Eating Well, Reading Well: Maryse Condé and the Ethics of InterpretationWhile rejecting a conception of literature as moral philosophy, or a device for imparting particular morals to the reader through exemplary characters and plots, Maryse Condé has displayed throughout her writing career a strong valorization of literature as ethical critique. This study examines her singular approach to literary commitment as a critical reworking of aesthetic models and modes of interpretation. Focusing on four dominant problematics in Condé’s work—history and globalization in La Belle Créole and Moi, Tituba sorcière...noire de Salem, intertextuality and reception in La migration des cœurs and Célanire cou-coupé, trauma and subjectivity in En attendant le bonheur and Desirada, community and ethics in Traversée de la mangrove and Histoire de la femme cannibale—this analysis proposes to elucidate how, and to what ends, Condé engages, and alters, approaches to reading, staging the problematic, yet pragmatic, need to read well. This hermeneutic imperative foregrounds the need to engage with texts, to cannibalize texts while recognizing their fundamental opacity and inexhaustibility, their resistance to the reader’s interpretive habits. |
Contents
Introduction Interpreting through Examples | 11 |
The Example of the Past after Globalization | 27 |
Insolent Imitation Parodic Intertextuality | 69 |
Collective Traumas Singular Pasts | 119 |
Digesting the Other Interpreting Community | 165 |
Conclusion Comme un Indien Tupinamba | 201 |
Bibliography | 207 |
Index | 229 |
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Eating Well, Reading Well: Maryse Condé and the Ethics of Interpretation Nicole Jenette Simek No preview available - 2008 |
Common terms and phrases
Africa Anthea Antillean literature attempt avait Belle Créole Brontë’s c’est c’était cannibalism Caribbean Cathy Célanire cou-coupé Célanire’s Césaire Chamoiseau characters colonial conception Condé’s novels Créolité critical critique cultural d’une described Desirada Dieudonné’s discours antillais discourse Edouard Glissant Emily Brontë Est-ce ethical example exemplarity fait fantastic femme cannibale fiction Fiéla Francis Sancher Françoise French globalization Guadeloupe Guadeloupean Heathcliff Heremakhonon hermeneutical Homi K hybridity identity interpretive intertextual interview j’ai jamais l’avait Lionnet literary Loraine Magic Realism mangrove Marie-Noëlle Marie-Noëlle’s Maryse Condé métissage migration des cœurs n’est narrative narrator nègre Négritude noire nomad one’s opacity Paris parody Patrick Chamoiseau political postcolonial postcolonial literature postmodern problematic qu’elle qu’il qu’un question race racial Raphaël Confiant Razyé reader reading relation rewrite Reynalda rien Rivière au Sel Rosélie Rosélie’s ruse Sancher Ségou social Sory specificity story Tituba Tituba sorcière tout trauma Traversée University Press Véronica violence Writing Wuthering Heights