Eating Well, Reading Well

By Nicole Simek

While rejecting a conception of literature as moral philosophy, or a device for imparting particular morals to the reader through exemplary characters and plots, Maryse Cond has displayed throughout her writing career a strong valorization of literature as ethical critique. This study examines her singular approach to literary commitment as a critical reworking of aesthetic models and modes of interpretation. Focusing on four dominant problematics in Cond 's work-history and globalization in La Belle Cr ole and Moi, Tituba sorci re...noire de Salem, intertextuality and reception in La migration des coeurs and C lanire cou-coup , trauma and subjectivity in En attendant le bonheur and Desirada, community and ethics in Travers e de la mangrove and Histoire de la femme cannibale-this analysis proposes to elucidate how, and to what ends, Cond engages, and alters, approaches to reading, staging the problematic, yet pragmatic, need to read well. This hermeneutic imperative foregrounds the need to engage with texts, to cannibalize texts while recognizing their fundamental opacity and inexhaustibility, their resistance to the reader's interpretive habits.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 9042023279
• ISBN13: 9789042023277
• Release Date: January 2008
• Publisher: Brill
• Length: 236 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 9.2"