Volume 136, Issue 3

William Shakespeare’s Othello (1604) displays a critical agenda towards the emerging colonialist discourse of his time and may have encountered, or even been influenced by, African oral literature. This thesis will be probed in this article by comparing Othello with the folktale “The Handsome Stranger” and the Trickster character, well known all across Western Africa, touching lightly on Leo Africanus’s The History and Description of Africa (1550) in the process. In doing so, Othello ’s most acknowledged source text, “Un Capitano Moro” by Giovanni Battista Giraldi (1565), will be involved, thus complementing earlier comparative readings of “Un Capitano Moro” and Othello . This postcolonial comparative reading will finally embrace Ahmed Yerima’s adaptation of Othello , entitled Otaelo (2002). In doing so, the article will discuss striking parallels among all four texts, as well as differences and diversions. The latter are, however, not read as counter arguments to the possibility of an encounter; rather, discursive diversions are contextualised historically and trans*textually. Before delving into this analysis, the article will explore both historical probabilities and methodological challenges of reading African oral literature as possible sources of Shakespeare’s Othello , as well as theorise trans*textuality (as related to and yet distinct from Kristeva’s intertextuality and Genette’s transtextuality). This article has developed from two papers, one held in 2015 at a symposium dedicated to Michael Steppat in Bayreuth, who, ever since, accompanied this project with most helpful critical input; I owe him my sincerest gratitude. A second workshop on this topic was held in 2016 in Berlin in the presence of Shankar Raman, Christopher Joseph Odhiambo, and a student research group from Bayreuth with Taghrid Elhanafy, Weeraya Donsomsakulkij, Samira Paraschiv, and Mingqing Yuan. Taghrid Elhanafy dedicates her MA and PhD thesis to comparing Romeo and Juliet with several Arabic and Farsi versions of Layla and Majnun (Cf. Elhanafy 2018). Moreover, this article owes sincere gratitude to a most challenging and expert editing by Shirin Assa, PhD candidate at Bayreuth University, as well as Omid Soltani. Moreover, I wish to thank Dilan Zoe Smida and especially Samira Paraschiv for supporting me while doing research and working on notes and bibliography.

Since the profession of war correspondent came into existence in the middle of the nineteenth century, war reporters have attracted the attention of novelists. The literary representation of journalism in war times is a fundamental tool when analyzing the evolution of this profession, since, as Barbara Korte has argued (2007: 432), it provides an opportunity to illustrate the problems when reporting conflicts and the consequences such reporting has on journalists. Graham Greene in The Quiet American and Arturo Pérez-Reverte in El pintor de batallas ( The Painter of Battles ) dramatize the practice of journalism when reporting wars in different eras of the profession in the last century, namely the Indochina war (in the early fifties) and the Balkans conflict (in the early nineties) respectively. Both authors, after being war correspondents, resort to fiction to reflect on the implications of experiencing and narrating wars. Through the experience of the protagonists of their novels, Fowler in The Quiet American and Faulques in El pintor de batallas , Greene and Reverte question the principles of objectivity in journalism. In their literary work, they critique the practice of this profession based on neutrality and non-involvement, revealing the contradictions inherent in the claims of objectivism in reportage.

The present article analyses J. L. Carr’s novel A Month in the Country (1980) in the light of an approach to traumatic experience as paradoxically relating destructiveness and survival. This view of trauma – already present in Freud and further elaborated in more recent theories like Cathy Caruth’s – accentuates the possibility of constructing a new story that bears witness not only to the shattering effects of trauma but also to a departure from it. From this perspective, the author deals first with the role of art as a survival aid to the novel’s traumatised protagonist, explaining how his restoration of a medieval mural helps him work through his troubled memories of the Great War. Repetitions and doublings link the two central characters, their discoveries and their recovery, creating layers of meaning that, it is argued, call for a ‘palimpsestuous’ reading, in Sarah Dillon’s sense of the term. The author then focuses on the regenerative power of nature in the novel, relating its use of the pastoral to the frequent recourse to it in Great War literature, and interpreting Carr’s text in line with critical approaches that reject escapism as the main trait of the pastoral mode. Finally, the protagonist’s retrospective narration is discussed as a creative act that is also an aid to the survival of the self. 1

This article addresses the role of music and broadcast radio as elements in the construction of borderscapes, spaces of cultural construction and identity negotiation, in three black British novels published in the 1990 s, namely Diran Adebayo’s Some Kind of Black (1996), Karline Smith’s Moss Side Massive (1994/1998), and Courttia Newland’s Society Within (1999/2000). The article argues that the novels use black popular music and pirate (community) radio stations as means of constructing black identities, belonging, and communities in the conditions of the borderscape where hegemonic and resistant identifications come into contact with each other. Furthermore, the borderscape constructed can be seen as a sonic borderscape owing to the significant role allotted to music and radio in the novels. While music plays a particularly significant role at the level of the individual and contributes to the making of a distinct identity and difference, their becoming, the specific function given to community radio in these novels is to construct communities of belonging. 1

This contribution introduces the ‘fragmentary essay-novel’ in terms of an emerging hybrid genre within the experimental branch of contemporary Anglophone literature. Reading David Shields’s manifesto Reality Hunger (2010) as a poetics which literally ‘essays’ a “path for the novel” (Smith 2008: n. pag.) in the early 21st-century, it also discusses Tom McCarthy’s recent work Satin Island (2015) as a prime representative of the fragmentary essay-novel. Both Shields’s and McCarthy’s texts are contextualized and framed as aesthetic responses to the digital age, especially to the implications that processes of digitization have for our shifting understanding of ‘reality’, ‘authenticity’, ‘literature’, ‘reading’, and ‘authorship’. Special attention will be given to the question of how the organization of knowledge in digital networks affects the epistemological situation of the novelist and the human individual. In addition to putting the essay-novel on the map of contemporary fiction, we aim to raise awareness of the tradition and general significance of this unduly neglected genre.

The article aims at exploring how the concept of the transmodern fits, comprises and helps to understand transcultural events from a wider perspective. To do so, three metaphors will be addressed, namely Enrique Dussel’s ‘jungle’, Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s ‘rhizome’ and Sarah Dillon’s ‘palimpsestuous palimpsest’. In all three cases, issues like multiplicity, connectedness and a sense of motility are present. And, the article proves, they prove valid to render the aesthetic, ethical and political possibilities of contemporary texts that range from literature, Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room (2010), to music, Hozier’s hit “Take me to Church” (2014), and to cinema, González Iñárritu’s Babel (2006). 1