Literary Theory and
Methodology
Session Two:
Postcolonialist Theories
Agenda
• Revisiting Session One
• Postcolonialist theories: An Introduction
• Reading poco
Revisiting Session One
• Theories deal with the production of
meaning and value:
– Author
– Text
– Reader
– Context
– Code
Revisiting Session One
• Texts dramatise the production of meaning
• Texts often concern other texts and their
writing and reading:
• Writing and reading love letters in Hardy’s ”On the
Western Circuit”
• Gabriel’s dinner speech in Joyce’s ”The Dead”
• Travelling as an allegory of reading and writing in
travel literature
Postcolonialist theories: An
Introduction
• The study of colonial discourse
• Key words:
– Ethnocentrism
– Centre – margin: Western – non-Western
– Subject positions: authors and readers
• Backgrounds:
– Poststructuralism
– Postmodernism
Postcolonialist theories: An
Introduction
• An Example:
• ”Pears’ Soap”
Edward Said
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Orientalism
The ”worldliness” of the text
The critic
Said’s reading of Heart of Darkness
Edward Said
• Orientalism:
– The history of and cultural relations between
Europe and Asia
– The university discipline dealing with Oriental
languages and culture
– Images, stereotypes, myths, and ideologies
about ”the Orient” as the ”Other”
Edward Said
• The ”worldliness” of the text
– Texts are not examples of différance – of
meaning sliding endlessly along the chain of
signifiers
– Texts are used by specific people in specific
contexts for specific purposes
Edward Said Reading Heart of
Darkness
Against Chinua Achebe’s interpretation,
Conrad is a ”thoroughgoing racist”
• Contrapuntal reading of the two narratives:
– The official imperialist enterprise
– The non-Western world
• Conrad shows but cannot see both
narratives
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
• The subaltern
• Spivak’s reading of Jane Eyre
• Spivak’s reading of The Satanic Verses
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
• The subaltern – the colonized non-elite
– How can the subaltern speak?
– How can the subaltern be spoken for?
Spivak Reading Jane Eyre
• Jane Eyre – feminist heroine of British
fiction (independence, individualism)
• an allegory of the general epistemic
violence of imperialism” (i.e. of the way in
which imperialism projects a white,
European epistemology onto the rest of
the world) – silencing the subaltern
A Selection of Further Important
Concepts
• Mimic man: in-between subjectivity
• Hybridity: Bakthin and revolutionary
discourse (the dialogic)
• Diaspora – the dispersion of something
that was originally localized (people,
language, culture)
The Spicy Brits
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British immigrant writers:
Salman Rushdie
Kazuo Ishiguro
Timothy Mo
Zadie Smith, White Teeth
Monica Ali, Brick Lane