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This article addresses connections between the fictional writings of Franz Kafka and Maurice Blanchot by examining the window motif in their stories. This motif has a central meaning for both [...]

This survey paper focuses on Pakistani Anglophone literary narratives that examine the multiple identities of victimized women as opposed to the commonly endorsed essentialist and reductive argument that is too easily conscripted into post-9/11 global discourses surrounding women of colour. In the context of the global hegemony of Western scholarship, my purpose in this paper is to foreground the simultaneous liberation and subjection, centricity and marginality, of Pakistani women. I argue that it is important to situate third world women's subjection as well as agency in relation to the class, regional, ethnic and religious diversities that inform the degree and nature of freedom and constraints that women experience. In addition to this, urban, rural, tribal and feudal environments also inform the plurality of victimized identities as well as of women's agency. Against this backdrop, I read Pakistani literary narratives as acts of breaking through the Eurocentric monopolization of a reductive one-dimensional image of the Muslim world by emphasizing the need to situate the subjectivities of Pakistani women within community-based relationships and responsibilities, both of which have intrinsic value in Muslim culture. In so doing, I emphasize the importance of incorporating in these dominant discourses an exclusively Pakistani-Muslim feministic perspective that considers and claims pluralistic alternatives. Keywords: Pakistani fiction, agency, subjection, community-based relationships, third world women, Introduction This survey paper focuses on Pakistani Anglophone literary narratives that figure out the multiple identities of victimized women as opposed to the commonly endorsed essentialist and reductive argument that [...]

Is there any more cursed term in the modern critical lexicon than 'literary fiction'? With a weed-like tenacity, it has established itself since the 1980s as the dismissive shorthand for [...]

Padgett Powell has a habit of saying provocative things, and one such line that struck me was, 'I am gay in every way except the sex.' While an undergraduate at [...]

South African-born Lindsey Collen, based for most of her writing years on the Indian Ocean Republic of Mauritius, has been propelled to fame in the postcolonial English-language sphere for twice having gained the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Africa region. Best known for her first winner, the breakthrough novel The Rape of Sita (1993, 1995, 2001), she has nevertheless also published several other works, notably in the local Kreol language. She is hailed there as an activist publicising advanced causes through the medium of her innovative short and long fictions, as this summary demonstrates afresh., Late in the 1980s an aspirant woman writer picked from the rotating stand in a second-hand bookshop an old paperback with a lurid cover and vaguely familiar title--or at least [...]

Hemingway's literary interest in cycling has been upstaged by other interests such as bullfighting and boxing. But in his apprenticeship years in Paris, he became a devoted fan of bicycle [...]

Samuel Beckett pursues a practice of 'vaguening' his late work as a strategy that eschews an art of clarity in pursuit of vagueness as an aesthetic value in itself. Beckett's [...]

In a world of new media and rapid technological change the nature and status of representation--both aesthetic and political--evolve. Is this why we are experiencing a soul-searching 'Platonic turn'? Contemporary [...]

Prose fictions such as Chris Abani's Becoming Abigail and Dave Eggers's What Is the What mobilize their readers' readiness to identify with a given protagonist through differently haunted styles of [...]

If Haruki Murakami's fictions are symptomatic of what has happened to the (Jamesian) notion of a 'central intelligence' as necessary to the novel, they present a new level of postmodernist [...]