Postmodern Fiction and the Break-Up of Britain

This is a monograph analysing the symbolic role played by contemporary fiction in the break-up of political and cultural consensus in British public life. This study explores how British identity has been explored and renegotiated by contemporary writers. It starts by examining the new emphasis on space and place that has emerged in recent cultural analysis, and shows how this spatial emphasis informs different literary texts. Having first analysed a series of novels that draw an implicit parallel between the end of the British Empire and the break-up of the unitary British state, the study explores how contemporary writing in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales contributes to a sense of nationhood in those places, and so contributes to the break-up of Britain symbolically. Dix argues that the break-up of Britain is not limited to political devolution in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It is also an imaginary process that can be found occurring on a number of other conceptual coordinates. Feminism, class, regional identities and ethnic communities are all terrains on which different writers carry out a fictional questioning of received notions of Britishness and so contribute in different ways to the break-up of Britain

The Permanent Tourist: Guidebooks in Travel and Education

About a year ago I heard a paper presented by Gary Day at the University of York on the fate of theory in higher education. He looked at the ways in which university departments had been brought within the auspices of a culture of inspection. In a world where higher education commands a fee and is thus becoming more and more commodified, there must be some means of assuring the quality of the product on offer, as there are for other kinds of product on the market ranging from telecommunications to food safety. In particular, he references Catherine Belsey’s Critical Practice (1980) and Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory (1995) as landmark moments in a drive to render the skills gleaned from English courses more quantifiable. If a Higher Education course is a commodity in which students are investing time and money, they need to feel certain that by the end of the course they will have received the skills in which they have invested, otherwise they will select another course from the market. These guidebooks to literary and cultural theory are thus an important means of providing the students with the skills they require. They minimize the students’ personal response to texts, providing instead a checklist of what various authors and critics ‘do.’ It is a scenario in which the reader is rendered entirely passive, as if he or she simply absorbs from the manual a basic sense of how they should approach a text if they want to give it a post-colonial, gay, or Marxist reading. To do this is to measure English and the human sciences against the material progress of science and technology – criteria by which they will always be judged wanting since the study of English per se does not achieve material results. Instead, the trend is to generate a set of students who will at least read and think in certain routine ways, which in this case means not thinking for themselves at all, merely consuming and absorbing passively the skills which their theoretical manuals provide. The use of guidebooks in higher education in many ways thus forestalls the possibility for really creative individual work and expression, generating instead a gradually homogenised discipline, English Literature. The production of a passive reader and routine patterns of response informs my idea of guidebooks more generally. It is in the nature of guidebooks to present stable meanings and self-contained units of information. At the same time, the construction of a guidebook means that it is not amenable to interrogation. To depend on a guidebook is not to know what questions we would need to ask in order to disavow the contents of that book. The user of the guide – whether reader or traveller – is thus in many ways a passive figure. In this paper I look both at travel guides and fictional representations of the Guide and suggest that the line dividing them might not be as clear as it seems

Mark Twain: Freedom, Imperialism and Selective Tradition

When I look at critical work on Mark Twain, I am struck by the extent to which it has been invested in establishing Twain as the symptomatic American writer. He is seen as the creator of a new national American literary vernacular idiom, promulgator of quintessentially American values such as frontier spirit, and a champion of free speech and social criticism. These virtues in turn are then distilled as the defining elements of national character. As a non-American national, I find something troubling in this approach. I do not dispute the validity of the established nationalist reading of Mark Twain per se. But I have found that my interest in the texts and the history with which they are involved is continually frustrated by this other insistence on the national parameters of the texts. I have always thought that I enjoy and value the texts, and yet am also aware that I do not value them for this reason. Is my valuation of the texts then invalid? What in any case is the basis for my valuation of them? The more I have tried to answer this question, the more I have found that the nationalist-symptomatic readings of Twain are enmeshed with a deeply conservative nationalist politics. The nationalist-heroic approach is founded on a selective tradition, keeping the spotlight firmly on those Twain texts which sustain this reading. To question that selection and that reading is to open up an alternative current in the reception of Mark Twain’s work, examining how the texts might be valued without necessarily endorsing an extreme form of cultural nationalism. In the recent political climate in Britain and America, the figure of Mark Twain has been used as a kind of bridging figure. Twain is seen as a comic genius to whom we can all relate, thus creating a kind of fellow-feeling on both sides of the Atlantic and cementing the ‘special relationship’ between both countries. That this should occur during a period of jointly prosecuted aggressive overseas foreign policy on the two governments has suggestive political implications. In this regard it is interesting that one B.B.C. commentator on the funeral of Ronald Regan compared the up-bringing of President Regan to a Huckleberry Finn style idyll. Britons and Americans were invited to put all differences behind them through this nostalgic appeal to America’s most established literary hero. It did not seem to strike anyone as odd that these invocations of nostalgia and rural idyll were greatly in contrast to the very un-idyllic foreign military pursuits being prosecuted by both nations at that very time. There is a deep irony here, because this attempt at bridging two cultures masks an earlier and much more complicated bridge – in precisely this area of aggressive overseas expansion. Historically, the moment of British High Imperialism in the nineteenth century also signals the point at which America enters the world stage as a militaristic and pseudo-imperial power. When the US joined the European governments at the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884-85, to negotiate commercial and territorial rights in the Congo basin, it had in effect become as much of an imperial power as Britain. Between these two expanding empires there was a good deal of traffic in commerce, culture, and ideas. In this paper I wish to demonstrate that there is a political unconscious at work in late nineteenth-century American literature. This unconscious takes the form of a complicated negotiation of the relation between American and British political and imperial interests. I am using Twain as a case in point, to highlight this complexity. The nineteenth century public sphere in America is one of great anti-imperial activity. This gives rise to the social criticism for which Twain is perhaps best known. Yet this criticism feeds into the established nationalist reading of Twain, where Twain and his characters are somehow taken to embody the voice of a nation’s conscience and thus tell the nation all of the best things about itself. My reading of Twain is more complex. I do not in any way dispute the idea that Twain was an important social critic - there is overwhelming evidence to support this view. But this approach to Twain seems insufficiently historical. There is also evidence to suggest that Twain’s work, like much of late nineteenth century America, was inextricably bound up with the practices and ideologies of imperial Britain, even while the man himself was an outspoken critic of imperialism. I do not wish to score points against Twain personally, but I do wish to stress this important historical limiting factor. The historical congruence of British and American imperialism at this time was such that Twain’s political criticism could not out flank it. Thus I wish to demonstrate how Twain’s work was involved in the structure of American imperial expansion, despite his own egalitarian politics. Implicitly here I shall be interrogating the concept of freedom – and the uses and abuses to which this word has been recently subject. The established nationalist reading of Twain sets Twain up as the moral mouthpiece of America, endlessly campaigning for freedom and justice. This move implicitly invites us to celebrate the conditions of freedom which enable such public critique in the first place. By highlighting the selective nature of such an appropriation of both freedom and Twain, I hope to bring the analysis up to date with a very urgent contemporary concern. For what Laura Chrisman has called the imperial unconscious binds Britain and America to imperial policies through this ratifying appeal to a notion of freedom. And this imperial unconscious has not yet obsolesced. On the contrary, in Iraq today, it may only just be reaching its zenith

“To Speak in New Ways”: Class and Poetry in Wales since 1970

Shortly before Margaret Thatcher’s first re-election as Prime Minister in June 1983, one of Wales’s best-known working-class writers, Raymond Williams, was asked to give a paper entitled ‘Problems of the Coming Period’ to a meeting of the Socialist Society, London. In this chapter, I wish to use Williams’s paper to provide some of the social and historical contexts in which Welsh poetry since 1979 can be understood

From Writer’s Block to Extended Plot: career construction theory and lives in writing

Although intangible, authorial careers are nevertheless material entities that have to be constructed in order to exist and that can be analysed to generate critical understanding of the creative works produced within them. Yet until recently, very little research or scholarly attention had been devoted to the concept of the authorial career as such. This paper argues that the body of work known as career construction theory, which originated in social psychology at the end of the twentieth century, can be used to discuss authorial careers in order to illuminate the relationship between life stages and writing practice in new ways. This is because career construction posits individuals as metaphorical ‘authors’ of their own life stories, with career counsellors acting as co-authors of the next chapter in an individual’s career narrative during times of career uncertainty or vocational change. By identifying certain life themes – or macro-narratives – that transcend the concerns or issues that preoccupy an author at precise stages in their careers (or micro-narratives), it draws attention to a complex dual time frame on which authorial careers are based, emphasising a combination of sameness and difference over time

Autofiction: The Forgotten Face of French Theory

This paper argues that, compared to other components of French critical theory (structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, feminism and intertextuality), autofiction has been less influential both in its ‘home’ country and in the English-speaking world. This relative neglect is ironic because, as the paper shows, those different areas of theoretical inquiry each helped pave the way for the development of ideas about autofiction, but simultaneously eclipsed them so that for decades autofiction remained under-conceptualized and under-researched. Having identified and critiqued a number of reasons for this belatedness, the paper then identifies two recent contexts that are more auspicious for the evolution of theories of autofiction. Specifically, it argues that developments in the concept of participatory culture (including audience research) on the one hand and the proliferation of various forms of historical and/or cultural memorials, commemorative events and public anniversaries on the other both provide meaningful contexts in which theories of autofiction have recently started to reach their full potential

Raymond Williams: Cultural Materialism and the Break-Up of Britain

To Raymond Williams, the nation-state was fundamentally an institution of cultural modernity and imperialism. In his major work, The Country and the City (1973), he attempted an examination of the connections that exist between the capitalist order and the nation state. Beginning with a look at the genre of country house writing, Williams was interested in how this writing both reflected the power of a late feudal aristocracy and actively contributed to augmenting its power. The idealisation of one particular class was accompanied by a mystification of national interest and national identity. Williams pursued this analysis across a long historical period, from early modernity into the twentieth century. He explored the structural congruence that existed between the process of nation building in Britain and empire building overseas. In the last instance, he extended the metaphor of the country house, suggesting that, throughout the period of imperialism, the Western world has become something like an enormous country estate. It draws resources and labour from its (third world) hinterland, while also blinding itself to the injustices and violence on which this process is founded. While writing The Country and the City, Williams was also at work on a detective novel, The Volunteers (1978). In what follows I shall offer a reading of The Volunteers, tied to a survey of The Country and the City. I wish to extrapolate the extent to which the tradition of country house writing which Williams analyses can be taken as a measure of the shifting imperial system. This is elevated in the work of Williams to a post-imperial theorising of that global process. I shall then look at the transition that has occurred in country house writing since 1997, the year of devolution in Scotland and Wales. Historically, this transition is related to the end of imperial power overseas during the 1950s and 60s. The fact that Williams himself did not survive to witness the moment of devolution in no way weakens the impact of his writing. I shall argue that his work anticipates the moment of devolution and the break-up of the British state in important ways, with the result that Williams is a major figure in our understanding of British postcolonial cultures today

On Balkanism and Orientalism: Undifferentiated patterns of perception in literary and critical representations of Eastern Europe

This paper explores the extent to which Eastern Europe has been historically subject to a process of othering in the Western literary imagination; and how far the Western practice of Balkanism can be considered congruous with the wider practice of Orientalism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the twenty-first. Drawing on theoretical work by Vesna Goldsworthy and Maria Todorova, it shows that in both fiction and literary scholarship Western writers have been unable fully to conceptualise Eastern Europe, with the result that their fictional portrayals are evasive and indistinct and their literary analysis unable to define a clear object. Malcolm Bradbury's novel Rates of Exchange (1983), Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (1995) and Jim Crace's Six (2003) are explored alongside Edward Said's Beginnings and Fredric Jameson's Political Unconscious to show that this under-conceptualisation has continued to dominate literary representations of Eastern Europe during the late- and post-Cold War periods, thereby subjecting Said and Jameson to a rigorous critique of their own methods with regard to the Western practice of Balkanism of which they are uncritical