Pub Date : 2018-12-27DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199980963.003.0013
Brigid Rooney
Focusing on Johnno (1975), An Imaginary Life (1978), and Remembering Babylon (1993), this chapter argues that David Malouf’s redeployment of the formal devices of the modernist novel enables a distinctively Australian representation of postcolonial modernity. It explores Malouf’s public and literary advocacy of “imaginative possession” as a means to achieve settler belonging and effect true reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Postcolonial critics, however, have accused Malouf of appropriating Aboriginal history and identity. This chapter argues that modernist investments within Malouf’s fiction enable imaginative possession but also yield enigma. Malouf’s use of Woolf and Faulkner’s shifts in narrative perspective, Proust’s manipulation of time and memory, Proust and Joyce’s reworking of the Bildungsroman, and the modernist intensification of lyrical subjectivity enables the tempering and attuning of settler selves to place. Yet in Johnno modernist resources unravel fixed truths, pointing instead to creative error and the fabrications of the self.
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Pub Date : 2018-12-27DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199980963.003.0006
Richard Begam
This chapter positions The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995)—the first full-fledged novel Salman Rushdie wrote following the 1989 fatwa—in relation to criticisms of modernism advanced not only by Ayatollah Khomeini but also by scholars such as Fredric Jameson and Edward Said. It is significant that the novel’s subject is modernism itself, represented by Aurora Zogoiby, whose work synthesizes virtually every avant-garde movement, from fauvism, surrealism, and Dadaism to cubism, expressionism, and abstractionism. In offering a history of twentieth-century art, Rushdie explores how modernism can retain its aesthetic autonomy while giving voice to its social and political commitments. The chapter concludes by examining two aspects of the novel that are usually considered postmodern: the figure of the palimpsest and Moraes’s accelerated aging. The former is associated with James Joyce and T. S. Eliot’s mythic method, while the latter—with its sense of accelerated temporality—functions as a metaphor for modernism itself.
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Pub Date : 2018-12-27DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780199980963.003.0002
Brian May
Analyzing Chinua Achebe’s tetralogy of novels, this chapter shows how Achebe addresses one of the central issues of both modernism and postcolonialism: the organization and conceptualization of time. Things Fall Apart (1958) and No Longer at Ease (1960) present snapshot moments of arrested temporality that Achebe treats with the modernist techniques of imagism and epiphany. Taking a more pessimistic turn, Arrow of God (1964) grounds the handling of sequentiality not in Igbo ideas of cyclical change but in Spenglerian, Yeatsian, and Eliotic notions of apocalypse, in which endings do not mark new beginnings but a point of terminal cessation. Finally, Man of the People (1966) further modifies this version of time, replacing the cultural collapse of the previous novel with the more affirmative vision of community and village life found in Eliot’s “East Coker.” In sum, the chapter traces the tetralogy’s evolution of divergent and competing notions of time, especially as they relate to Igboland and more generally to postcolonialism.
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Pub Date : 2018-12-27DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199980963.003.0003
Mark A. Wollaeger
This chapter considers points of intersection between Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Joseph Conrad. By Ngũgĩ’s own account, his rewriting of Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (1911) as A Grain of Wheat (1967) triggered a crisis of audience that ultimately led him to abandon English for his native Gikuyu. To further complicate the question of influence, Wollaeger also examines the relationship between two works of nonfiction: Conrad’s A Personal Record (1912) and Ngũgĩ’s Decolonizing the Mind (1986). At the heart of Ngũgĩ’s attempt to fashion premodern tribalism into a utopian space are two problems that still animate critical discussion. What is the status of the local and the indigenous? Does attention to influence reinstate a center-periphery model in postcolonial criticism? This chapter shows the extent to which Conrad and Ngũgĩ both anticipate and generate theoretical models later used to articulate modernism and postcolonialism as fields of inquiry.
{"title":"Reading Ngũgĩ Reading Conrad","authors":"Mark A. Wollaeger","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780199980963.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199980963.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter considers points of intersection between Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Joseph Conrad. By Ngũgĩ’s own account, his rewriting of Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (1911) as A Grain of Wheat (1967) triggered a crisis of audience that ultimately led him to abandon English for his native Gikuyu. To further complicate the question of influence, Wollaeger also examines the relationship between two works of nonfiction: Conrad’s A Personal Record (1912) and Ngũgĩ’s Decolonizing the Mind (1986). At the heart of Ngũgĩ’s attempt to fashion premodern tribalism into a utopian space are two problems that still animate critical discussion. What is the status of the local and the indigenous? Does attention to influence reinstate a center-periphery model in postcolonial criticism? This chapter shows the extent to which Conrad and Ngũgĩ both anticipate and generate theoretical models later used to articulate modernism and postcolonialism as fields of inquiry.","PeriodicalId":105749,"journal":{"name":"Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124184357","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-27DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199980963.003.0011
Nico Israel
Focusing on The Unnamable (1953) and Act Without Words I (1956), this chapter draws on Giorgio Agamben’s writings on “gesture” and the “gag” to illuminate the “peculiarly oblique forms of Beckett’s postcolonial political engagements.” Attending to Beckett’s characters, who depend on gesture to counter their muteness, the chapter suggests that Beckett’s postcolonial politics—his engagements with decolonization in Indochina, Algeria, West Africa, and Ireland—is muted, gagged, and indirect. In keeping with Agamben’s articulation of the prelinguistic power of the gesture, its “archetypal openness that points beyond nation, tradition and political domination,” the chapter argues that Beckett’s evasive and anagogic approach to postcolonial issues may announce an even more radical break with modernity and modern politics than those advocated by Beckett’s more avowedly political postcolonial critics. By means of the gesture and the gag, Beckett points the way not just beyond the postcolonial condition, but, potentially, beyond modern politics altogether.
{"title":"Samuel Beckett and the Colonial Gag","authors":"Nico Israel","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780199980963.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199980963.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"Focusing on The Unnamable (1953) and Act Without Words I (1956), this chapter draws on Giorgio Agamben’s writings on “gesture” and the “gag” to illuminate the “peculiarly oblique forms of Beckett’s postcolonial political engagements.” Attending to Beckett’s characters, who depend on gesture to counter their muteness, the chapter suggests that Beckett’s postcolonial politics—his engagements with decolonization in Indochina, Algeria, West Africa, and Ireland—is muted, gagged, and indirect. In keeping with Agamben’s articulation of the prelinguistic power of the gesture, its “archetypal openness that points beyond nation, tradition and political domination,” the chapter argues that Beckett’s evasive and anagogic approach to postcolonial issues may announce an even more radical break with modernity and modern politics than those advocated by Beckett’s more avowedly political postcolonial critics. By means of the gesture and the gag, Beckett points the way not just beyond the postcolonial condition, but, potentially, beyond modern politics altogether.","PeriodicalId":105749,"journal":{"name":"Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122989532","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-27DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199980963.003.0009
Geneviève Abravanel
This chapter on Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990) examines the Caribbean poet’s ambivalent relationship with Anglophone modernism. It cautions that Walcott’s epic ambition to found a new tradition of Caribbean writing makes him reluctant simply to affirm or imitate the European cultural heritage of modernism. Walcott’s fraught relationship with modernism underscores his objections to the imperial violence and oppressive colonial institutions with which he associates Anglophone modernism. Focusing on Walcott’s complex use of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Joyce’s Ulysses, the chapter examines how the poet manipulates the literary tropes, myths, literary figures, and above all the names (of characters and places) that he borrows from his Anglophone predecessors. The chapter concludes that Walcott’s inventive refashioning of his literary borrowings allows him to gesture “through and against European modernism.” Walcott thus creates a New World literary aesthetic by sublating Anglophone modernism, “absorbing, transforming and rejecting metropolitan aesthetic practices.”
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Pub Date : 2018-12-27DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780199980963.003.0014
P. Steer
In its reading of the bone people, this chapter reexamines Keri Hulme’s controversial borrowings from literary modernism in light of her claims to represent a postcolonial identity derived from Māori cultural traditions. The chapter distinguishes between a “modernist critical realism” deriving from Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson and a more formally experimental modernism employing myth, fantasy, intertextual borrowings, and Joycean wordplay. This second strain of modernism has raised doubts about the “authenticity” of Hulme’s representation of a New Zealand reborn out of Māori culture. The chapter argues that it was never Hulme’s aim to portray or preserve a pure and “authentic” Māori culture. Hulme’s narrative instead models an understanding of indigeneity as capable of incorporating modernist aesthetics within it. Hulme thus reconfigures “postcolonial hybridity” in the service of a bicultural vision of New Zealand that embraces settler culture within a distinctively Māori framework.
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Pub Date : 2018-12-27DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780199980963.003.0005
R. Barnard
This chapter examines Nadine Gordimer’s postcolonialism in relation to modernism, realism, and the writings of J. M. Coetzee. Especially significant in this context is the “unrepresentability” of the cultural Other, a figure exemplified by the mute and mutilated figure of Friday in Coetzee’s Foe (1986). Gordimer addresses this issue in scenes in Burger’s Daughter (1979) and July’s People (1981), in which black men speak their minds to white women. Unlike Coetzee, Gordimer underscores not the impossibility of communication or representation, but a shift in power relations that enables black speech. The chapter concludes by focusing on two works that inaugurated contrasting views of postcolonialism: Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974) and Gordimer’s The Black Interpreters (1973). The former treats history as an “ungraspable” series of abyssal texts, while the latter validates critical realism within the context of European Marxism. The chapter concludes by arguing that Gordimer represents a form of “modernist realism” or “realist modernism.”
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Pub Date : 2018-12-27DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780199980963.003.0015
Alice Brittan
Focusing on In the Skin of a Lion (1987), The English Patient (1992), and The Cat’s Table (2011), this chapter examines Ondaatje’s modernist, indeed Conradian, engagement with the unreliability of individual cognition and subjective impression. Ondaatje’s characters typically fail to recognize their view of the world depends on acts of “enframing.” Blindness to their situated perspectives leaves them vulnerable to political violence and social injustice, including colonialism and imperialism. The chapter argues that the modernist lesson is that perception is always a game of frames, so the eye needs to keep seeking the edge. The postcolonial lesson is that an eye that does not move becomes complicit with nationalism and empire building. Ondaatje’s efforts to look more closely at the hidden mechanisms that shape social life represent his attempt to apply the formal and thematic concerns of modernism to the politics of colonialism and the challenges of global modernity.
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Pub Date : 2018-12-27DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780199980963.003.0004
Simon During
This chapter contends that J. M. Coetzee’s writing strives to achieve the detached and otherworldly modernism of Franz Kafka but fails to do so because political and ethical beliefs displace what the chapter calls the “Kafka effect,” a form of writing that stands apart from the world and refuses to judge it. The chapter examines three aspects of Coetzee’s work: his spare and minimalist style, his handling of authorial figures, and his turn toward the “reverse Bildungsroman.” Despite Coetzee’s “will to neutrality,” novels like Life and Times of Michael K (1983), The Master of Petersburg (1995), Disgrace (1999), Elizabeth Costello (2003), and Slow Man (2005) ultimately take an ethical turn, in which the style is engaged rather than detached, authorial figures develop sympathy for marginalized groups, and central characters become members of subaltern communities. In other words, Coetzee’s commitment to postcolonialism both complicates and qualifies his commitment to Kafka’s modernism.
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