Issue Details: First known date: 2012... 2012 Writing the Self/ Writing the Other in Thomas Keneally’s 'The Tyrant’s Novel' and Inaam Kachachi’s 'The American Granddaughter'
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Thomas Keneally's The Tyrant's Novel (2004) and Inaam Kachachi's The American Granddaughter (2008) both deal with the crisis in Iraq and its ramifications. Recognizing the important ideological and humanistic role played by literature, both writers choose to assume their moral responsibility in the face of injustice, war and violence. The paper attempts to show how each of them follows a humanistic approach that advocates human rights and equality. It also compares how each evades or otherwise succumbs to the pitfalls of Humanism that turns the sign "human' to a universal category representing humanity according to the Western model. In so doing it examines how the fact of their coming from opposite sides of the cultural divide influences the cross-cultural negotiation of publicly disseminated representations of both the self and its other(s).' [Author's abstract]

Notes

  • Epigraphs:
    Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction. -- Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics 110
    What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one's own language as it is perceived in someone else's language, coming to know one's own conceptual horizon in someone else's horizon. -- Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination 365

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Last amended 1 Feb 2013 09:29:38
http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/view/1368/1385 Writing the Self/ Writing the Other in Thomas Keneally’s 'The Tyrant’s Novel' and Inaam Kachachi’s 'The American Granddaughter'small AustLit logo Postcolonial Text
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