Trespassers and Compass-Killers. Writers on the Borderline

  • Silvia Albertazzi Università di Bologna
Keywords: Border, Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, Salman Rushdie, Step Across This Line, Julio Cortazar

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh's novel The Shadow Lines (1988) is probably the most important fictional work to have appeared in South Asian literature in the last quarter of a century: it sums up and fictionalises all the major issues of Postcolonial literature – the search for identity, the need for independence and the difficult relationship with colonial culture, the rewriting of colonial past, an attempt at creating a new language and a new narrative form and the use of personal memory to understand communal past. In this article I try to show how Ghosh manages to do so by continually transforming the title metaphor, thus ever changing its meaning. The first part of the essay is devoted to the use of the image of borders in Postcolonial theory, and especially in Salman Rushdie’s critical essays, while the last section deals with a novel where the extreme possibilities of the same metaphor are exploited: Rayuela (Hopscotch) by Julio Cortázar.

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Author Biography

Silvia Albertazzi, Università di Bologna

is Full Professor of English Literature at the University of Bologna, where she is also Responsible of a PhD on Modern, Comparative and Postcolonial Literatures. She is the author of many critical volumes and collections of essays, such as Introduzione a Lawrence (Laterza, 1987); Bugie sincere. Narratori e narrazioni 1970-1990 (Editori Riuniti, 1992); La letteratura fantastica (Laterza, 1993); Nel bosco degli spiriti (Vecchiarelli, 1998); Lo sguardo dell’Altro. Le letterature postcoloniali (Carocci, 2000); Il romanzo new global. Storie di intolleranza, fiabe di comunità (ETS, 2003), the chapters on the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries of Breve storia della letteratura inglese (Einaudi, 2004), In questo mondo, ovvero, quando i luoghi raccontano le storie (Meltemi, 2006), winner of  the Ist Literary Prize for Essay Writing “Alziator” in 2007, and Il nulla, quasi. Foto di famiglia e istantanee amatoriali nella letteratura contemporanea (Le Lettere, 2010). With Roberto Vecchi she edited Abbecedario postcoloniale (Quodlibet, 2001, 2002; II ed. 2004).; with Vecchi and Barnaba Maj, Periferie della storia (Quodlibet, 2004), and with Ferdinando Amigoni, Guardare oltre. Letteratura, fotografia e altri territori (Meltemi, 2008). Her articles have appeared on literary journals all over the world and on the magazines Linea d’ombra and Pulp, and the newspapers  Il Piccolo, il manifesto and Liberazione.

 

References

Albertazzi, Silvia, “Crossing the Shadow Lines”, Interactions. Essays on the Literature and Culture of the Asia-Pacific Region, Eds. Dennis Haskell - Ron Shapiro, Nedlands, Western Australia, University of Western Australia Press, 2000.

Conrad, Joseph, The Shadow Line, Ed. Jacques Berthoud, London, Penguin, 1986.

Cortázar, Julio, Rayuela, Buenos Aires, Editorial Sudamericana, 1966, trad. it. Il gioco del mondo, Torino, Einaudi, 1966.

Gasparini, Adalinda, Aladino e la lampada meravigliosa, Firenze, Ponte alle Grazie, 1995.

Ghosh, Amitav, The Shadow Lines, London, Bloomsbury, 1988.

Hanimann Joseph, Un parlamento immaginario? Conversazione con Salman Rushdie, Wole Soyinka e Russell Banks, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 2004.

Rushdie, Salman, The Satanic Verses, London, Viking, 1988.

Rushdie, Salman, Across this Line, New York, Random House, 2002.

Salmon, Christian - Hanimann, Joseph (eds.), Divenire minoritari. Per una nuova politica della letteratura, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 2004.

Turner Hospital, Janette, Borderline, Toronto, McC1elland and Stewart, 1985.

Zullo, Federica, Il cerchio della storia. Conflitti e paure nell’opera di Amitav Ghosh, Padova, Il Poligrafo, 2009.

Sitografia

Bergonzoni, Alessandro, “Inedito per la Biblioteca Sala Borsa di Bologna”, http://www.bibliotecasalaborsa.it/eventi/1498, web.

Bergonzoni, Alessandro, Presentazione di Paolo Conte al Teatro Comunale di Bologna, 18/12/2000, http://www.alessandrobergonzoni.it/speciale/volo.htm, web.

Published
2011-05-25
How to Cite
Albertazzi, S. (2011). Trespassers and Compass-Killers. Writers on the Borderline. Between, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.13125/2039-6597/132
Section
Cartographies of Comparative Studies