the study and analysis of selected post-independence Nigerian dramas, using the conceptual parameters of metatheatre, a theatrical strategy which foregrounds the process of play-making by breaking the dramatic illusion. She argues that distancing, as a function of metatheatre, creates a balanced theatrical experience and environment in terms of the emotive and cognitive levels of reception of a particular performance. Anwar's book is the first in-depth study of the concept of metatheatre with reference to Nigerian drama including Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman (1975) and King Baabu (2002), Ola Rotimi's Kurunmi (1971) and Hopes of the Living Dead (1988), Femi Osofisan's The Chattering and the Song (1977) and Women of Owu (2006), Esiaba Irobi's Hangmen Also Die (1989), and Stella 'Dia Oyedepo's A Play That Was Never to Be (1998). The perspectives of Bertolt Brecht (1936), Thomas J. Scheff (1963), and other theoreticians of dramatic distancing and metatheatre are used in the analyses and, where required, challenged through appropriate contextual and theoretical adjustments. The book is the first attempt to illustrate how Brechtian approach to the display and generation of emotions can be revised through Scheff's model of emotional balance.

Forming a pair with the voice, the gaze is a central structuring element of Samuel Beckett’s creation. And yet it takes the form of a strangely impersonal visual dimension testifying to the absence of an original exchange of gazes capable of founding personal identity and opening up the world to desire. The collapse of conventional reality and the highlighting of seeing devices—eyes, mirrors, windows—point to the absence of a unified representation. While masks and closed spaces show the visible to be opaque and devoid of any beyond, light and darkness, spectres—manifestations without origin—reveal a realm beyond the confines of identity, where nothing provides a mediation with the seen, or sets it within perspective. Finally, Beckett’s use of the audio-visual media deepens his exploration of the irreducibly real part of existence that escapes seeing. This study systematically examines these essential aspects of the visual in Beckett’s creation. The theoretical elaborations of Jacques Lacan—in relation with corresponding developments in the history and philosophy of the visual arts—offer an indispensible framework to understand the imaginary not as representation, but as rooted in the fundamental opacity of existence.

"In the wake of the fear that gripped Europe after the fall of Constantinople (1453), the English dramatists joined most continental artists (literary and visual) in representing the Ottoman Turks in plays inspired by historical events. As the many subjective elements involved in the stereotyping of the Turks in these plays—revolving around complex themes such as tyranny, captivity, war, and conquests—arose from their perception of Islam, Ottoman milieu as a dramatic setting provided for the English audiences a common experience of fascination and fear of the Other. The Ottomans' failure in the second siege of Vienna (1683), however, became a factor in the reversal of trends in the representation of the Turks on stage. As the ascending strength of a web of European alliances began to check further the Ottoman expansion, what then began to dazzle the aesthetic imagination of the eighteenth century England was the sultan's seraglio with images of extravaganza and decadence. In this book, Esin Akalın draws upon a selective range of seventeenth and eighteenth century plays to reach an understanding, both from a non-European perspective and Western standpoint how one culture represents the other through discourse, historiography, and drama. The book explores a cluster of issues revolving around identity and difference in terms of history, ideology, and politics of representation. In contextualizing political, cultural, and intellectual roots in the ideology of representing the Ottoman/Muslim as the West’s Other, the author, ultimately, tackles with the questions of how history serves literature and to what extent literature creates history. "