by Amalthea Bishop Meir
Born in a valley of wheat and light, she knows horses and the sea and the poetry of life.
Armando Gnisci was Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the Department of Italian Studies, University of Roma “La Sapienza”. He has taught literature at several European universities and around the world, including Japan, U.S.A., Brasil, Cuba and Argentina. He has published and edited over thirty books, mainly within the field of Comparative Literature, which have been translated into many languages. In 2012 Professor Gnisci was elected member of the Academia Europaea (the Academy of Europe, London).
Cultural historian and evolutionary theorist Riane Eisler talks to Le Simplegadi about her vision of new human possibilities and her belief in humanity’s capacity for caring and mutuality as an alternative to the violence and domination of much of recorded history. In her ground-breaking works, The Chalice and the Blade (1987) and Sacred Pleasure (1995), both published in more than 20 languages including the recent Italian re-editions by Udine University Press Forum, she gives evidence of “another history”, that of the Neolithic before the violent invasions of pastoralist nomads, in which an equalitarian mode of living was far more central than the patriarchal dominator configuration. This resulted, as Eisler describes, in relations of “linking” rather than rigid “ranking”, and what she calls “hierarchies of actualisation” rather than hierarchies of domination. This work provides a new radical perspective on the ways human relationships and institutions were structured and how they can be again structured, ranging from culture, education, and economics to spirituality, sexuality, and family and other intimate relationships.
Born in Brisbane, Queensland in 1934, he left Australia aged twenty-four and lived in Britain from 1959-68 where he taught in London and Birkenhead. He returned to Australia in 1968 and lectured at the University of Sydney. He became a full-time writer in 1978 and now lives in Sydney. His first two published books were both collections of poetry: Bicycle and Other Poems (1970) and Neighbours in a Thicket: Poems (1974). He later published another collection of poems Revolving Days (2008). He is the internationally acclaimed author of novels including An Imaginary Life (1978), The Great World (1990) winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ prize and the Prix Femina Etranger, Remembering Babylon (1993), shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, The Conversations at Curlow Creek (1996) and Ransom (2009), and his autobiographical classic 12 Edmondstone Street (1985). He has published three collections of short-stories Antipodes (1985), Dream Stuff (2000) and Every Move You Make (2006). He also wrote the libretti for Voss, an adaptation of the novel by Patrick White and first produced in Sydney in 1986, and Baa Baa Black Sheep, an opera with music by Michael Berkeley, the play Blood Relations (1988), and his latest collaboration with Michael Berkeley is the opera Jane Eyre (2000). He was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2000 and the inaugural Australia-Asia Literary Award in 2008.
Born in Karachi and raised in Lahore, Pakistan, she has been widely celebrated as the finest novelist produced by her country. She is the author of several novels, including The Crow Eaters, An American Brat, Cracking India, The Pakistani Bride, and Water, which have been translated and published in several languages. Her anthology City of Sin and Splendour: Writings on Lahore was published in 2006. Among her many honours, she received the Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe/Harvard, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, the Sitara-i-Imtiaz, Pakistan’s highest national honour in the arts, and the LiBeraturepreis in Germany and the 2007 Premio Mondello Award in Italy. She was also on the advisory committee to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on Women’s Development and has taught at Columbia University, University of Houston, Mount Holyoke College, Southampton University and Brandeis. Her novels Cracking India and Water were made into the film Earth and Water by Canadian director Deepa Mehta. Her play Sock ’em with Honey was staged in London (2003) and An American Brat was produced by Stages Repertory Theater in Houston (2007). She now lives in Houston, Texas.
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After a brief consideration of some of the ways in which cartography has operated through the ages, this article discusses the maps mentioned in the first part of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and references to maps in the work of three postcolonial writers: Jamaica Kincaid, Amitav Ghosh and Derek Walcott. It suggests that the postcolonial texts display a distinctive cartographical vision, which rethinks the way spaces are imaginatively constructed. Different though they are from one another, the three postcolonial writers considered particularly foreground the personal cognitive aspects of mapping and, explicitly or implicitly, challenge the totalizing, supposedly authoritative versions of world geography that characterize maps of Empire and Western cartography more generally.
Bolwar Mahamad Kunhi is a distinctive voice in Kannada writing of the last quarter century. What is remarkable about his writing is that he writes as a locally rooted Indian who has an intimate knowledge of his background, the Muslim way of life. What his fiction brings out is that people need an anchor in life and they look to religion for sustenance. Bolwar has an equally close knowledge of the way traditional Brahmins live and his portrayal of the inter-face between completely different ways of life is startlingly true and refreshing.
The article thematically and stylistically analyzes the verse written by the Slovenian migrant poet from Australia, Jože Žohar, in the Slovenian language, which has only been published in Slovenia. The poet shows a great gift for poetic experimentation and tries to reconcile in himself the dividedness between the two “Homes”, Slovenia and Australia.
Even if the Raimond Panikkar’s relationship-based metaphysic is poorly treated in his writings – particularly concerning its deepest significance – it represents the “gold key” to comprehend the whole work of the Catalan philosopher. It shows interesting similarities with the “creatio continua” medieval theory, that is in turn in touch with some traditional Buddhist views and some recent scientific conceptions. A comparison between these apparently different doctrines supports the main ontological Panikkar’s idea: nothing exists “inside itself”, since things live “outside of themselves” into the open space of mutual interactions.
This essay focuses on a comparative study of Modernist fiction and the French Nouveau Roman. Not only do these literary phenomena display some common features allowing us to regard them as manifestations of the same cultural climate, but the Nouveaux Romanciers’ explicit mention of the Modernist novelists as their admired predecessors also seems to legitimise an approach that establishes continuity and reveals interesting transnational connections. Indeed, their relationship can be assessed in terms of reception and assimilation of a model. Such a reading shows some striking analogies between Woolf’s and Sarraute’s aesthetics on the one hand, and the never-ending quests of Joyce and Butor on the other.
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