Sisyphus and Eldorado: Magical and Other Realisms in Caribbean Literature
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
Creative writers and critics come together in this major collection of writings about the literature of the Dutch-, English-, French-, and Spanish-speaking Caribbean. It began with the thought that a distinction might be made between a principally anglophone "Sisyphus," representing the task of material, metaphysical, and cultural liberation as a basically pessimistic work of "success" and "achievement," and a francophone and hispanophone "Eldorado," expressed especially in magical realism, as a hope of surpassing material and local familiarities and moving into an altogether different cultural and spiritual dialectic.
As its authors worked together and separately, the divisive assumptions of this double theme became clearer even as it offered new ways to set them in mutual conjunction. All Caribbean writing shares and explores what both these names represent. At the same time, their juxtaposition does offer a fruitful way to explore Caribbean culture(s) as a unity with its own distinctive characteristics. Thus this collection discusses works of individual writers as well as wider issues of personal and political identity, of literary and cultural creation in neo- or post-colonial situations, of the meaning of creolity and creolization, of the nature of Caribbean cultural unity, and of how literatures "write back" against others who try to make them in their image.
Among the writers considered are Robert Antoni, Erna Brodber, Alejo Carpentier, Aime Cesaire, Wilson Harris, Albert Helman, C. L. R. James, George Lamming, Boeli van Leeuwen, Saint-John Perse, Simon Schwarz-Bart, Derek Walcott, and others.
Contributors to the volume include Gerard Aching, A. James Arnold, Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Erna Brodber, John Chioles, Rhonda Cobham, Maryse Condé, Joan Dayan, Wilson Harris, the late André Lefevere, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Ineke Phaf, Timothy Reiss, Silvio Torres-Saillant, and Sylvia Wynter.
About the Author
Timothy J. Reiss, Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, has recently published Against Autonomy: Global Dialectics of Cultural Exchange (2002). His previous book was Knowledge, Discovery and Imagination in Early Modern Europe: The Rise of Aesthetic Rationalism (1997). The Meaning of Literature won the 1992 Forkosch Prize in intellectual history. Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe is in press. Africa World Press published his edited collection, For the Geography of the Soul: Emerging Perspectives on Kamau Brathwaite, in 2001.
Sisyphus and Eldorado: Magical and Other Realisms in Caribbean Literature,Timothy J. Reiss,Africa World Pr,0865438927,Caribbean literature,History and criticism,Literature: Classics
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