LITR 5734 Colonial Postcolonial Literature UHCL lecture notes

psychology of character (e. g., interiority, evolving attitude toward cannibals)

I walked about on the shore lifting up my hands, and my whole being, as I may say, wrapped up in a contemplation of my deliverance; making a thousand gestures and motions, which I cannot describe; reflecting upon all my comrades that were drowned, and that there should not be one soul saved but myself; for, as for them, I never saw them afterwards, or any sign of them, except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows.

Humans as "story-telling creatures" organize reality via narratives: people acting / talking in space-time

"myth criticism"--imposition of familiar myth or collective narrative on individual experience

Appeal: Totalizing allegory + intertextuality: read one text in terms of another as a means of imposing order or closure

Facts / data lie around in bits and pieces, not satisfying in themselves except as they fit into a larger structure or meaning, or a story, or narrative

The second Adam since the fall, / His germinal corruption . . . congenital heresy [that is, "original sin"]

Reading literary texts against or within historical backgrounds or events (e. g., colonial and postcolonial novels)

Historicism also tends to be totalizing, grand-scale, like myth, but instead of myth's emphasis on narrative, history's emphasis on movements, trends like capitalism, colonialism, liberation movements, tradition / modernity

bottom p. 60: Crusoe as individual + rise of modern industrial capitalism, spread of Protestantism

p. 63, "Our civilization as a whole is based on individual contractual relationships, as opposed to the unwritten, traditional and collective relationships of previous societies . . . ."

65 Crusoe's original sin > really the dynamic tendency of capitalism itself, whose aim is never merely to maintain the status quo, but to transform it incessantly

2. To theorize the novel as the defining genre of modernity, both for early-modern imperial culture and for late-modern postcolonial culture.

Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

3 the novel is the sole genre that continues to develop, that is as yet uncompleted.

39 . . . a genre that structures itself in a zone of direct contact with developing reality.

40 Such a reorientation [the concept of a future] occurred for the first time during the Renaissance. . . . It was in the Renaissance that the present first began to feel with great clarity and awareness an incomparably closer proximity and kinship to the future than to the past.

For Watt too, the novel constantly renews our relationship with a reality that always evolves, maintaining some memory of the past but opening to a radically different future.

Euphemism = substitution of agreeable or less offensive expression for a troubling reality, as in terms for race, sex, bathrooms; here it's "professional interrogation techniques" for "torture"

Americans born between the 1930s and the 1950s have a much harder time getting over the shock of learning that our country practices torture than do Americans born in the 1970s or 1980s. The memory of the Gestapo [Nazi secret police] and the GPU [Soviet secret police], the depiction of torture in a film like Open City [Rome: Open City, 1945 film set during Nazi occupation of 1944] are not apt to press on younger minds. But the different responses are also a consequence of the different imaginings to which people may fall prey. Many who fear that their children might be killed by a terrorist bomb cannot imagine anyone they know ever suffering injustice at the hands of the national security state.

This complacency suggests a new innocence—the correlative in moral psychology of euphemism in the realm of language. And if you take stock of how little general discussion there has been of the advisability of pursuing the global war on terrorism, you realize that this country has scarcely begun to take stock of the United States as an ambiguous actor on the world stage. Those who said, in the weeks just after the September 11 attacks, that the motives of the terrorists might be traced back to some US policies in the Middle East were understandably felt to have spoken unseasonably. [e. g., Al-Qaeda specifically mentioned US troops in Saudi Arabia, which were removed after 9/11]

The surprising thing is that six and a half years later, when a politic reticence is no longer the sole order of the day, discussion of such matters is still confined to academic studies like Chalmers Johnson's Blowback and Robert A. Pape's Dying to Win,^[3] and has barely begun to register in The New York Times, in The Washington Post, or on CNN or MSNBC.

Ask an American what the United States may have to do with much of the world's hostility toward us and you will find educated people saying things like "They hate the West and resent modernity," or "They hate the fact that we're so free," or "They hate us because this is a country where a man and a woman can look at each other across a table with eyes of love." Indeed, the single greatest propaganda victory of the Bush administration may be the belief shared by most Americans that the rise of radical Islam—so-called Islamofascism—has nothing to do with any previous actions by the United States.

32 diners look like M’s relatives / waiters look like my relatives (cf. God of Small Things)

33 [more labor] man who’d done things for her family; as if he belonged to family

10 longed to see someone on corner drawing attention, engaging, complaining; cf. P. 86

21 why should my life be reduced to these two possibilities? (cf. God of Small Things)

29 daffodils: looked simple, as if made to erase a complicated and unnecessary idea

30 cast beloved daffodils in scene she never considered . . . of conquered and conquest

32 diners look like M’s relatives / waiters look like my relatives (cf. God of Small Things)

33 [more labor] man who’d done things for her family; as if he belonged to family

40 nothing remotely like an Indian about her: why claim a thing like that? I myself . . . my grandmother is a Carib Indian

45 Mariah & children: sincerity & straightforwardness [compare later lying re rabbit]

75 history of civilization, mention everything; not one world on the misery to be found at a dining-room table

80 where I came from, known that some men and women not to be trusted in certain areas

Instructor's notes from Lucy re Lucifer / Prometheus, parent-child or creator-creature imagery, disobedience, etc.

45 Mariah & children: sincerity & straightforwardness [compare later lying re rabbit]

1. . . . give students some idea of being a thesis student, the stages, the challenges, the resolutions.

2. More specifically, [Kayla's] thesis meets one of this course's potential problems. Students are used to thinking of either English or American literature, but colonial-postcolonial involves those traditions in a larger format. Some students are inspired, but others just treat the class as a by-way in literary studies. You, to your credit, found a way to integrate readings from the course with other literary studies. Retrace how you came up with your thesis topic and the part Lucy played in developing the topic.