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Craig White's authors |
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Jamaica Kincaid (b. 1949) |
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brilliant but troubling author--usually divides the class, but a fast read
pace of narrative and rapid cycle of feelings imitates actual social life?
compare to DeFoe’s exhaustiveness of detail; Kincaid extremely selective in detail and plotting
Lucy 66-71 discussion of possible pregnancy; then subject is dropped! Possible criticism: style cares more for affect, feelings, emotional responses than realism.
style: hot, passionate, readable but perverse
attraction-repulsion, intimate but offputting
Lucy 20 love and hate exist so side by side
90 not like my mother—I was my mother.
relate to Objectives (opening bullets): In contrast to Anglo-American scholarship's and fiction's plain style, postcolonial criticism and fiction may act out in extravagant or confrontational ways; sometimes it flouts the dominant style but it can also imitate.
Kincaid, A Small Place: "Since we were fuled by the English, we also had their laws. There was a law against using abusive language. Can you imagine such a law among people for whom making a spectacle of yourself through speech is everything?" (93)
Contrast with repression of emotion or human relations in Robinson Crusoe and other colonial texts.
"one-note artist"--intense love-hate relation with mother, writes about it obsessively in all her novels; productive but disconcerting relationship seems extended to all other relations
Jamaica Kincaid brief autobiography at Emory PoCo Site
BBC literary profile of Kincaid
