Autodafe 2
AUTODAFE is a collection of reports, interviews, correspondence, narratives, and stories from around the world. The review aims to be a place for debate and experimentation, a place where writers, silenced by censorship join voices with world-renowned writers. The contributors are all members of the International Parliament of Writers; the pieces are original to Autodafe. The journal's common themes are the reflection of social and political realities of the world, censorship, the interdict of language, and the effects of globablization among others.
From Papyrus to Hypertext
Reflections and predictions of technology's effect on reading and writing
Shifting Paradigms in Culture
Jean Genet is a writer known for contradictions in his life and in his creative endeavours. As a playwright, he has been classified in various categories: as a part of the Theatre of the Absurd, as a representative of the rights of the gay community, as a spokesperson of the Palestinian cause, and so on. His comments about his life and works further complicate things. This book frees Jean Genet’s plays from the overpowering Sartrean perspective, and offers an interpretation that reveals the otherwise hidden spaces of the prison, brothel or the maid’s garret ingrained in them. The plays selected for analysis in this study make a bold statement about areas in society that escaped the attention of contemporary dramatists. In the process, the existing social fabric is meaningfully subjected to the playwright’s gaze; this is achieved through the creation of a stage dynamic different from the one adopted by the Theatre of the Absurd. The chapters in the book explain paradigms informing the plays and enabling the viewer to forge their own response. Discussions in the book take the reader to possibilities of invention and experimentation in an act that belongs to the stage as much as to the world it controls. This book traverses challenging issues and spaces – the areas inhabited by the blacks, the ghettoized existence of social discards, and others rotting on the margins in the post-Second World War period. It is clearly suggested that the playwright spoke from his own experiences and of those others with whom he empathized; into these aspects he infused his imaginative and creative skills. An important method of enquiry used in this study is that of the panoptic machinery: the tower and its function of keeping watch on people caught in the web of the oppressive modern state. It is highlighted that the panopticon survives by hiding its dialectical link with its inhabitants. The panopticon can remain only as long as it conceals – therein lies its threatening presence. The three segments into which the discussion is divided are: “Role-playing and The Maids,” “The Panopticon and The Balcony,” and “Decolonisation and The Blacks.”
Cosmopolitanisms
Cosmopolitanisms explores how social groups find ways of living productively with each other. This book analyzes theoretical approaches and research to give a new understanding of the cultural, personal, moral and legal dimensions of cosmopolitanism. This is a key critical guide to cosmopolitanism for all students of globalization and sociology.
Time's Fool
Time’s Fool: Essays in Context is a collection of essays on a broad range of topics, from Gilgamesh to James Joyce – and beyond: to Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Yaşar Kemal, Cormac McCarthy, Abdulrahman Munif, and many others. Time’s Fool is a memorial to the life work of A. Clare Brandabur, who walked away from a tenure-track teaching position at the University of Illinois to embark on a career of teaching in Middle Eastern universities in Jordan, Syria, Bahrain, occupied Palestine, Cyprus, Ankara, and finally Istanbul, where she taught for the last decade and a half of her life. Had Clare stayed with a career at a “Research I” university in the United States, her scholarship would have been far less rich and free-wheeling – more narrow, concentrated, and specialized – and she would not have been able to help and inspire her graduate and undergraduate students from the Near East and, especially during her last five or six years at Fatih University, from around the world. The essays are organized into five main groups, from “Gender and Family Relations” and “Ecocriticism,” to “Colonialism and Post-Colonialism,” “Colonialism and Ireland,” and “Colonialism, Palestine, Genocide”; and a final ‘catch-all’ section of “Miscellaneous Essays” that includes Gilgamesh, T.E. Lawrence, Yaşar Kemal, Graham Green, and modern theory. There are also sub-categories that transcend the six sections, such as Arab Literature, Catholicism, Women’s Studies, and Mythology – something for everyone, in short. Clare’s essays give a sense of her breadth of scholarship and her very rich play of mind, but the real monument to her life’s work is in the hearts and minds of the students from around the world whom she influenced.
