Saturday, January 29, 2011

How can we read (Wild Irish Girl) IG in light of Trumpener’s article? Can we do it the other way around?

Trumpener does not provide an elaborate interpretation of the novel but focuses her attention largely on how Scott’s legacy has overshadowed and perhaps obliterated any nuanced understanding of the complex legacy of the national tale as a genre and its relationship to the better known historical novel famously inaugurated by Scott.

In her conclusion she recapitulates her thesis that was implicit throughout the article. “Progress” is nothing but a retroactive (re)construction. In her opinion, the national tale in its later, more complicated incarnations embodies how past turns into legend which is even true of our understanding of the historical novel.

Back to our own novel that Trumpener regards as one of the formative, pre-Waverly specimens of the national tale. Perhaps we could focus a little bit on the three motifs that she identifies as important features of the genre as a whole: the journey, the marriage, the national character. What about it? What about her account of the relationship between the formation of generic conventions and perhaps that history that frames, marks those literary developments? What is the relationship between literature (genre) and history? What about a historicized account of this relationship? Which one comes first, history or literature? How does the answer to this question shall affect our own attempts at understanding the past both literary and historical?

Published in 1806, in post-Union GB, IG perhaps is a straightforward allegorical postcolonial novel. If we regard the Union Act as a sort of internal colonization that transforms Ireland into the periphery and England into the metropolitan center, the novel thus enacts a defensive re-humanization, reconstruction of culture and population that has been denigrated, emptied of significance and perhaps simply appropriated by the colonialist center. Thus everything within the novel has to become typically representative, pure essence that is emblematic of a distinct cultural, historical, and geographical territory (we could perhaps recall Jameson’s argument about the inevitability of national allegory in the composition of 3rd world literature). Trumpener I recall somehow briefly emphasized the significance of place within the generic conventions of the national tale, how can we account for the allegorical, spatially-centered nature of this genre as they are enacted in IG? How can culture or nation be spatialized, or put differently how can space be culturalized, nationalized?

What do you make of the detailed, elaborate footnotes that accompany the narrative? I am reminded of the slave narratives that had to be authorized, vouched for by white abolitionists in order to gain public acceptance. Aside from that desire to augment plausibility for the narrative, what else can we learn from a meditation on their parallel presence within the novel?

What about the desire on the part of the Irish characters within the novel to link their past to that of Greece? What about the detailed descriptions that were given of rites, rituals, and ceremonies along with an explanation of their relevant mythologies and superstitions?

What about the characterization of Glorvina? Can we, should we, take her as the gendered embodiment of her nation, culture? What about her marriage at the end? What about the question of gaze that becomes central if we focus on her part within the narrative? She as the object of the gaze? She objectified, abused, expropriated? What about she objectifying the protagonist? What about she performing another fictional narrative for the protagonist who has assumed a false identity? What about the protagonist being fascinated by a fictional performance that he takes to be nothing but true? What about the protagonist as object of another gaze?

Can we look at the novel as an example of destructive creation? An attempt to resuscitate (reconstruct) a less powerful nation’s cultural heritage (past) that is simultaneously antithetical to its specificity and heterogeneity and deadly of its irreducible vitality? How can we represent ourselves, how can we represent others? How can we not to?

What does the novel reveal to its contemporary English readership? What kind of reaction did this novel provoke in its English audience? Can we imagine (at least some of them) reflecting on the significance of retroactive reconstruction to the consolidation of traditions and cultural and national continuities? Did it occur to them to perhaps question the essentialized homogeneity that is enacted obtrusively in the narrative and perhaps is the cause for the defensive reaction that the novel is within Britain?

What do we make of the epistolary form of the narrative, If we go beyond a traditional reading of it as an effect of the nascent evolution of the novel as a genre at the time?

The protagonist reveals how he wanted to learn more about the secret life of Glorvina through an attentive reading of the wordy narrative elicited from her garrulous servant? A sort of search for the valuable latent content from its surface; what if we regard the whole novel, as perhaps I have been doing so far, as such a verbose account that contains some telling symptoms that reveal the important hidden content? What is the hidden content?

What does the novel reveal about the English? If Irishness is something that can be distinctly narrativized, what about Englishness? And if something can be narrativized, which one comes first, that something or the narrative? Or perhaps together dialectically?

What about the political effectiveness of the narrative as a whole? How can we counter deleterious effects of essentialized reductive stereotypes that mediate our relations with others (individuals, religions, nations, cultures, narratives)? Can we neutralize their harmful reductiveness by counter salubrious stereotypes? Can we send a careful observer among them to record for us their humane excess that cannot be contained within those stereotypes? How can they know us without stereotypical narratives?

What about the long discussion about the origins of Ossianic poetry within the novel? What about the persistent emphasis that is placed on hospitality? What about reading the novel as a shameless attempt at touristic commodification? How can culture be commoditized? What about nation? How can that be objectified, elaborated, located in the essence of a particular geography or tradition? Is the novel a re-enactment of the invention of traditions (here self-consciously by a peripheral nation or culture to re-assert its value)? What does it leave out? What does it gain?

My questions, thoughts are admittedly perhaps deliberately broad. What other questions can we add to our list?

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Allegories of Reading--Postcolonial Criticism and the Victorian Novel

Hi All,
We don't have anyone signed up to post for this Tuesday's reading, so I'm offering a few questions for discussion both online and in class. Feel free to address any of them. This is not necessarily a template for what online discussions or posts should look like (I'd like you to offer a little more of a reading than I do here), but I figured a few questions could get us going.

1. Erin O'Connor's provocative "Preface for a Post-Postcolonial Criticism" makes a number of assumptions and claims about genre, literary history, and the relationship between literature and politics that I'd like for us to explore.

a) What does O'Connor mean by a "thoroughly domestic novel" (226). What is the relation between the domestic and global in the Victorian novel?

b) What would a "territorial" way of approaching fields look like and what would it yield (228)?

c) If novels aren't "people" (231) what is the relation between a text and the world? (this is a broad question:)) If O'Connor wants us to see JE as a "work of art" and not "an inquiry into some points of ideology" what does such a reading look like?

d) What should we do with the "cacophony" of voices in the 19th century novel and 19th century culture? (236). If grouping them together and generalizing about them is oversimplifying how does one approach such diversity?

e) If we shouldn't use texts to "illustrate" theory (240) and we shouldn't adhere to totalizing paradigms or theories (241), what does such a mode of reading look like? (242).

2. Neil Lazarus's "The Fetish of the West" offers a broad critique of the discourse of "Europe" and "the West" in Postcolonial criticism.
a) What exactly does Lazarus object to and why?
b) Is the idea of "fetishism" particularly useful to his argument about the use of the idea of "the west"? Why?
c) What methodologies or approaches does Lazarus suggest instead? What drives the assumptions behind his methodological and theoretical preferences? In other words, what does he legitimate one approach over another.