[DOWNLOAD] "Modernity in Marquez and Feminism in Ousmane (Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Sembene Ousmane) (Critical Essay)" by Geetha Ramanathan # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Modernity in Marquez and Feminism in Ousmane (Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Sembene Ousmane) (Critical Essay)
- Author : Geetha Ramanathan
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 105 KB
Description
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice (Marquez, 1). The realism of the line belies the hallucinatory quality of the image of modernity descending in Macondo. Not only does the narrative not fulfill the promise of the future, but it repeats the twin tropes of both the firing squad and the ice as though to drum the fantasy of modernity as the trump of deceit. The failure of modernity to deliver more than the ephemerally melting ice is not as relevant as its inexplicable promise of itself, the object, or the sign itself, rather than what it might grandly stand in for, such as progress, escape, redemption, or entrance into the banquet of nations. The arrival of ice and the "cinema" are enigmatic; "signs taken for wonders," not as in the case of the English book's entrance in India because it is "repeated, translated, misread, displaced," but because the very concrete object carries magical properties (Bhaba 163). Curiously, "the magical realism" of Gabriel Garcia Marquez devolves as much around this fantasy of the modern as it does on the coexistence of the magical in the real in the everyday existence. Paradoxically, then, the bases of critical understandings of magical realism, as part of a specifically Latin American reality can be qualified to suggest that there are two perceptions of the magical in Marquez's text: one from outside the text and located problematically in the Latin American and the other within the diegesis and experienced within the world of the text, identified as arriving from the outside and signifying the modern. Whether the invention itself is contemporary or new is beside the point; in this context the ice is new as are the magnets, suggesting what's more recently been termed "geo-modernism," a modernity situated in place and time (Doyle and Winkiel 1). Moreover, the genealogy of Marquez's style is the baroque, a period in Latin American letters that has been subject to extensive re-readings in recent scholarship. One line of thinking in new modernity studies would have it that the baroque is very much a function of the "modern," as a movement roughly contemporary to the "Enlightenment" in Europe. For example, Monika Kaup advances the idea of the "neo-baroque" as commensurate to an alternate modernity that challenges the philosophy of the Enlightenment and is trans-historical in being a modality, rather than a time-bound movement (128-53). This reclamation of the baroque of the seventeenth century in Latin America in the early twentieth century is also viewed as critiquing an exclusive western model of modernity. Both content and form, ideology and aesthetic are here perceived as proffering a neo-modernity comparable with similar usages of uneven and multiple aesthetics in the post-colonial world. Elements of the legacy of the neo-baroque are apparent in Marquez's use of both magical and real elements to descry the complexity of the "arrival" of the realia of modernity. If the arrival clearly does not erase what existed earlier, a fear nowhere felt in the diegesis of the text, but redolent of the project of the text itself, it also escapes the tangibility of having arrived, its facticity described as lacking instrumentality and inviting fantasy. The neo-baroque aesthetic, claimed as modern, is mapped on to an existing terrain inhabited by methods of family formation which being both mythical and socially real envision women as inhabiting the real but positioned by romance. Within the framework/space of the received scholarship on One Hundred Years a pattern subtended by assumptions on genre emerges. Although a penchant for proclaiming the specificity of the Latin American experience cuts across most borders and is most appealing to the vast, increasing readership of the novel, its identification within the epic/myth has served to make the male characters all important to the understandin