Library Catalog
Amazon cover image
Image from Amazon.com

The Tongue-Tied Imagination : Decolonizing Literary Modernity in Senegal / Tobias Warner.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2019]Copyright date: ©2019Description: 1 online resource (320 p.) : 12Content type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780823284634
  • 9780823284313
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 809/.99663 23
LOC classification:
  • PQ3988.5.S38 W37 2019
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Note on orthography and pronunciation -- Introduction: Unwinding the Language Question -- Part I. Colonial Literary Modernity -- 1. The Fetish of Textuality: David Boilat's Notebooks and the Making of a Literary Past -- 2. Para-literary Authorship: Colonial Education and the Uses of Literature -- 3. Toward the Future Reader: Print Networks and the Question of the Audience -- Part II. Decolonization and the Language Question -- 4. Senghor's Grammatology: The Political Imaginaries of Writing African Languages -- 5. Counterpoetics: Translation as Aesthetic Constraint in Sembène's Mandabi and Ndao's Buur Tilleen -- Part III. World Literature, Neoliberalism -- 6. How Mariama Bâ Became World Literature: Translation and the Legibility of Feminist Critique -- 7. Aesthetics After Austerity: Boubacar Boris Diop and the Work of Literature in Neoliberal Senegal -- Epilogue. Out of Time: Decolonization and the Future of World Literature -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
Summary: Should a writer work in a former colonial language or in a vernacular? The language question was one of the great, intractable problems that haunted postcolonial literatures in the twentieth century, but it has since acquired a reputation as a dead end for narrow nationalism. This book returns to the language question from a fresh perspective. Instead of asking whether language matters, The Tongue-Tied Imagination explores how the language question itself came to matter. Focusing on the case of Senegal, Warner investigates the intersection of French and Wolof. Drawing on extensive archival research and an under-studied corpus of novels, poetry, and films in both languages, as well as educational projects and popular periodicals, the book traces the emergence of a politics of language from colonization through independence to the era of neoliberal development. Warner reads the francophone works of well-known authors such as Léopold Senghor, Ousmane Sembène, Mariama Bâ, and Boubacar Boris Diop alongside the more overlooked Wolof-language works with which they are in dialogue.Refusing to see the turn to vernacular languages only as a form of nativism, The Tongue-Tied Imagination argues that the language question opens up a fundamental struggle over the nature and limits of literature itself. Warner reveals how language debates tend to pull in two directions: first, they weave vernacular traditions into the normative patterns of world literature; but second, they create space to imagine how literary culture might be configured otherwise. Drawing on these insights, Warner brilliantly rethinks the terms of world literature and charts a renewed practice of literary comparison.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9780823284313

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Note on orthography and pronunciation -- Introduction: Unwinding the Language Question -- Part I. Colonial Literary Modernity -- 1. The Fetish of Textuality: David Boilat's Notebooks and the Making of a Literary Past -- 2. Para-literary Authorship: Colonial Education and the Uses of Literature -- 3. Toward the Future Reader: Print Networks and the Question of the Audience -- Part II. Decolonization and the Language Question -- 4. Senghor's Grammatology: The Political Imaginaries of Writing African Languages -- 5. Counterpoetics: Translation as Aesthetic Constraint in Sembène's Mandabi and Ndao's Buur Tilleen -- Part III. World Literature, Neoliberalism -- 6. How Mariama Bâ Became World Literature: Translation and the Legibility of Feminist Critique -- 7. Aesthetics After Austerity: Boubacar Boris Diop and the Work of Literature in Neoliberal Senegal -- Epilogue. Out of Time: Decolonization and the Future of World Literature -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

restricted access online access with authorization star

http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

Should a writer work in a former colonial language or in a vernacular? The language question was one of the great, intractable problems that haunted postcolonial literatures in the twentieth century, but it has since acquired a reputation as a dead end for narrow nationalism. This book returns to the language question from a fresh perspective. Instead of asking whether language matters, The Tongue-Tied Imagination explores how the language question itself came to matter. Focusing on the case of Senegal, Warner investigates the intersection of French and Wolof. Drawing on extensive archival research and an under-studied corpus of novels, poetry, and films in both languages, as well as educational projects and popular periodicals, the book traces the emergence of a politics of language from colonization through independence to the era of neoliberal development. Warner reads the francophone works of well-known authors such as Léopold Senghor, Ousmane Sembène, Mariama Bâ, and Boubacar Boris Diop alongside the more overlooked Wolof-language works with which they are in dialogue.Refusing to see the turn to vernacular languages only as a form of nativism, The Tongue-Tied Imagination argues that the language question opens up a fundamental struggle over the nature and limits of literature itself. Warner reveals how language debates tend to pull in two directions: first, they weave vernacular traditions into the normative patterns of world literature; but second, they create space to imagine how literary culture might be configured otherwise. Drawing on these insights, Warner brilliantly rethinks the terms of world literature and charts a renewed practice of literary comparison.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 02. Mrz 2022)