Monday 10th December 2012
NATURALISM, HUMANITARIANISM AND THE FICTION OF WAR:
Public lecture by Professor Eleni Coundouriotis
(Connecticut)
War has always occupied an important place in the African
novel and, in recent years, has arguably become the dominant literary theme of
works about Africa read outside Africa. As a subject, war presents particular
challenges as it threatens to mire us in stereotypes of Africa as conflict
ridden and dysfunctional. A close reading of the literature, however, reveals a
great deal that counters these now static images. The war novel in Africa (from
the 1960s through the 1990s) is in fact a people’s history, an attempt to write
outside the frame of the Bildungsroman, the genre which dominated the literature
of an educated, assimilated class, and imagine history from below. Because it
has the characteristics of naturalist fiction, it is, moreover, linked to
humanitarian discourse, and it is this relationship between naturalism and
humanitarianism that situates it in the growing scholarship on human rights and
literature. If war is the subject of humanitarianism par excellence, what could
be the contribution of a reading of war fiction to the emerging academic
discourse of human rights?
Eleni Coundouriotis is Professor of English at the University
of Connecticut and Faculty Affiliate of the Human Rights Institute.
Eleni’s research interests are in postcolonial literature,
nineteenth-century comparative prose studies, cultural studies and human rights.
Her publications include Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography, and the
Novel (1999) and the forthcoming The People’s Right to the Novel: War Fiction in
the Postcolony.
Lecture 6.00pm Geoffrey Manton Lecture Theatre 5
Reception starts in the atrium at 5.30pm
ALL WELCOME
Please register on Eventbrite here:
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