Literary Theory and Methodology Session Two: Postcolonialist Theories

Agenda Revisiting Session One Postcolonialist theories: An Introduction Reading poco

Revisiting Session One Theories deal with the production of meaning and value: –Author –Text –Reader –Context –Code

Revisiting Session One Texts dramatise the production of meaning Texts often concern other texts and their writing and reading: Writing and reading love letters in Hardy’s ”On the Western Circuit” Gabriel’s dinner speech in Joyce’s ”The Dead” Travelling as an allegory of reading and writing in travel literature

Postcolonialist theories: An Introduction The study of colonial discourse Key words: –Ethnocentrism –Centre – margin: Western – non-Western –Subject positions: authors and readers Backgrounds: –Poststructuralism –Postmodernism

Postcolonialist theories: An Introduction An Example: ”Pears’ Soap”

Edward Said Orientalism The ”worldliness” of the text The critic Said’s reading of Heart of Darkness

Edward Said Orientalism: –The history of and cultural relations between Europe and Asia –The university discipline dealing with Oriental languages and culture –Images, stereotypes, myths, and ideologies about ”the Orient” as the ”Other”

Edward Said The ”worldliness” of the text –Texts are not examples of différance – of meaning sliding endlessly along the chain of signifiers –Texts are used by specific people in specific contexts for specific purposes

Edward Said Reading Heart of Darkness Against Chinua Achebe’s interpretation, Conrad is a ”thoroughgoing racist” Contrapuntal reading of the two narratives: –The official imperialist enterprise –The non-Western world Conrad shows but cannot see both narratives

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak The subaltern Spivak’s reading of Jane Eyre Spivak’s reading of The Satanic Verses

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak The subaltern – the colonized non-elite –How can the subaltern speak? –How can the subaltern be spoken for?

Spivak Reading Jane Eyre Jane Eyre – feminist heroine of British fiction (independence, individualism) an allegory of the general epistemic violence of imperialism” (i.e. of the way in which imperialism projects a white, European epistemology onto the rest of the world) – silencing the subaltern

A Selection of Further Important Concepts Mimic man: in-between subjectivity Hybridity: Bakthin and revolutionary discourse (the dialogic) Diaspora – the dispersion of something that was originally localized (people, language, culture)

The Spicy Brits British immigrant writers: Salman Rushdie Kazuo Ishiguro Timothy Mo Zadie Smith, White Teeth Monica Ali, Brick Lane