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Haddis Alemayehu's classic novel ፍቅር እስከ መቃብር (Fikir iske Mekabir , Love until Death , 1958 Ethiopian Calendar, 1965/6 Gregorian Calendar), is lauded by critics as a pioneering realist and modern novel in the Amharic literary tradition. My aim in this article is to scrutinize this take by examining the novel's narrative temporalities and modes through a dialectical lens. This leads me to argue that the novel's realism is marked by contradiction and fluidity. Specifically, the emergence of realism in Fikir iske Mekabir is accompanied by its breakdown while the realist narrative mode is accompanied by the traditional narrative modes of epic and hagiography (or, gedl). This hitherto unexamined textual and intertextual quality of Haddis's novel reveals new insights into its thematic content regarding modernity, tradition, and social reproduction under the old Ethiopian order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Majumder takes on from there and shows how the conceptual ground provided by Roberto enables him to formulate a peripheral aesthetics, which does not ignore "the particular histories of the societies and of the literatures these engender." In yet another example of horizontal readings, he presents Roberto's[3] theory as one of the conditions of possibility of the kind of world literature proposed in the book. Keywords: materialist cultural criticism; world literature; peripheral studies EN materialist cultural criticism world literature peripheral studies 411 416 6 11/03/22 20220901 NES 220901 When I sat down to write these brief notes on I Insurgent Imaginations i , my first temptation was to juxtapose its project for world literature to liberal accounts. [5] In the essay, Roberto shows how Candido inaugurates this dialectical way of reading in Brazil. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the aesthetics of representing female sexuality within colonial narratives of the West–East encounter. I consider two literary works whose female characters challenge the gendered metaphors of empire that predominated in a tradition of colonial literature and its postcolonial rewriting: the short story "La femme adultère" by the French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, and the novel Wāḥat al-ghurūb by Egyptian writer Bahāʾ Ṭāhir. In each text, the standard heterosexual troping of imperial conquest as a male activity directed at or against a feminized other is inverted to place a European woman's sexually aroused body at the center of the drama of colonial contact. Reading these two texts against the grain of the aesthetic formulas that they employ to contemplate the political stakes of cross-cultural intimacies in a colonial setting, I argue that the phenomenological immediacy of how the female protagonist in each is shown to experience the eroticism of colonial space introduces a break in these formulas. The loss of narrative plausibility in each text that follows from these erotic interludes, I propose, ultimately testifies to the irreducibility of the body to either enforcing or disputing the epistemologies of the colonial project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]