By Nicole Simek
Through a chain of case stories spanning the boundaries of literature, images, essay, and manifesto, this e-book examines the ways that literary texts do theoretical, moral, and political paintings. Nicole Simek methods the connection among literature, thought, and public lifestyles via a particular web site, the French Antillean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, and specializes in at the same time elucidating phrases: starvation and irony. studying those suggestions jointly is helping elucidate irony’s inventive power and bounds. If starvation provides irony buy through anchoring it particularly old and fabric stipulations, irony additionally provides a literature and politics of starvation a way for relocating past a given scenario, for pushing during the inertias of heritage and culture.
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Additional info for Hunger and Irony in the French Caribbean : Literature, Theory, and Public Life
Sample text
Melodrama, its overblown emotions and universalizing pronouncements, becomes reincarnated, but transfigured; it must be dismissed as naïve and misguided, yet it also carries weight. It is not outmoded, though not not outmoded at the same time. Irony knots together the two meanings it would seem to separate, refiguring critical detachment as critical entanglement—a mode of critique inseparable from the unsettling affects and investments that “dispassionate” analysis would pretend to evacuate. Such an embodied irony characterizes the paratextual dialogue figuring among the opening epigraphs to Solibo Magnifique: The ethnographer: —But, Papa, what to do in such a situation?
Her muteness feeds the fascination and horror of the public, and also elicits a major postcolonial critical move: that of retracing the process of othering through which a subaltern subject is marginalized. The novel authorizes such a move largely by positing cannibalism as the defining feature of her “crime,” and examining the ways in which criminal suspicion persists even when the supporting evidence is shown to be faulty. Most of the public assumes Fiela to have perpetrated murder and interprets her “act” through ahistorical psychological and mythological typologies, or reductive historical paradigms.
Irony points to the inaccessibility of a position from which a “secure” reading—a reading that would confirm one meaning of the sentence to be the “true” one—could be articulated. As such, it does not so much dismiss the ostensible “surface” meaning of the sentence (Rosélie suffers from a complex) in favor of its “opposite” (Rosélie does not suffer from a complex), but rather creates a hungry negativity that turns this opposition itself back into something no longer identical to the original: Rosélie does not not suffer from a complex, Stephen is not unmanly in his actions.