Eating Well, Reading Well: Maryse Condé and the Ethics of Interpretation

While rejecting a conception of literature as moral philosophy, or a device for imparting particular morals to the reader through exemplary characters and plots, Maryse Conde 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 Conde's work'history and globalization in La Belle Creole and Moi, Tituba sorciere...noire de Salem, intertextuality and reception in La migration des c'urs and Celanire cou-coupe, trauma and subjectivity in En attendant le bonheur and Desirada, community and ethics in Traversee de la mangrove and Histoire de la femme cannibale'this analysis proposes to elucidate how, and to what ends, Conde 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.Nicole Simek is an Assistant Professor of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Whitman College. Specializing in French Caribbean literature, Simek's research interests include the intersection of politics and literature in Caribbean fiction, trauma theory, and sociological approaches to literature.Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. Interpreting through ExampleChapter 1. Reading History: The Example of the Past after GlobalizationChapter 2. Rusing with the Canon: Insolent Imitation, Parodic IntertextualityChapter 3. Writing Violence: Collective Traumas, Singular PastsChapter 4. The Cannibal Reader: Digesting the Other, Interpreting CommunityConclusion. Comme un Indien Tupinamba...BibliographyIndex