revista de estudios ingleses y norteamericanos miscelánea vol. 26 Volumen de literatura, 2002 cine y estudios culturales Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Vol. 26 • 2002 Studies se publica con la ayuda económica del (Volumen de literatura, cine y estudios cultruales) Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana de la facultad de Filosofía y Letras y del Vicerrectorado de Investigación de la Universidad de Zaragoza. Dirección, coordinación, tratamiento de textos y edi- ción electrónica (vol. 26): Publicación semestral (2 vols. al año) del María Dolores Herrero Granado, Directora Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana de la Rosa Lorés Sanz, Subdirectora Universidad de Zaragoza. Published twice a year by Hilaria Loyo Gómez, Subdirectora the Department of English and German Philology, University of Zaragoza, Spain. 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Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana de la Universidad de Zaragoza Selección de textos: ISSN: 1137-6368 Consejo de redacción de Miscelánea Depósito legal: Z-3207-1994 a journal of english and american studies miscelánea 3 Universidad de Zaragoza 2002 Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana Edición electrónica Internet homepage: http://fyl.unizar.es/miscelanea/miscelanea.html 4 miscelánea Directora Consejo de Redacción/ M. Dolores Herrero Granado Editorial Board Enrique Alcaraz Varó, Subdirectoras Universidad de Alicante Rosa Lorés Sanz José Luis Caramés Lage, Hilaria Loyo Gómez Universidad de Oviedo Francisco Collado Rodríguez, Editor de Estilo Universidad de Zaragoza Timothy Bozman Ángeles de la Concha, Universidad N. de Educación a Distancia Chantal Cornut-Gentille D‘Arcy, Universidad de Zaragoza Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana Juan José Coy Ferrer, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras Universidad de Salamanca Universidad de Zaragoza Juan José Cruz Hernández, 50009 Zaragoza • Spain Universidad de La Laguna Tel. 976 761 529 - 976 762 237 - 976 761 518 Fax. 976 761 519 Juan M. de la Cruz Fernández, E-mail: [email protected] Universidad de Málaga [email protected] Carmelo Cunchillos Jaime, [email protected] Universidad de La Rioja Edicion en Red / Online Edition: Celestino Deleyto Alcalá http://fyl.unizar.es/miscelanea/miscelanea.html Universidad de Zaragoza Rocio G. Davis, Ana Hornero Corisco, Universidad de Navarra Universidad de Zaragoza Angela Downing, Carlos Inchaurralde Besga, Universidad Complutense de Madrid Universidad de Zaragoza Angus Easson, Robert W. Lewis, University of Salford University of North Dakota Peter Evans, Pilar Marín, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University Universidad de Sevilla of London J. Hillis Miller, Teresa Fanego Lema, University of California, Irvine Universidad de Santiago de Compostela Marita Nadal Blasco, Kathleen Firth, Universidad de Zaragoza Universidad de Barcelona Mª Pilar Navarro Errasti, Celia Florén Serrano, Universidad de Zaragoza Universidad de Zaragoza Carmen Olivares Rivera, José Ángel García Landa, Universidad de Zaragoza Universidad de Zaragoza Macario Olivera Villacampa, Francisco Garrudo Carabias, Universidad de Zaragoza Universidad de Sevilla Susana Onega Jaén, José Luis González Escribano, Universidad de Zaragoza Universidad de Oviedo Beatriz Penas Ibáñez, 5 Constante González Groba, Universidad de Zaragoza Universidad de Santiago de Compostela Ramón Plo Alastrué M. Isabel González Pueyo, Universidad de Zaragoza Universidad de Zaragoza Constanza del Río Álvaro, José Luis Guijarro Morales, Universidad de Zaragoza Universidad de Cádiz Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Ignacio Guillén Galve Ibáñez, Universidad de Zaragoza Universidad de La Rioja Leo Hickey, Andrew Sanders, University of Salford University of Durham Pilar Hidalgo Andreu, Ignacio Vázquez Orta, Universidad de Málaga Universidad de Zaragoza Andrew Higson, Patrick Zabalbeascoa Terrán, University of East Anglia Universidad Pompeu Fabra table of contents Articles 11 21 39 CHRISTIAN GUTLEBEN LUIS MIGUEL GARCÍA MAI- LOURDES LÓPEZ ROPERO 6 (University of Strasbourg) NAR (University of Alicante) (University of Zaragoza) Palindromes and ‘Some of All of Us in You’: Palimpsests: Strategies of Genre, Auteur and Identity Intra-racial Relations, Deliberate Self-contradiction in Contemporary Pan-Africanism and in Postmodern British Hollywood Cinema: Clint Diaspora in Paule Fiction Eastwood’s White Hunter, Marshall’s The Fisher King Black Heart 5971 91 MÓNICA CALVO PASCUAL SONIA BAELO ALLUÉ ANUPAM NAGAR (University of Zaragoza) (University of Zaragoza) (University of North Guja- rat, India) My Beautiful Laundrette: Serial Murder, Serial Hybrid “Identity”, or the Consummerism: Bret The Two Sides of a Single Paradox of Conflicting Easton Ellis’s American Coin: Karun Rasa and Identifications in “Third Psycho (1991). Tragic Feeling Space” Asian-British Cinema of the 1980s. Reviews 103 109 113 CHRISTIAN GUTLEBEN ANNE MacCARTHY SUSANA ONEGA AND JOHN A. STOTESBURY Nostalgic Postmodernism: James Clarence Mangan, (EDS.) The Victorian Tradition and Edward Walsh and the Contemporary British Nineteenth-Century Irish London in Literature: Novel Literature in English Visionary Mappings of the (by M.a Jesús Martínez (by Teresa Sixto Rey. Metropolis Alfaro. University of University of Santiago de (by Christian Gutleben. Zaragoza) Compostela) University of Strasbourg) Abstracts Notes for Contributors 115 123 Addressing the Asian Diaspora: A Review of Four 7 Different Books on the Subject (by Rocío G. Davis. University of Navarra) 129 Acknowledgements 139 Articles PALINODES, PALINDROMES AND PALIMPSESTS: STRATEGIES OF DELIBERATE SELF-CONTRADICTION IN POSTMODERN BRITISH FICTION CHRISTIAN GUTLEBEN University of Strasbourg 11 “Words once spoke can never be recall’d” declared Wentworth Dillon in his classical Art of Poetry (1680), little thinking that his statement along with many other canonical truisms would be challenged and overturned by postmodernist fiction. To simultaneously say and unsay, tell and untell, assert and negate, propose and retract is precisely the type of paradoxical privilege contemporary literature likes to claim for itself. The consequence of these self-contradictory practices, which is manifestly also its purpose, is a lack of committment, of selection, of assertiveness, foremost on the narrative level but also and crucially in the aesthetic and ideological fields. It is my contention that if postmodernism has given rise to such polemical definitions and analyses and if it continues to be such a complex cultural phenomenon to grasp, it is in particular because of its paradigmatic association of contradictory statements, modalities, and literary traditions. The logic of self-contradiction stems from what one might call, to transpose Lyotard’s renowned phrase, an incredulity towards all meta-ideologies, or in other words a fundamental political weariness and wariness. Defined as a song and by extension a text which retracts, negates or contradicts that which has previously been stated, the palinode is, according to Antoine Compagnon (1990: 151), what characterizes postmodernism and its retraction of modernist purity, balance and messianism. Rather than choose one guiding line, contemporary art explores one type of tradition, style or dogma before questioning miscelánea: a journal of english and american studies 26 (2002): pp. 11-20 Christian Gutleben it and exploring an opposed tendency. Concretely, palinodes can take two textual forms, one isolated and syntagmatic, the other narrative and structural. In Ever After, for example, Graham Swift (1992: 120, 249, 259) uses palinodes as a strikingly repetitive figure of speech: “It’s not the end of the world. It is the end of the world”. “Life goes on. It doesn’t go on”. “It’s not the end of the world. It is. Life goes on. It doesn’t”. “Nothing is meant to be. Everything is meant to be”. Voiced by the wavering, hesitating, suicidal narrator, these antithetical declarations appear initially as a means of self-characterization: Bill Unwin who has lost all certainty stands on “groundless grounds” (55) and nourishes contradictory hopes. The same device is employed again in Out of this World and Shuttlecock (“The facts of life, my darlings. Your parents fuck. They don’t fuck”, Swift 1988: 139), but it becomes evident however that what is at stake is not merely the depiction of the protagonists, and this is underscored by the fact that retractions can also be found in the structural unfolding. In Ever After, the double-layered narrative starts by accounting for the conjugal, albeit provisional, happiness of the two main characters before dwelling on the opposite likelihood, i.e., unfaithfulness and woeful cuckoldry. One state of affairs does not cancel the other: a possibility and its opposite are presented concomitantly, neither being more definitive than the 12 other. The same process is at work in Shuttlecock where the initial portrait of the protagonist’s father as a war hero is later retracted and replaced by the description of a traitor and a coward,