Recounting Cultural Encounters
Editor: Marija Knežević and Aleksandra Nikčević Batrićević
Date Of Publication: Jun 2009
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-0566-7
Isbn: 1-4438-0566-1
Contributions reprinted in this book highlight some of the wide ranging ways in which the issues of culture and identity can be approached in a literary text, while focusing on the ways in which cultural encounters have been changing both the world and its reflection in literature. The beginning of the twenty first century is an appropriate time to repay careful attention to these issues. Understanding how our perception of the Other changes with the concept of the world we inhabit, we want to emphasize the rising importance of fostering cultural pluralism and global understanding.

Having based their research on widespread readings in academia, such as deconstruction, post-colonialism, post-modernism, new historicism, and narratology, the authors of these papers proceed by addressing the metaphor of travel as one of the strongest metaphors for the evolution of mankind, especially if considered under the light of the historically and politically imposed opposition between the progressive western and the static eastern or African societies. However, as the end of the imperialist era brought about poignant awareness of cultural relativism, as well as deconstruction of the great narrative of progress, facing the Other as an unconceptualized entity became a major moral concern of a modern traveller. It is pronounced that this concern should be textually testified to dramatize the human inability to avoid verbal appropriation of the other. The final question we seek to answer is whether the era of advanced technology and globalisation, along with a post-modern ironical attitude to hyper realities and textual transparencies, has rendered the sphere of the text the only available point of concern of contemporary literature and thought in general.

...

For its argumentation strongly founded in recent literary studies and humanities in general, its interdisciplinary nature and its focus on the actual global problems of abrupt cultural change and exchange, its heightened understanding of the necessity of coexistence of differences in a changing world, its spirit of tolerance, and its international spirit in general, we assume this collection will not only attract academic literary scholars but will also appeal to the general reading public.

Marija Knežević teaches 19th- and 20th-century British literature, Canadian Literature, as well as British and American cultural studies at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Montenegro, where she also works as a vice dean for international relations. Her publication primarily focuses on the work of D. H. Lawrence (Lorens u Italiji, Beograd: 2000, and Traganje za onostranim u prozi D. H. Lorensa due 2009), but her recent interests include contemporary British and Canadian literature, travel writing, as well as Native American literature. Together with Aleksandra Nikčević Batrićević, she co-edited Culture-Bound Translation and Language in the Global Era History, Politics, Identity: Reading Literature in a Changing World, both published by Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2008, as well as Size Zero (Podgorica, 2009). She edited and co-edited a series of translations of British, Canadian, and Native American authors.

Aleksandra Nikčević Batrićević teaches English and American literature at the Department of English language and literature, University of Montenegro. She also teaches English language at the Departments of History and Sociology. Both her M.A. and her doctoral dissertation are on American literature. Although in her publications she primarily focuses on the works of Herman Melville and American female poets, her interests also include narratology, feminist criticism, and various other authors from the domain of English and American literature. During the previous years she has participated at various international conferences and herself co-organized four on Anglo-American studies at the University of Montenegro and one on female writing that took place in American Corner in Podgorica. She is president of the Society for Anglo-American Literary Studies.

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