A.H. Tammsaare’s Truth and Justice as a Postcolonial Bildungsroman

A.H. Tammsaare’s pentalogy Truth and Justice is considered a central text in Estonian culture, perceived virtually as a second national epic. The article analyzes it from the perspective of comparative genre studies. It is discussed as an idiosyncratic example of Bildungsroman, a genre narrativizing modernizing change focusing on the lives of everyday individuals, thus symbolically domesticating and humanizing the global developments of modernization. The emplotment of Tammsaare’s novel is comparatively discussed against the background of the Western European Bildungsroman on the one hand and of non-European postcolonial Bildungsroman on the other. The analysis enables to gain new insight into the reception and cultural working-through of the belated rapid modernization in Estonia. It also helps to explain the canonical position of Tammsaare’s novel in Estonian literature: The novel is a poetic tour de force that forges a both intra- and internationally acceptable model of modern Estonia.     

‘Everybody else just living their lives’: 9/11, race and the new postglobal literature

ABSTRACT

López's essay focuses on three questions or concerns: globalization, its aftermath and how those on the bottom survive it. During globalization's rise through the 1990s even the most virulent critics treated its eventual hegemony over the planet as a fait accompli; the only relevant questions were how it would change us, and whether those changes were desirable. Today the question is how to live now that globalization has failed us. As the aftermath of each of the global cataclysms of the last decade have amply demonstrated, it is the poor, the disenfranchised and marginalized who bear the brunt of the suffering and anxiety set in motion by the economic, political and cultural changes unleashed by globalization at the level of neighbourhoods and communities. What López calls the ‘postglobal’ emerges precisely at those moments when globalization as a hegemonic discourse stumbles, when it experiences a crisis or setback. The first section of his essay consists of a detailed exposition of the term ‘postglobal’ and its efficacy for the study of contemporary literature and culture. The rest focuses on Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane as an exemplar of what he calls the new postglobal literature.     

成长中的磨砺——解析乔伊斯·卡罗尔·欧茨的《狐火:一个少女帮的自白》中“狐火”的象征意义

乔伊斯·卡罗尔·欧茨的《狐火:一个少女帮的自白》是一部美国少女的《哈克贝利.费恩历险记》,"狐火"是女孩们立志结盟的纹身,它象征着解脱,怒火与毁灭,它伴随了主人公成长的艰辛历程。这部成长小说深刻探索了女性面对现实问题时的解决方法,为女性成长小说的研究提供了最佳素材,了解"狐火"的象征意义对理解小说非常有益。