DOCSLIB.ORG

Iain Banks, James Kelman and the Art of Engagement: an Application of Jean Paul Sartre's Theories of Literature and Existentialism to Two Modern Scottish Novelists

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Iain Banks, James Kelman and the Art of Engagement: an Application of Jean Paul Sartre's Theories of Literature and Existentialism to Two Modern Scottish Novelists Braidwood, Alistair (2011) Iain Banks, James Kelman and the art of engagement: an application of Jean Paul Sartre's theories of literature and existentialism to two modern Scottish novelists. PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/3024/ Copyright and moral rights for this thesis are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Iain Banks, James Kelman and the Art of Engagement: An Application of Jean Paul Sartre’s Theories of Literature and Existentialism to Two Modern Scottish Novelists Alistair Braidwood In fulfilment of the degree of Ph.D. Department of Scottish Literature School of Critical Studies University of Glasgow February 2011 - i - Abstract This thesis is a study of the key novels of Iain Banks and James Kelman in the light of Jean Paul Sartre’s theories of existentialism and literature as set out in his 1949 literary manifesto Literature and Existentialism . By comparing and contrasting these two contemporary Scottish writers with reference to Sartre’s ideas, valuable insights into their fiction and their Scottish literary context may be gained. Sartre’s existentialism is primarily concerned with the potential of the apparently alienated subjective individual to influence and affect wider society. His theory of literature focuses specifically on the relationship between the writer, the reader and the social context of both, so the thesis will consider not only the novels of Banks and Kelman but also the social context of their writing and the critical reaction to it. The thesis is structured as an examination of Kelman and Banks in terms of their depictions of class, politics (both economic and social), gender, religion and ideas of morality. The introduction explains the reasons for choosing Sartre’s Literature and Existentialism as the critical basis of the thesis and the context in which his theories were formed. A brief overview of existentialism precedes consideration of the specific argument that Sartre proffers in terms of the relationship between his existentialist thought and literature. As a novelist himself, as well as a politically committed intellectual and existential philosopher, Sartre believed that there was a strong connection between literature and philosophy. His ideas about literature and existentialism therefore have the authority of a novelist’s experience of writing as well as those of a philosopher and critical thinker. I subsequently explain why I have chosen Iain Banks and James Kelman as the literary focus of the thesis. Both are pre-eminently novelists who have expressed political and, in some senses, philosophical, ideas that link them implicitly to Sartre’s writings. Neither makes extensive or overt acknowledgement of Sartre, but approaching them and their work from the Sartrean perspective is illuminating because it highlights what drives their main protagonists as well as their own motivation for writing. Using Sartre’s claims for the importance of literature as my starting point I consider not only their writing but also what has inspired their work in terms of their political, social and - ii - ethical beliefs, examining the reaction to their work, both from critics and in their own self-reflective comment. Chapter One examines in greater detail the ideas set out in the introduction, with reference to the idea of the ‘engaged writer’. This is a specific term which derives from Sartre’s claim that the ‘engaged writer knows his words are actions’. The chapter examines Sartre’s definition of the writer and the writer’s role in society. This definition is applied to Iain Banks and James Kelman with reference to their artistic reaction to the world post 9/11 in Banks’ novels Dead Air and The Steep Approach to Garbadale and Kelman’s You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free . The chapter analyses what can be gleaned from their differences and similarities when writing about the same subject and concludes that both writers, for all their apparent contrasts in terms of style and aesthetic, understand that the relationship between reader and writer is one which can promote social and political change, thus fulfilling Sartre’s definition. Chapter Two focuses on Banks’ and Kelman’s reaction to a specific political situation and widens the scope to look at the political climate that both Banks and Kelman deal with in their fiction. Kelman (born 1946) and Banks (born 1954) are of a generation of Scottish artists who have reacted to a particularly volatile time in Scottish politics. By looking at their personal comment upon it I investigate the culture that produced their writing, and how relevant their respective reactions were. For this, particular attention is paid to Banks’ Complicity and Kelman’s How Late it Was, How Late in a discussion of the role of the writer in political debate and in wider society. In these and other novels both writers not only provide reportage on the politics of the time, but, through their fiction, as ‘engaged writers’, directly challenge the mainstream contemporary political ideology. Chapter Three moves on from questions of politics to consider the writer and morality. For Sartre, the question of personal morality is central to the writer’s reason for writing. He believed not only that an individual writer’s moral sense is evident in their fiction, but also that the reader likewise learns about the environment that created that moral sensibility, specifically in their respective community. In this chapter questions are - iii - therefore asked about the transmission of ideas and ideals through the act of Banks’ and Kelman’s writing, as well as questioning what the nature of morality is. In their fiction Banks and Kelman deal with the individual, the collective (with reference to religion, art, class and philosophy) and further related questions of social and political morality by placing their characters outside the socially accepted norm, and offering a critique of those norms in their depiction of those characters’ circumstances and actions. In ways that invite comparison with Sartre’s stated ideas about the link between an individual’s writing and personal morality, both writers offer considered moral, social and political ideas and ideals that they believe will change the individual reader, and the wider collective, for the better. Chapter Four examines the question of Scottish masculinity and femininity as expressed in the novels of Banks and Kelman. This examination is related to the ideas discussed in the previous two chapters with reference to how portrayals of men and women in literature reflect the connection between gender and a nation’s political and social systems in a Scottish context. Said depictions interrogate the politics, morals and aesthetics of the writers’ work. Banks and Kelman offer different, but related, critiques of the masculine and feminine stereotypes in Scottish, British, and Anglo-American conventions. Their creation of male and female characters thus exemplifies the politics and aesthetics of their writing and the nature of their ‘engagement’. Chapter Five looks more closely at Sartre’s theories with specific reference to the individual writer’s aesthetic, the individual reader’s aesthetic and the idea of shared aesthetic values between both. This is done with close analysis of how Banks’ and Kelman’s writing has changed over the years, and in doing so this analysis asks to what extent one writer can be said to be ‘artistically superior to’, or more ‘aesthetically pleasing than’, another. The expectations of the reader and the writer are discussed with reference to Sartre’s specific definition of the writer’s aesthetic, and this definition is applied to Banks and Kelman to ascertain what we can learn from their respective aesthetics. Both writer and reader are required to create an ‘objective reality’, a process by which Banks, Kelman and Sartre implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, propose the recognition of ‘human freedom’ as its ultimate aim. - iv - Chapter Six posits that comparison with a number of their contemporaries will demonstrate that, while Banks and Kelman are novelists who notably benefit from such critical exposition, Sartre’s ideas are perennially relevant and insightful when considering writers in a political, social and ethical context. Amongst modern Scottish writers Banks and Kelman are pre-eminently ‘engaged’ writers with moral responsibilities, as Sartre believes all writers should be, and their engagement remains morally, politically and aesthetically committed and challenging, yet open to further revision and development. Over and above applying Sartrean literary philosophy to Banks and Kelman this thesis therefore also offers a model of literary criticism that can be applied to a number of other contemporary Scottish authors. In conclusion, this thesis suggests that Sartre’s theories of literature can assist in the attempt to better understand the value of the writer in society, and of Kelman and Banks in particular. The comparison and contrast between Banks and Kelman makes clear the importance of contextualising the individual writer not only with the work of their contemporaries, but with the time, place and position in which they are writing. The intention of the thesis is to discover how Sartre’s ideas of existentialism and literature can be applied to writers and their work in a way that allows ‘the critic’ to analyse both the novelist’s fictional technique and to gauge the value of their role in society – in other words, how Sartre’s theories allow us to better understand the individual writer in a social, political and moral context, both nationally and internationally.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Pierre Naville and the French Indigenization of Watson's Behavior
    tapraid5/zhp-hips/zhp-hips/zhp99918/zhp2375d18z xppws Sϭ1 5/24/19 9:13 Art: 2019-0306 APA NLM History of Psychology © 2019 American Psychological Association 2019, Vol. 1, No. 999, 000–000 1093-4510/19/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/hop0000129 “The Damned Behaviorist” Versus French Phenomenologists: Pierre Naville and the French Indigenization of Watson’s Behaviorism AQ:1-3 Rémy Amouroux and Nicolas Zaslawski AQ: au University of Lausanne What do we know about the history of John Broadus Watson’s behaviorism outside of AQ: 4 its American context of production? In this article, using the French example, we propose a study of some of the actors and debates that structured this history. Strangely enough, it was not a “classic” experimental psychologist, but Pierre Naville (1904– 1993), a former surrealist, Marxist philosopher, and sociologist, who can be identified as the initial promoter of Watson’s ideas in France. However, despite Naville’s unwav- ering commitment to behaviorism, his weak position in the French intellectual com- munity, combined with his idiosyncratic view of Watson’s work, led him to embody, as he once described himself, the figure of “the damned behaviorist.” Indeed, when Naville was unsuccessfully trying to introduce behaviorism into France, alternative theories defended by philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty explic- itly condemned Watson’s theory and met with rapid and major success. Both existen- tialism and phenomenology were more in line than behaviorism with what could be called the “French national narrative” of the immediate postwar. After the humiliation of the occupation by the Nazis, the French audience was especially critical of any deterministic view of behavior that could be seen as a justification for collaboration.
    [Show full text]
  • From Alignment to Commitment: the Early Work of James Kelman
    From Alignment to Commitment: The Early Work of James Kelman Terence Patrick Murphy James Kelman (© BBC, 2002) Abstract In Marxism and Literature (1977), Raymond Williams argues that writing is in an important sense always aligned. This sense of alignment, however, may be distinguished from a sense of chosen commitment,which is “conscious, active, and open.” Through a close analysis of the early work of the Scottish working-class writer James Kelman, this essay examines how an ideologically committed writer learned to refashion the dominant forms of novelistic discourse for his own political purposes. For Kelman, commitment in writing involves the recognition of the “distinction between dialogue and narrative as a summation of the political system.” This distinction was “simply another method of exclusion, of marginalizing and disenfranchising different peoples, cultures and communities,” Political commitment thus required Kelman to break successfully with the tradition of “‘working class authors’ who allowed ‘the voice’ of higher authority to control narrative, the place where the psychological drama occurred.” Copyright © 2007 by Terence Patrick Murphy and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 Terence Patrick Murphy 2 . the relation between the language of the novelist — always in some measure an educated language, as it has to be if the full account is to be given, and the language of these newly described men and women — a familiar language, steeped in a place and in work; often different in profound as well as simple ways — and to the novelist consciously different — from the habits of education: the class, the method, the underlying sensibility. It isn’t only a matter of relating disparate idioms, though that technicality is how it often appears.
    [Show full text]
  • AS.450 ( Liberal Arts) 1
    AS.450 ( Liberal Arts) 1 AS.450.605. Art Since 1960. 3 Credits. AS.450 ( LIBERAL ARTS) What is contemporary art, and what are the factors that shaped it? This course will attempt to answer those questions through a chronological AS.450.082. MLA Capstone: Portfolio. and thematic investigation of some of the most influential artworks, The MLA Portfolio is a zero-credit Capstone option. Students who select movements, and theories of the past 60 years. Beginning with a close the Portfolio option will take 10 courses in the program (one core course look at mid-century modernism, we will move into a consideration of Pop, and 9 electives), and register for the zero-credit portfolio in their final Minimalism, conceptual art, land art, performance art, postmodernism, semester. The portfolio will be completed within the same semester as AIDS activism, and relational aesthetics. Along the way, we will also the 10th course. The portfolio consists of a sampling of the best papers consider the relevance of feminist and phenomenological theory and of and projects written over the course of the student's graduate career, institutional critique and globalization; at the same time, we will explore and it is designed to highlight the intellectual points of convergence in ways in which art of our own time constitutes both an extension of, and each student's course of study, presenting the student's reflections on reaction against, some of the historical ideas we encounter. Throughout, knowledge gained and lessons learned. students will have a chance to read and discuss both primary and AS.450.600.
    [Show full text]
  • Department of Philosophy
    Kent State University Catalog 2021-2022 1 DEPARTMENT OF Philosophy (PHIL) PHIL 11001 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY (DIVG) (KHUM) 3 PHILOSOPHY Credit Hours An introduction to the diverse methods and subject matters in College of Arts and Sciences philosophy. Topics may include: What are the arguments for the existence Department of Philosophy of God? Do humans have free will? Can we know anything with certainty, 320 Bowman Hall and how do we know anything at all? Is what we see real, or might it Kent Campus be only an illusion? What makes a person a person - their mind, or their 330-672-2315 physical attributes? Is the mind the brain, or is it something else? [email protected] Prerequisite: None. www.kent.edu/philosophy Schedule Type: Lecture Contact Hours: 3 lecture Grade Mode: Standard Letter Attributes: Diversity Global, Kent Core Humanities, TAG Arts and Undergraduate Programs Humanities, Transfer Module Humanities • Philosophy - B.A. PHIL 11009 CRITICAL THINKING (KADL) 3 Credit Hours Critical thinking is essential to every aspect of life, whether reading a Minors news report or editorial, examining a contract or other legal document, or • Health Care Ethics entering into a debate. This course teaches the strategies of “cognitive self-defense” that allow students to see past false claims and avoid being • Philosophy deceived by misleading rhetorical strategies. The course also examines the role of argument in reasoning, including types of arguments and the Graduate Programs ways in which mistakes in reasoning can lead us astray. Examples from • Philosophy - M.A. everyday life illustrate the sorts of complex reasoning that are a crucial part of practical decision-making.
    [Show full text]
  • What Is the Western Canon Good For?
    What is the Western Canon Good For? Adam Kotsko AM IN THE MIDST OF MY SIXTH YEAR OF TEACHING AT SHIMER COLLEGE, A SMALL LIBERAL arts school in the Great Books tradition. This tradition, which began in the I early 20th century in response to the perception that higher education was becoming too specialised, starts from the premise that every college student should engage with primary texts of enduring importance. A Great Books education is a broadly humanistic one, aimed at inducting students into the ‘Great Conversation’. In many ways, it is a very optimistic pedagogical model, throwing students into the deep end without textbooks or background lectures, on the assumption that nothing human is foreign to them. Hence they will be able to make at least some productive headway with exemplary products of human thought. It has also tended to be a deeply conservative pedagogical model, reifying the ‘canon’ of the Western Tradition—the intellectual trajectory that postcolonial theorists have lampooned as stretching ‘from Plato to NATO’. The best-known Great Books school is St. John’s College, where students read great texts from the Greeks forward, in chronological order, meaning that they do not encounter a single text by a woman until late in their career. A colleague of mine calls Shimer’s program ‘Reformed Great Books’, meaning that we make room for more contemporary and diverse texts in our curriculum. © Australian Humanities Review 60 (November 2016). ISSN: 1325 8338 157-61 158 Adam Kotsko / What is the Western Canon Good For? Unlike the St. John’s program, the Shimer curriculum is divided into three broad disciplines—Humanities, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences—and does not necessarily proceed in chronological order, even within a single course.
    [Show full text]
  • The Religious Foundations of Western Law
    Catholic University Law Review Volume 24 Issue 3 Spring 1975 Article 4 1975 The Religious Foundations of Western Law Harold J. Berman Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.edu/lawreview Recommended Citation Harold J. Berman, The Religious Foundations of Western Law, 24 Cath. U. L. Rev. 490 (1975). Available at: https://scholarship.law.edu/lawreview/vol24/iss3/4 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by CUA Law Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Catholic University Law Review by an authorized editor of CUA Law Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS OF WESTERN LAWt Harold 1. Berman* I. THE WESTERN LEGAL TRADITION The Western legal tradition, like Western civilization as a whole, is under- going in the 20th century a crisis greater than any other in its history, since it is a crisis generated not only from within Western experience but also from without. From within, social, economic, and political transformations of un- precedented magnitude have put a tremendous strain upon traditional legal institutions and legal values in virtually all countries of the West. Yet there have been other periods of revolutionary upheaval in previous centuries, and we have somehow survived them. What is new is the confrontation with non- Western civilizations and non-Western philosophies. In the past, Western man has confidently carried his law with him throughout the world. The world today, however, is more suspicious than ever before of Western "legal- ism." Eastern man and Southern man offer other alternatives.
    [Show full text]
  • LITR) 1 Comparative Literature (LITR)
    Comparative Literature (LITR) 1 Comparative Literature (LITR) * LITR 022a, Music and Literature Candace Skorupa This seminar explores the rivalry between music and literature, the attraction and repulsion between these two art forms, and the dialogue between writers and composers. In select fiction and poetry spanning a variety of cultures and times, we look at the aesthetic challenges of conveying music in words; in select music from the same periods, we study the use of literary themes and narrative. How does music inhabit literature, and literature influence music? We read fiction describing music and borrowing musical forms; we study symphonies and opera inspired by literature; we look at films that bring together these two arts. Students examine theoretical approaches and learn comparative methods useful for literature and culture courses. Though not required, musical experience and/or interest is welcomed for the seminar, which may be taken simultaneously with gateway courses in the humanities. Enrollment limited to first-year students. Preregistration required; see under First-Year Seminar Program. WR, HU * LITR 026a, The Literature of Sports Robyn Creswell Writers on sport examine ideas of beauty and human divinity; virtuosic performance; group identity; questions of race, class, and gender; global realities of migration; and the ubiquity of spectacle. Topics include origins and essence of play; and case studies in the literature of sports, including the Olympic games of classical Greece, bull fighting, Muhammad Ali, cricket and colonialism, and the globalization of soccer. Readings by Pindar, Hemingway, Huizinga, CLR James, Mailer, Delillo, Foster-Wallace, and Ben Fountain. Enrollment limited to first-year students. Preregistration required; see under First-Year Seminar Program.
    [Show full text]
  • Class, Gender, and Identity in Contemporary Scottish Literature
    UNIVERZITA PALACKÉHO V OLOMOUCI Filozofická fakulta Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky Jan Horáček James Kelman: Class, Gender, and Identity in Contemporary Scottish Literature Diplomová práce Anglická filologie – Historie Vedoucí práce: Mgr. Ema Jelínková, Ph.D. Olomouc 2012 Prohlašuji, že jsem tuto bakalářskou práci vypracoval samostatně a uvedl úplný seznam citované a použité literatury. V Olomouci dne 11. května 2012 ………………………………… James Kelman: Class, Gender, and Identity in Contemporary Scottish Literature iii 1 Contents Acknowledgements . v Introduction. 1 I Kelman and Capitalism . 5 1. ‘When skint I am a hulk’: Unemployment and Poverty-Stricken Freedom . 7 2. ‘these capitalist fuckers’: The Breakdown of Welfare . 10 3. ‘On the margins of the traditional working-class life’: Past and Present . 12 4. Stealing and Reading: New Perspectives on Workerism. 15 5. ‘wealthy fuckers and rich cunts’: Class War and Beyond . 18 6. ‘Places where humans might perish forever’: Victims and Casualties . 21 II Kelman and Working-Class Community . 25 7. ‘When men expect women to stop work’: Challenging Masculinity . 25 8. Emasculated Men and Empowered Women . 29 9. ‘Middle-Class Wankers’: From Ambivalence to Estrangement . 32 10. The Collapse of Workers’ Solidarity . 34 III Kafka on the Clyde . 38 11. ‘Wee horrors’: Authentic Stories and Abnormal Events . 38 12. Concrete Facts and Genre Fiction . 41 13. Lack and Becoming: Changing Kelman? . 44 IV Kelman and Demotic Language . 48 14. Unity of Language: The Clash Between English and Scots Vernacular . 49 15. ‘ah jist open ma mooth and oot it comes’: Language of the Gutter . 53 16. Abrogation: Resisting Power and Cultural Marginalization . 56 17. ‘enerfuckinggetic’: Language Play and Innovation .
    [Show full text]
  • Jean-Paul Sartre
    From the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Jean-Paul Sartre Christina Howells Biography Sartre was a philosopher of paradox: an existentialist who attempted a reconciliation with Marxism, a theorist of freedom who explored the notion of predestination. From the mid-1930s to the late-1940s, Sartre was in his ‘classical’ period. He explored the history of theories of imagination leading up to that of Husserl, and developed his own phenomenological account of imagination as the key to the freedom of consciousness. He analysed human emotions, arguing that emotion is a freely chosen mode of relationship to the outside world. In his major philosophical work, L’Être et le Néant (Being and Nothingness)(1943a), Sartre distinguished between consciousness and all other beings: consciousness is always at least tacitly conscious of itself, hence it is essentially ‘for itself’ (pour-soi) – free, mobile and spontaneous. Everything else, lacking this self-consciousness, is just what it is ‘in-itself’ (en-soi); it is ‘solid’ and lacks freedom. Consciousness is always engaged in the world of which it is conscious, and in relationships with other consciousnesses. These relationships are conflictual: they involve a battle to maintain the position of subject and to make the other into an object. This battle is inescapable. Although Sartre was indeed a philosopher of freedom, his conception of freedom is often misunderstood. Already in Being and Nothingness human freedom operates against a background of facticity and situation. My facticity is all the facts about myself which cannot be changed – my age, sex, class of origin, race and so on; my situation may be modified, but it still constitutes the starting point for change and roots consciousness firmly in the world.
    [Show full text]
  • Jean-Paul Sartre and the Algerian Revolution: 1954-1962
    https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ Theses Digitisation: https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/research/enlighten/theses/digitisation/ This is a digitised version of the original print thesis. Copyright and moral rights for this work are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This work cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Enlighten: Theses https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] JEAN-PAUL SARTRE AND THE ALGERIAN REVOLUTION: 1954-1962 BY ABDELMADJID AMRANI B.A. ALGIERS UNIVERSITY, (1981) M. LiTT. GLASGOW UNIVERSITY, (1985) A THESIS SUBMITTED IN FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY, PH.D. DEPARTMENT OF MODERN HISTORY FACULTY OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW FEBRUARY 1990 i ProQuest Number: 10970983 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10970983 Published by ProQuest LLC(2018). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author.
    [Show full text]
  • What Is Literature? (Excerpt)
    14 Writing Literature is the art form in which Sartre expresses his own philosophy. The novels and plays are strewn with characters in bad faith: Garcin in No Exit, Goetz in The Devil and the Good Lord, the senator in The Respectable Prostitute, Hugo in Dirty Hands, Franz in Altona, Lucien in the short story ‘Childhood of a Leader’ in The Wall, Daniel in The Roads to Freedom, Kean in the play of that name, and of course, the café waiter who features not only in The Age of Reason, the first volume of The Roads to Freedom, but in Being and Nothingness. Opposed to them, but fewer in number, are the characters who in differing degrees recognise their own freedom: Mathieu in Iron in the Soul (but not in The Age of Reason and The Reprieve), Oreste in The Flies, the tortured resistance fighters in Men Without Shadows, Lizzie in The Respectable Prostitute, Roquentin in Nausea. Works of fiction provide a criterion for the truth of a ‘humanistic’ philosophy such as Sartre’s existentialism. Sartre draws a sharp distinction between literature and science: Literature is ambiguous but each sentence of science or philosophy has, or should have, one and only one meaning. Sentences of literature may have multiple meanings, or may express different propositions. This presents Sartre with a dilemma. To the extent to which the sentences making up his novels, stories and plays are ambiguous they do not serve as a vehicle for his philosophy. To the extent to which they are unambiguous, they are not literature, at least by his own criterion.
    [Show full text]
  • 'Not Not the “Real” James Kelman' Paul Shanks (University of Aberdeen) A
    ‘Not not the “real” James Kelman’ Paul Shanks (University of Aberdeen) A Review of Simon Kıvesi , James Kelman (Manchester University Press, 2007), ISBN 978-0-7190- 7096-9, xiv + 210pp Simon Kıvesi’s book forms the most substantial publication on James Kelman’s fiction to date. Given this fact, it is somewhat disconcerting to find an epigraph in the introduction that details Janet Todd’s mild dismissal of Kelman in an interview that appeared in The Herald in March 2006. In considering Todd’s reservations about Kelman (‘the trouble is one ought to admire him’), Kıvesi detects the hidden prejudices of the literary establishment and provocatively states that ‘one implication might be that most literary academics who claim to like Kelman’s work, actually do not. She seems to be suggesting that Kelman benefits from a silencing political correctness, a general fear that actually nobody really likes Kelman’s work much at all’ (1). In making this claim, Kıvesi illuminates one of the more problematic features of Kelman criticism in that it is often instilled with ‘a silencing political correctness’ that serves to overshadow the formal and linguistic subtlety of the fiction. While Kıvesi disparages those critics that have pigeon holed Kelman’s work within a narrowly defined form of social realism or that have illustrated classism in their solidarity or derision (both overt and covert) of the writer, he occasionally falls victim to a more insidious form of the very ‘political correctness’ that he seeks to efface. Throughout the study, Kelman’s statements on art, politics and culture are too often taken to the letter and discussion of the fiction frequently rests upon the critical parameters that Kelman himself has established.
    [Show full text]