Recounting Cultural Encounters

Book excerpt: 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.