Browsing by Author "Higginson, Pim"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Blurred Identities: Investigating Language and Memory as Locations of Identity and Culture in Amara Lakhous' Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a Piazza Vittorio and Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez
    (2013) Allen, Anaka; Higginson, Pim; Ricci, Roberta; Seyhan, Azade
    While varied forms of migration have always existed, the last few decades have witnessed vast displacements and resettlements of many populations. World and ethnic wars, the dissolution of nations, environmental fluctuations, and the increasing wealth disparities between nations have all contributed to the growing number of exilic populations. In addition, the world has also contracted in its perceived expanse as a consequence of improved technologies, which have provided a facility of communication and mobility across borders. Thus exile, a term that has often been perceived as a unifying condition suffered by populations of ‘immigrants,’ ‘emigrants,’ ‘emigres,’and ‘refugees,’ has become an increasingly universal experience. Amara Lakhous and Richard Rodriguez, two authors who have encountered the liberties and constraints pertaining to the modern exile, have demonstrated their precarious condition of “in-betweenness” in their respective works. As modern exilic authors, they are concerned with the preservation of identity and cultural history in the face of a destination country that does not resemble their own and misunderstands the ‘other’. As they attempt to balance two opposing cultures, language and memory become crucial modes for both accessing the past and assimilating within the host culture. Lakhous and Rodriguez demonstrate that the exilic author is a classification under construction, which complicates the limited boundaries of nation and national literature, and the experience of migration.
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    “Ce Lieu de Déséquilibre Occulte:” The Postcolonial Fantastic in La Vie et Demie and Midnight’s Children
    (2016) Givertz, Samuel Wolfe; Higginson, Pim; Roberts, Deborah H.
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    La Relation entre Mission Terminée et Afrique Noire, Littérature Rose
    (2013) Gant, Samuel E.; Higginson, Pim
    In my essay I explore the relationship between Mongo Beti's polemical essay Afrique Noire, Littérature Rose and his book Mission Terminée. In the essay Beti assumes a strictly anticolonial stance and insists, perhaps paradoxically, that African authors must be unequivocally anticolonial in their books but also must be published and widely read by a metropolitan French audience. I use the criteria he establishes for good, authentic African literature in his essay and apply it to his novel to see if the book can be classified as anticolonial. I conclude that the novel is a polemical text like the essay, but it is far more nuanced and accessible to a wide variety of audiences.
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    One and Three Texts: Writing and Re-writing the Politics of Al-Khubz al-Hafi in Translation
    (2015) Fries, Daniel; Seyhan, Azade; Higginson, Pim
    In 1973, a British publisher asked American novelist Paul Bowles, then in Tangier, to ask Moroccan Amazigh writer Mohamed Choukri for an autobiography. Bowles had some experience translating oral narratives, but since he was unable to read Arabic, Choukri’s text was unintelligible to him. The two men translated through Spanish, French, and colloquial Arabic, while their disagreements led to them sitting on opposite sides of the same room, trying to work independently. After a few edits, the book was translated into French in 1980 by native Arabic speaker Tahar Ben Jelloun, and was finally published in Arabic in 1982. In this thesis, I examine the Bowles translation, titled For Bread Alone, and the 1980 French translation, Le Pain nu, and compare them to the 1982 version of the Arabic text. I argue that Choukri’s original text is politically motivated, written to criticize the French and Spanish colonial influence on Morocco and the Moroccan economy. Choukri’s violent memoir describes abject poverty, as well as a complicated relationship between food, sex, and money, that Bowles, with his experience of Tangier as a foreign city, rewrites, either deliberately or because of his inability to understand Arabic. I make use of Lawrence Venuti’s work on translation, and in an analysis that takes the form of word-to-word comparison, as well as original translation of some sections of the Arabic, I evaluate the effects of the “remainder”— what the translator brings unconsciously to a text already inscribed with its own values, traditions, and structures—on Mohamed Choukri’s political goals in writing a “collective autobiography” of the Rifian Amazigh people in Morocco.
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    «Paisible sauvagerie» : Les enfants et la mort dans la littérature et le film français modernes
    (2012) Serpico, Allison M.; Higginson, Pim; Anyinefa, Koffi, 1959-
    I examine the intersection of childhood and death in four works of modern French literature and film: La Maison de Claudine (Colette), W… (Perec), Les Mots ( Sartre), and Jeux interdits (Clément). Drawing on the French tradition of psychoanalysis and Freud’s theory of the “death instinct,” I examine these young characters and argue that their concretization of death is far more courageous and cathartic than society’s tendency to deny it. I also apply the image of the child exploring death as a metaphor for the modern French author, whose creative power stems from his appraisal and acceptance of personal loss.
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    The Body and the Object: Physical Relations of Viewing in the Sculpture of Eva Hesse
    (2012) Garner, Hannah; Miller, Jerry; Higginson, Pim
    The dynamic between viewer and art object is central to Eva Hesse’s oeuvre. In writing about Hesse’s sculpture through the viewer’s experience of the work, I demonstrate the experiential and embodied nature of viewership. Through Hélène Cixous’ definition of écriture féminine and a performative understanding of art viewership, I argue that Hesse’s sculpture puts the viewer’s physical presence at the forefront of the experience and meaning of the work. The viewer’s body thus infringes on the independent objecthood of the artwork. Furthermore, as phenomenology and Minimalist art theory help elucidate, Hesse’s work wavers between art object and mere thing, further destabilizing the state of objecthood in her art. Hence, the physical and conceptual experience of the viewer must be considered as part of the sculpture itself. If we acknowledge that the art of Hesse’s work is located not in the physical work but in the relationship between art and viewer, then Hesse’s sculpture is never closed or finished.