2OO8 and electronically at [email protected] © British and American Studies, vol. XIV, 2008 CONTENTS “POST”-DILEMMAS MICHAEL CHAPMAN POSTCOLONIALISMA LITERARY TURN / 7 PIA BRÎNZEU “POSTCOLONIALISM” OR “POSTCOLONIALISMS”?: THE DILEMMAS OF A TEACHER / 21 ILEANA SORA DIMITRIU POSTMODERNISM AND/ AS POSTCOLONIALISM:ON RE- READING MILAN KUNDERA AND BREYTEN BREYTENBACH / 33 ELISABETTA MARINO FROM BRICK LANE TO ALENTEJO BLUE: CROSS-CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS IN MONICA ALI’S WRITINGS / 51 DANIELA ROGOBETE PROTEAN IDENTITIES AND INVISIBLE BORDERS IN HARI KUNZRU’S THE IMPRESSIONIST / 59 MARIA ªTEFÃNESCU AN ARTIST OF FLOATING WOR(L)DS / 71 ANDREEA ªERBAN CANNIBALISED BODIES. MARGARET ATWOOD’S METAPHORS OF TROUBLED IDENTITIES / 79 ANDREEA TEREZA NIÞIªOR TWO INSTANCES OF THE FRAGMENTARY IN THE POSTMODERN NOVEL: ITALO CALVINO’S IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELER AND ANNIE PROULX’S THE SHIPPING NEWS / 89 CRISTINA CHEVEREªAN DEARLY BELOVED:TONI MORRISON’S RESURRECTION OF THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN NARRATIVE / 105 JACQUES RAMEL UNDEAF YOUR EARS: WHAT THE TRAGEDY OF RICHARD II GIVES US TO HEAR / 113 KLAUDIA PAPP INSCRIPTION AND ENCRYPTION: DAPHNE DU MAURIER’S REBECCA / 121 CLAUDIA IOANA DOROHOLSCHI WILLIAM MORRIS’S CHILD CHRISTOPHER AND GOLDILIND THE FAIR: MEDIEVALISM AND THE ANTI-NATURALISM OF THE 1890S / 129 ANNIE RAMEL THE WHEEL OF DESIRE IN THE MILL ON THE FLOSS / 139 DANA PERCEC BARRY UNSWORTH AND THE HISTORICAL NOVEL TODAY / 151 TERESA BELA NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE IN THE EARLY NOVELS OF PIERS PAUL READ / 161 ISTVÁN D. RÁCZ WHAT IS “ALMOST TRUE”: LARKIN AND KEATS / 171 CLAIRE CRABTREE-SINNETT INTENSITIES OF CONSCIOUSNESS DELUSION, DREAM, AND DELIRIUM IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S MRS. DALLOWAY AND KATHERINE ANN PORTER’S “PALE HORSE, PALE RIDER” / 181 B.A.S. vol. XIV, 2008 4 CULTURAL SPECULATIONS CHAD WEIDNER “THE GREAT GOD PAN IS DEAD!” THE ECOLOGICAL ELEGY OF WILLIAM BURROUGHS’ GHOST OF CHANCE / 195 MARIA BAJNER THE POWER OF ATTRACTION IN THE NARRATIVE OF SOAP OPERAS / 207 ERIC GILDER, THE PEDIGREE OF AMERICA’S CONSTITUTION:AN MERVYN HAGGER ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATION / 217 DANA VASILIU THE MEDIEVAL SOCIAL HIERARCHY: FROM CONGREGATIO FIDELIUM TO SOCIETAS HUMANA / 227 MAGDA DANCIU THE END OF THE JOURNEY: BACK TO SCOTLAND / 237 IRINA DIANA MÃDROANE TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITIES: ROMANIA AND EUROPEAN VALUES IN OFFICIAL VS. FORUM DISCOURSES / 247 LINGUISTIC ZIG-ZAG DELIA ROBESCU LINGUISTIC RESOURCES OF BIAS IN NEWS DISCOURSE / 265 STEEN SCHOUSBOE LINGUISTIC FLIM-FLAM? / 275 PREDRAG NOVAKOV ENGLISH PRESENT PERFECT: ASPECTUAL AND TEMPORAL COMPONENTS / 283 DARIA PROTOPOPESCU ON DEPICTIVES, MANNER AND TRANSPARENT ADVERBS IN ENGLISH AND ROMANIAN / 293 ADINA OANA NICOLAE MACHINES AND TOOLS IN ECONOMIC METAPHORS / 305 HORTENSIA PÂRLOG HIS COCKLE HAT / 315 ALBERT VERMES CONTEXTUAL ASSUMPTIONS AND THE TRANSLATOR’S STRATEGY. A CASE STUDY / 331 NATALIA VID POLITICAL - IDEOLOGICAL TRANSLATIONS OF ROBERT BURNS’ POETRY IN THE SOVIET UNION / 343 “POST”-DILEMMAS POSTCOLONIALISM A LITERARY TURN MICHAEL CHAPMAN University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban Abstract: The paper poses a Commonwealth (more generally, a South) challenge to British (or northern institutional) delineations of the postcolonial. It is suggested that globalisation and postcoloniality represent interlocking categories, in which the political supersedes the literary. The argument here, in contrast, pursues a literary turn. Is there a role for literature — or, to be specific, imaginative literature, or the literary — in postcolonial studies? And where may one locate my own country, South Africa, or any other marginalised country, for example Romania, in a field delineated by northern, that is, U.S., British, institutional purposes, practices, paradigms and, more pragmatically, career/publishing opportunities? Having developed as a set of conceptual and perceptual resources for the study of the effects on people’s lives of colonial modernity — from its Renaissance expansions to contemporary manifestations of global capital — postcolonialism has come to describe heterogeneous, though linked, groupings of critical enterprises: a critique of Western totalising narratives; a revision of the Marxian class project; utilisation of both poststructural enquiry (the displaced linguistic subject) and postmodern pursuit (scepti- cism of the truth claims of Cartesian individualism); the condition of both nativist longing for independence from the metropolitan power and recog- nition of the failure of the decolonisation trajectory; a marker for voices of pronouncement by non-resident, ‘Third-World’ intellectual cadres in ‘First- World’ universities. More positively from the perspective of the South — if, indeed, postcolonialism, as Robert J.C. Young has it, is a mark of “the West’s own undoing” (2001: 65) — there is a focusing of the ethical and imagina- tive lens on expression, writing, and testimony outside of, or in tangential relation to, the metropolitan centre-space. Such a focus, in curricular design, involves new selections of texts and revised reading practices B.A.S. vol. XIV, 2008 8 prompted by what was earlier called Commonwealth literature or, more recently, new literatures in English or, simply, the new englishes. I refer lastly in the above list to literary matters. For postcolonialism identifies its priorities not as literary, but as political or ideological. Again to quote Young, who visited South Africa under the auspices of a project, Postcolonialism: A South/African Perspective: The assumption of postcolonial studies is that many of the wrongs, if not crimes, against humanity are a product of the economic dominance of the north over the south. In this way, the historical role of Marxism in the his- tory of anti-colonial resistance remains paramount as a fundamental framework of postcolonial thinking. Postcolonial theory operates within the historical legacy of Marxist critique...which it simultaneously trans- forms according to the precedent of the greatest tricontinental anti-colo- nial intellectual politicians (2001: 6). With tricontinental referring here to Africa, Asia, and Latin America, it is indeed political figures, or at least philosophical spokespersons, not liter- ary people, who feature most prominently in Young’s monumental Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001), from which the above passage is taken. There is seemingly a paradox here. For postcolonialism has sought to accord value to the personal or human dimension — the effects on people’s lives — of asymmetrical power relations between North and South. The field — however mixed in its material and cultural presuppositions — has struck, continues to strike, a chord in literature departments which, as Young has noted, constitute the “solitary space within academic institutions where subjective forms of knowledge were taken seriously” (2001: 64). Yet a literary turn — my qualifier to the title of this paper — requires defence not only because of its marginalisation in postcolonial political mapping and revisionism, but also because of its status in the field as handmaiden to the- ory. In its discursive categorisations — its Foucauldian acts of enunciation by which the postcolonial formulates the condition of its own possibility (see Foucault 1970) — postcolonial theory predominates as sense-maker, or event-maker, over and above the experiential terrain to which its theory directs its diagnostic or emblematic or, too often, its obscurantist pronunci- ations. After twenty-five years of northern institutional postcolonialism — its beginning is usually tied to the publication of Edward Said’s entirely lucid study, Orientalism (1978) — we encounter a repetitious opposition between 9 “POST”-DILEMMAS the ‘framework ideas’, principally, of Said, Spivak and Bhabha, designated compositely as the linguistic-cultural or poststructural turn, and the ‘conflict ideas’ of a persistent Marxist materialism in, among others, Ahmad and San Juan Jr (see also Ali 1993, and Parry 2004). In what too often is reminiscent of binary argument, the theory or methodology stands the danger of repli- cating the very power positions it wishes to challenge: “the West and the rest of us” (see Chinwezu 1975). The ordering of the questions, in consequence, has led to scepticisms emanating from those of ‘South’ identity. Such scepticisms are summarised in Kwame Anthony Appiah’s wicked parody — does he, ensconsed in the northern university, include himself in his parody? — of postcoloniality as “the condition of a relatively small western-style, western-trained group of writers and thinkers, who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery” (1992: 63). What constitutes a nation; what, an ethnic group; what, the new world order; what may oppose the hegemony of U.S. imperialism? These questions characterise the utopian agenda of postcolonialism: the aim being a just social or, more precisely, a socialist world, in which class is again granted significant explanatory power, and in which the issues of race, gender, and the translation of cul- tures are posited upon the value of difference. In such an agenda, differ- ence, or différance (see Derrida 1978), does not confirm division, but trans- forms ‘othering’ from negative to positive premise. The utopian model, however, may be as totalising in its configuration as the narrative of Enlightenment-modernity against which, in almost mantra-like reaction (race, class, the unfinished business of gender), post- colonialism regularly pits its opposition. Its cultural materialist tendency seeks to resurrect a Leftish