Search

Introduction to special focus on Literary Walks, Slow Travel, and Eco-Awareness in Contemporary Literature Keywords walking, slow travel, ecocriticism, literature, cycling, One of the benefits of the current global pandemic caused by the coronavirus is the widespread recuperation of nature as humanity is hunkering down at home. As we are being [...]

Through a selection of literary texts featuring cockroaches in the wake of Franz Kafka's Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis (1915): Clarice Lispector's A paixão segundo G.H. (1964; The Passion According to G.H., 1988), Marc Estrin's Insect Dreams: The Half-Life of Gregor Samsa (2002), Scholastique Mukasonga's Inyenzi ou les Cafards (2006; Cockroaches, 2016), and Rawi Hage's Cockroach (2008), this article shows how these authors politicize the cockroach as bestia sacra between trauma and resilience. These literary works are exemplary in demonstrating how Anthropocene fiction resists and destabilizes biopolitically charged species metaphors with their dehumanizing agency. How do these authors, in writing beyond Kafka's doomed human cockroach, liberate the species blattodae from its aura of dehumanization and draw on the resilience of this ancient species in the face of adversity and as a model for human agency?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rushdie's Midnight's Children is a work of pastiche. As such it is typically postmodern, literature patched together from other literary texts. Using Grass's Tin Drum and the German postwar cultural-political situation as a model, Rushdie copies Grass in re-enchanting a secularized country grappling with the memory of genocide through a set of mythological paradigms. By drawing on postcolonial theory and the biopolitical concept of the homo sacer this essay analyses Rushdie's particular brand of what I have termed as mythical realism in view of its close amalgamation of hybridity with mimicry, subversive mockery, and liminality between the human and the animal, typical features of the postmodern novel trying to come to terms with war and genocide. It is the aim of this study to examine the functions of these key features for Rushdie's Midnight's Children for lifting the corks of forgetting and disclosing the concealment of India's past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]