OAR@UM Collection:
https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/42897
2024-03-29T10:21:34ZRe-thinking beginning : Okri’s The Famished Road and the crisis of the postcolonial nation
https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/42956
Title: Re-thinking beginning : Okri’s The Famished Road and the crisis of the postcolonial nation
Authors: Asempasah, Rogers
Abstract: This essay explores the centrality of beginning in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road. Beginning is explored not as a narratological category but a dominant trope in anticolonial nationalists’ discourses of nation formation and the transition to liberation. I argue that Okri’s exploration of beginning can be read in critical dialogue with Fanon, and can be framed by David Scott’s idea of tragic consciousness. This essay demonstrates how Okri redefines time as a complex process of disorder and order; within this scheme of things, beginning is presented in The Famished Road not a singular event but as a recurrent potential for national reinvention and generational responsibility constituted by radical betrayal. In other words, beginning is a moment plucked out of the paradoxical flux of time. This essay concludes that Okri’s reconceptualisation of beginning has implications for Scott’s notion of crisis of temporality and tragic consciousness.2019-04-01T00:00:00ZAbout our contributors [Antae Journal, 6(1)]
https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/42951
Title: About our contributors [Antae Journal, 6(1)]
Abstract: Short biographies of the contributors in this issue.2019-04-01T00:00:00ZQuest for the origin of primitive myths : revisiting Max Müller’s comparative mythology
https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/42903
Title: Quest for the origin of primitive myths : revisiting Max Müller’s comparative mythology
Authors: Yang, Yan
Abstract: Victorian intellectuals explored the origins of primitive myths to understand the early human mind and its evolution to its present state. Among various interpretations, Max Müller’s Comparative Mythology, based on Comparative Philology, is influential, controversial, but ultimately eclipsed. This essay revisits the rise and fall of Müller’s Comparative Mythology, paying particular attention to three particular time spots in Müller’s career. By examining Müller’s works on mythology, this essay argues that, with all its errors and limits, Müller’s theory of Mythology is multi-faceted, playing different roles in Victorian Mythography. Indeed, in the 1850s and 1860s, Müller’s Comparative Mythology is epoch-making, and scholars tend to forget his pioneering contributions to the Science of Mythology, neglecting his cautious warnings against anthropological conjectures.2019-04-01T00:00:00ZEditorial [Antae, Vol.6(1)]
https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/42902
Title: Editorial [Antae, Vol.6(1)]
Abstract: How does one begin to speak of beginnings? If we are here and the beginning is thus behind us, how does one begin again? Should one attempt to, and is it up to us to choose? On the first day there was, primarily, a beginning. Genesis multiplies this: the first day saw the beginning of light, the third gave rise to the origin of territory, the sixth birthed our very own beginnings. The seventh day—the day of rest—is when beginnings came to an end, only to begin again the morrow. What came before the beginning? That is to say, what came before the light? What lies before the preliminary, or, rather, the pre-luminary?2019-04-01T00:00:00Z