Abstract
In her article "Modernity in Márquez and Feminism in Ousmane" Geetha Ramanathan analyzes Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Sembène Ousmane's God's Bits of Wood. Ramanthan argues that if Márquez presents the semblance of the signs of modernity as fantasy and delusion, Ousmane's investment in the train as an instrument of the future in realist terms seems to challenge the modernist dictum that imperialism can be challenged only through modernist decenterings and through tricking and trumping. Yet, Ousmane's refusal to engage in the hallucination of the modern in his novel offers us a version of modernity that includes women in an epic realism. The aesthetic mode here is adequate to narrating the modern space of women in history. Paradoxically, the narrative mode of One Hundred Years is celebrated as "magical realism" whether implicitly modern or more frequently post-modern, while Ousmane's God's Bits of Wood is relegated to the margins of realism despite its full-fledged participation in "third world" modernity.
Recommended Citation
Ramanathan, Geetha.
"Modernity in Márquez and Feminism in Ousmane."
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
12.2
(2010):
<https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1597>
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