LITR 5734 Colonial & Postcolonial Literature

Lecture Notes

Continue E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (pp. 35-212; through II, "Caves," chapter xx); Edward W. Said, "Orientalism" (handout)

Thursday, 28 February: Continue E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (pp. 35-212; through II, "Caves," chapter xx); Edward W. Said, "Orientalism" (handout)

·        Dialogue between A Passage to India & "Orientalism":

leader: Dawlat Yassin

·        Poetry reading from Walcott: “The Season of Phantasmal Peace” (464-65)

reader: C. Vanessa Olivier

·        Web review: karma

About half are read, should finish and return graded midterms by individual email sometime this weekend

Check your email before coming to class next week

So far a representative range of styles, emphases, achievements, issues

Trying to keep my notes brief,

but usual acknowledgement of upsides

followed by identification of problems / opportunities + therapies

Familiar student response to review:

frustration that you’ve done what you thought was called for, only to be challenged or doubted on something you weren’t considering or which seems secondary

Reviews are at least partly subjective and can be unfair—

my reaction struggles for the right focus just as the student struggled to react to the assignment

Profession of Literature less about being conclusively right than processing and adapting to new information and ideas.

keep open possibility of following up, conferring by email, phone, or in person

I benefit from conferences—see and hear you more clearly, help more definitely

Lit-folk primp on being hip and forward-looking, but still a somewhat traditional society built on relations, exchanges, sharing, difference as relation

Questions?

assignments

Thursday, 6 March: complete Forster, A Passage to India (through part III, "Temple"; 212-362)

·        Reading highlight for Passage to India: Cory Owen

·        Poetry reading from Walcott: "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" (91)

reader: Matt Richards

·        Web review: Partition of India

complete Forster, A Passage to India (through part III, "Temple"; 212-362)

discussion questions:

Identify Forster's use of symbols: collar stud, wasp, cave, sound

compare Heart of Darkness -- standard Modernist technique

Conclusion to Passage

2 major scenes involving mystical and novel-of-manners elements

1. temple celebration of birth of Krishna / Krsna

2. Scene of horseback riding with Aziz and Fielding

Comedy of manners often ends with marriage / kiss / union

How does Forster adapt this formula to cross-cultural purposes?

How satisfying for conclusion? What prophecies?

Poetry reading from Walcott: "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" (91)

reader: Matt Richards

Compare "Christmas" poem to Krishna's birth at end of A Passage to India

Web review: Partition of India (1947--when British leave subcontinent, Pakistan divides from India--one of great catastrophes of human history

follow-up last week's question > Said

Edward Said, author of Orientalism (1978), best-known book on colonialism / postcolonialism

also Culture and Imperialism 1993

Last week, I mentioned that Said's originality was in combining

post-structuralism (formal literary theory based on structuralist and post-structural concepts of language (including intertextuality)

with

historicism

Dawlat asked how, & I excused myself as unprepared

but re-reading the excerpt from Orientalism for today reminded me how.

post-structuralism: formal literary theory based on structuralist and post-structural concepts of language

traditional views of language: sign = referent; e. g., rock = natural stone shape
words connect to the things they describe

structuralist: rock has no connection to "rocks" but only to other words; the way we identify rock is by knowing what it's not, that it's not "block" or even "stone"
words connect to other words

effect: destabilization of traditional identification; identity becomes more provisional, a matter of convenience and change rather than fixed nature

or positively: language and literature are a network of shared meanings rather than stand-alone islands of self-sufficient meanings

historicism: ideas about history as part of history

traditional idea of history: "what really happened"

historicism: how history was written, what purposes it serves

effect: history becomes destabilized; there is no historical reality, only words or images with which we compete to describe it, and these perpetually change

Edward W. Said (1935-2003) overview

strongly influenced by post-structuralist theory, applied to political conditions and history

earlier this semester: intertextuality as interdependence of one text on another

no such thing as an independent text--each text refers to others, uses others to constitute itself

Said (and others) extend this model of intertextuality to a psychological and political framework:

Self-other

Said 87 Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of the deepest and most recurring images of the Other.

Briefly, the idea of "self" depends on an idea of "other"

Earlier this semester, saw in Achebe:

Nearly eighty years after its initial publication, Achebe attacks Heart of Darkness in his essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” He considers “the desire—one might indeed say the need—in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe (337).”

112 all illness proceeds from Hindus

Identify ourselves by difference, but also learn and share difference

Things Fall Apart 13 fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father

father agbala, not only another name for a woman . . a man who had taken no title

Simplest relation: negative--"I'm not that kind of person."

But relationships between self & other soon reveal expressions or reflections of the self in the other

Negative polarization > positive exchange

No word exists independently of other words; no text without other texts (intertextuality); no historical event without others

> Said on Orientalism

Orientalism now mostly known as "Asian Studies"

"The Ballad of East and West"

by Rudyard Kipling

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat; . . .

But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,

When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth

In brief, no east without west

No orient without . . . occident

74 occidental

Orient < L east or sunrise

Occident < L west or sunset

Old-fashioned terms of categorization or convenience, now obsolescent or tainted by past errors:

“The Orient” = “the East” (of Europe); middle eastern or far eastern

“The Occident” = “the West”

Examples of Orientalism and contrasts with west, occident, British

87 slackness, inattention to detail

90 awfully British

100 British India, reason and orderliness

103 religious riots, proved the British were necessary to India

111 unfaithfulness

120 West doesn’t bother much over belief or disbelief

127 clarity vs. intimacy

128 indifference the Oriental will never understand

131 teaching people to be individuals

Islamic empires

Mughal Empire & Ottoman Empire (also Persian Empire)

In Passage,

77 Mogul Emperors

75 scene from film

Mogul restaurant on Bay Area Blvd. just beyond university (behind Jack in the Box)

Mughal Empire--app. 1500-1765--imperial power ruling Indian subcontinent, 1500s-1800s; Mughal (or Mogul) is Persian word for Mongol, as in Genghis Khan (1162-1227)

Akbar the Great, Shah Jahan, Auranzeb

159-160 Moguls

Maps of Mughal Empire

Ottoman Empire or Turkish Empire--

centered on present-day Turkey

at height in 16th-17th centuries, stretched from southeast Europe throughout Middle East to North Africa

Osman, Mehmet, Suleiman the Magnificent (1494-1566)

Contained Iraq, Kurds, others involved

Iraq established after collapse of Ottoman Empire in World War 1, around 1919

12 regained their departed greatness

16 Islam, his own country

17 Hindu rhythm uncongenial

113 feeling that India was one; Moslem

102 Chandrapore Mohammadans

India home to many great religions

Hinduism (Godbole)

Buddhism

Jainism

Sikhism

Parsi

Islam (Aziz, Hamidullah--Islam is not native to India, but many Indians are Moslems)

"Moguls" are Moslem peoples & armies from the Middle East (mostly Persia / Iran) who migrated-conquered-assimilated through present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan

22 He seemed to own the land . . . .   What did it matter if a few flabby Hindus had preceded him there, and a few chilly English succeeded.

Novel of Manners

146 most of life so dull

Moral / ethical significance of manners?

 161 their conversation—their civilization; cf. 279

53 the desire to behave pleasantly satisfies God

132 friends, brothers . . . affection had triumphed

karma

The Law of Karma:

Wikipedia definition of karma:

Echoes, karma, etc.

84-5 Godbole’s song, maze, incomprehensible

94 accident

104-5 a ghost!

136 caves like nothing else in the world

137 nothing attaches, unlike human speech

196 nothing can be performed in isolation

211 What was the “echo” of which the girl complained?

98 opposite currents, blended

novel of manners discussion

A Passage to India extends conventional “novel of manners” form in at least 2 ways:

cross-cultural

mystical union

Questions for seminar discussion:

Using A Passage to India for examples, how may a novel of manners serve a multicultural course in Literature or “Culture Studies” generally?

What would you rather be talking about? (Not to imply we're wasting time, but cultural or identity issues always feel more pressing than formal analysis.)

18 God is here

53 the desire to behave pleasantly satisfies God

Moral / ethical significance of manners?

 161 their conversation—their civilization; cf. 279

Novel of Manners partly descended from earlier

Comedy of Manners

Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost

Much Ado about Nothing

Moliere, Tartuffe

The Bourgeois Gentleman

esp. Restoration Comedy

Congreve, The Way of the World 1700

Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer 1773

Sheridan, The Rivals 1775

Wilde, The Importance of Being Ernest 1895

Barry, The Philadelphia Story 1939

preoccupied with codes of upper and middle classes

manners and conventions of an artificial, highly sophisticated society

satire against wannabes

satire of aberrations of social behavior

misfits, etc.

(handout on narrative)

comedy defined by concluding marriage, dance, union 

11 if men refuse to marry . . . .

54 succeed in getting married?

54 succeed in getting married?

 review "comedy" in genre handout

Next week, referring to the definition of comedy narrative, my question will be,

How is A Passage to India structured as a comedy?

+ what is significance of manners?

"manners" doesn't exactly mean same thing as etiquette, but more like behavior and how it fits with others and what it means

Passage to India p. 15 "To escape from the net and be back among manners and gestures that he knew!"

8 servant-master code

Subject: courtship, social interaction of leisure class, professionals, wannabes; social codes, reading and offering of signs 

Characters test each other’s interest, honor, generosity, folly, irony

Misconceptions, false identities, blunders, connections

Purposes of studying A Passage to India as "novel of manners"

"Novels of manners" are often regarded among the "finest literature," but can be difficult to read

A Passage to India extends conventional “novel of manners” form in at least 2 ways:

cross-cultural

mystical union

+ gender: like James and Whitman, a gay / homosexual / queer author

Both intensely social and outside normal courtship

A Passage to India extends conventional “novel of manners” form in at least 2 ways:

cross-cultural

mystical union

cross-cultural

7 "possible to be friends with an English gentleman?"

8 "We poor blacks . . . "

mystical union, resolution of conflicts & differences through divine

later in novel, esp. through character of Godbole, Forster camps on Hindu festivals, myths (Krishna)--most criticized parts of novel

Azia and Mrs. Moore under the moon

12 . . . the name of the poet, Hafiz, Haliz, Iqbal, was sufficient guarantee. India--a hundred Indias--whispered outside beneath the indifferent moon, but for the time India seemed one and their own . . .

28 Mrs. Moore: "A sudden sense of unity, of kinship with the heavenly bodies, passed into the old woman and out, like water through a tank, leaving a strange freshness behind.

But as a muted Modernist, Forster uses symbols effectively

quick definition of symbol . . .

material image + multiple meaning

Chapter 1 begins and ends with "caves"

images of entrapment and enclosure, like "net" p. 15--compare Whitman's images of fusing and linking

Chapter 3 ends on "wasp," which reappears periodically

leftover notes from previous classes

midterm review

Beth Cordell wishes the class to know she's been distracted from finishing her midterm by an accident to her daughter in California.

Late submissions--I'll try to read & return before class on 18 Oct.

Otherwise, a strong set of midterms that other students will benefit from.

I will too--important for teachers to see what students are hitting and missing > re-evaluate priorities

If students "get it," that's a strong signal that something in their background(s) makes them receptive.

If students don't get it, either you're not teaching it right or you're on some inappropriate level or angle

As always in literature, there are so many possibilities that you have to look for cues on what to cut, what to emphasize.

Judging from these midterms, the most successful axis in the class is the dialogue between texts. Nearly everyone wrote well about Things Fall Apart relative to Heart of Darkness and what's gained by reading them together.

What didn't show up as compellingly in the midterms is the historical narrative regarding colonialism > postcolonialism, though several of you made reasonable efforts. 

Instructor's possible reactions for future offerings of course:

Give up on the historical angle--do the dialogue and let the history take care of itself. (Trust interested students to pick it up on their own.) This sounds like a cop-out, but going with what works instead of struggling to redeem what doesn't work often turns out to be more productive.

Set up and "drive" the historical narrative more deliberately through lectures and presentations--conceivably there's a history textbook that could provide some basic readings in colonial history.

Install in the midterm assignment some requirements for reviewing the historical background--but careful!--don't want to mess up the success of the dialogue.

Questions or suggestions regarding midterm assignment?

maps

University of Texas Online Library: Perry-Castañeda Map Collection

Discussion starter(s) relating Said article to A Passage to India: Pauline Chapman

http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Orientalism.html

Some extractions from Said article on Orientalism:

p. 87, second par.:

In addition…the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience

p. 88, first paragraph:

Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient…is an Orientalist.

Compared…the term Orientalism is less preferred by specialists today, both because it is too vague and general and because it connotes…colonialism.

Orientalism lives on academically through its doctrines and theses about the Orient and the Oriental.

p.88, second par.:

Writers have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for texts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, 'mind,' destiny…

p.88, third par.:

Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. 

p.89, first par.

Moreover…no one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account the limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism

In brief, because of Orientalism, the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action.

Orientalism in A Passage to India

Mrs. Moore and Aziz:

"I don't think I understand people very well.  I only know whether I like or dislike them."

"Then you are an Oriental."  (21)

Aziz and  Ralph Moore:

"Can you always tell whether a stranger is your friend?"

"Yes."

"Then you are an Oriental."  (349)

What about Mrs. Moore and Ralph makes them "Oriental?"

What is Aziz implying about "Orientals" and Westerners?

For Miss Quested had not appealed to Hamidullah.  If she had shown emotion in court, broke down, beat her breast, and invoked the name of God, she would have summoned forth his imagination and generosity—he had plenty of both.  But while relieving the Oriental mind, she had chilled it, with the result that he could scarcely believe she was sincere, and indeed from his standpoint she was not.  For her behavior rested on cold justice and honesty; she had felt, while she recanted, no passion for those she had wronged…And the girl's sacrifice—so creditable according to Western notions—was rightly rejected, though it came from her heart, it did not include her heart. (272)

Ralph Moore and Aziz discuss Mrs. Moore:

"In her letters, in her letters.  She loved you."

"Yes, your mother was my best friend in all the world."  He was silent, puzzled by his own great gratitude.  What did this eternal goodness of Mrs. Moore amount to?  To nothing, if brought to the test of thought.  She had not borne witness in his favor, nor visited him in prison, yet she had stolen to the depths of his heart, and he always adored her. (350)

Do you think Aziz and the other Indians are fair in their dislike of Miss Quested and their adoration of Mrs. Moore? 

Yes, he did want to spend an evening with some girls, singing and all that, the vague jollity that would culminate in voluptuousness….If Major Callendar had been an Indian, he would have remembered what young men are, and granted two or three days' leave to Calcutta without asking questions.  But the Major assumed either that his subordinates were made of ice, or that they repaired to the Chandrapore bazaars—disgusting ideas both. (109)

What is Forster saying about Eastern and Western sensibilities about sensuality?

Is it fair to either side?  Is he projecting his own sensibilities?

Fielding traveling West to England:

The buildings of Venice, like the mountains of Crete and the fields of Egypt, stood in the right place, whereas in poor India everything was placed wrong.  He had forgotten the beauty of form among the idol temples and the lumpy hills; indeed, without form, how can there be beauty?  …but something more precious than mosaics and marbles was offered to him now: the harmony between the works of man and the earth that upholds them, the civilization that has escaped muddle, the spirit in reasonable form, with flesh and blood subsisting… his Indian friends would see the sumptuousness of Venice, not its shape…The Mediterranean is the human norm.  When they leave that exquisite lake…they approach the monstrous and extraordinary…(314)

Is this Forster's or Fielding's view?   What is Forster trying to say?

Instructor's follow-up to Said presentation 

Edward W. Said (1935-2003) overview

strongly influenced by post-structuralist theory, applied to political conditions and history

earlier this semester: intertextuality as interdependence of one text on another

no such thing as an independent text--each text refers to others, uses others to constitute itself

Said (and others) extend this model of intertextuality to a psychological and political framework:

Self-other

Said 87 Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of the deepest and most recurring images of the Other.

Briefly, the idea of "self" depends on an idea of "other"

Simplest relation: negative--"I'm not that kind of person."

But relationships between self & other soon reveal expressions or reflections of the self in the other

Negative polarization > positive exchange

Things Fall Apart 13 fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father

father agbala, not only another name for a woman . . a man who had taken no title

follow-up "novel of manners" / assignments

novel of manners

novel as infinitely adaptable, multivoiced genre

Conrad: Modernist novel as representation of mind

Achebe: literate narrator; oral dialogue

Forster: novel of manners

social customs, manners, conventions, and habits of a particular social class at a particular time

mores exert control over characters

Jane Austen

Edith Wharton

Henry James

Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

7 Hamidullah disagreed, but with so many reservations that there was no friction between them

7 They come out intending to be gentlemen

8 They meant . . .

11 neither a servant nor an equal

43 as if they sought for a new formula which neither East nor West could provide

50 the conventions have greater force

51 go against my class

61 convenient lie; insult?

Pleasure + ethics

conscience

follow-up to poetry reading / assignments

interesting aspect to Forster's novel style:

occasional focus on precise image or symbol

67 collar stud

87 collar stud

34 wasp

38 wasp

Moguls established an empire in India

Compare Norman French in England after 1066

Moguls and Norman French ran government, lived as nobility

Common people were Hindus or Anglo-Saxons