Abstract
This introductory chapter contextualizes the book’s argument in relation to different accounts of Romanticism’s afterlife, and to different interlinked conceptions of Romanticism—as privileged canon, imperial metonym, period metaphor, or textual repository. It also outlines the book’s theoretical schema and develops the book’s method in miniature through readings of two fragments of Romantic textuality as they appear in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace respectively.
‘From a bare ridge,’ he reads aloud,
we also first beheld
Unveiled the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved
To have a soulless image on the eye
That had usurped upon a living thought
That never more could be.
—J. M. Coetzee , Disgrace
In order to return to [the things themselves], it is necessary first to see them, therefore to see them as they come and, in the end, to bear their unpredictable landing.
—Jean-Luc Marion , Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness
The experiment has only started which, clearing the mind for the shock of life, would in time overcome every arbitrary god of the intellect, thus to achieve a perfect induction and a faultless faith.
—Geoffrey Hartman , The Unmediated Vision
I decompose, but I composing still.
—Derek Walcott , ‘The Spoiler’s Return’
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Notes
- 1.
Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 160.
- 2.
See Marc Redfield, The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003), 31.
- 3.
Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 18.
- 4.
Edward Larrissy, ed. Romanticism and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 11.
- 5.
Marc Redfield, ‘Aesthetics, Theory, and the Profession of Literature: Derrida and Romanticism’, Studies in Romanticism 46, no. 2 (2007), 242.
- 6.
See the Romantic Circles special edition on ‘Romanticism and the Insistence of the Aesthetic’ for essays by Forest Pyle, Ian Balfour, David Ferris, Karen Swann and Marc Redfield on this question. The contributors seek to move beyond the idea that Romantic aesthetic values can be contained in a safely historicized, volatilized past.
- 7.
Marjorie Perloff, ‘Postmodernism/Fin De Siècle: Defining “Difference” in Late Twentieth-Century Poetics’, in Romanticism and Postmodernism, ed. Edward Larrissy, 1999), 200.
- 8.
See, respectively, Peter Otto, Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), Justin Clemens, The Romanticism of Contemporary Theory: Institutions, Aesthetics, Nihilism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), and Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
- 9.
Jacques Khalip, and Forest Pyle, ‘Introduction: The Present Darkness of Romanticism’, in Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism, ed. Jacques Khalip and Forest Pyle (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 7.
- 10.
Graham Huggan writes that there are ‘several thousand definitions of Romanticism’, and while postcolonialism is still no match, ‘at the current turnover rate, it might get there yet’ (‘Postcolonial Ecocriticism and the Limits of Green Romanticism’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 45, no. 1 (2009), 3).
- 11.
Cynthia Chase, ‘Introduction’, in Romanticism, ed. Cynthia Chase (New York and London: Longman, 1993), 1.
- 12.
It is of course possible for postcolonial writing itself to offer a genetic narrative, laying claim to a Romantic genealogy of inheritance in which the postcolonial artist would be located, a phenomenon that can imply a diversity of representational politics (from Derek Walcott ’s retrieval of a mode of verse autobiography in the context of Caribbean artistic emergence, to Stephen Watson’s iteration of the Wordsworthian inscription in apartheid South Africa). These are still examples of the ‘pleasant freedom’ of choosing one’s literary parents, as Salman Rushdie puts it.
- 13.
Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 28–29.
- 14.
Kincaid, Lucy, 18.
- 15.
Kincaid, Lucy, 30.
- 16.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘The Burden of English’, in The Lie of the Land: English Literary Studies in India, ed. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1992), 276.
- 17.
Spivak, ‘The Burden of English’, 279.
- 18.
See, for example, Grace Nichols’s poem ‘Spring’ from The Fat Black Women’s Poems, in which the speaker steps outdoors after a winter of influenza ‘only to have that daffodil baby/ kick me in the eye’ (Grace Nichols, The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (London: Virago, 2007), 34), and Andrea Levy’s Small Island, in which Hortense attempts to teach her grandmother the poem (Andrea Levy, Small Island (London: Headline, 2004). Kincaid and Lorna Goodison have written in similar terms of their resentment of the poem (Jamaica Kincaid, ‘Plant Parenthood’, The New Yorker (1995), 46; Lorna Goodison, ‘How I Became a Writer’, in Caribbean Women Writers, ed. Selwyn R. Cudjoe (Wellesley, MA: Calaloux Publications, 1990), 291).
- 19.
Ian Smith, ‘Misusing Canonical Intertexts: Jamaica Kincaid, Wordsworth and Colonialism’s “Absent Things”’, Callaloo 25, no. 3 (2002), 801–2.
- 20.
See Helen Tiffin, ‘The Institution of Literature’, in A History of Literature in the Caribbean, Vol. 2, ed. A. James Arnold (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2001) for a discussion of the nature, function, and historical reach of these readers in the Caribbean and elsewhere (45–6).
- 21.
Kincaid, Lucy, 29.
- 22.
I am suggesting that Kincaid’s Romanticism consists in a hostility to aesthetico-cultural entanglements. The full radicalness of this position is most clear in Autobiography of My Mother, in which it is ultimately blankness, the ‘blankness of the sea and sky, so vast and without thought’, with which Xuela wants to commune (New York: Penguin, 1997), 106. The negative sublimity of the sea and sky corresponds with the negative phenomenology of the subject, if we can talk of a subject when what is at stake is the reduction of the historically saturated subject to something that can stand alone, free of determinants.
- 23.
Kincaid, ‘Plant Parenthood’. Quoted in Smith, ‘Misusing Canonical Intertexts: Jamaica Kincaid, Wordsworth and Colonialism’s “Absent Things”’, 802.
- 24.
Marc Redfield, ‘Reading the Aesthetic, Reading Romanticism’, in Romanticism and the Insistence of the Aesthetic, ed. Forest Pyle 2005), 1.
- 25.
‘Representation’ and ‘presentation’ are two competing translations of the word Vorstellung in Kant’s work, but the latter better captures the sense of the subjective process of conceptually forming objects (such as by intuition, conception, or imagination)—in contrast to re-presenting something already apprehended on this level.
- 26.
V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (New York: Vintage, 1988), 21.
- 27.
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Vintage, 2000), 22–23.
- 28.
Coetzee, Disgrace, 32.
- 29.
Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), 95.
- 30.
Coetzee, Disgrace, 21.
- 31.
Geoffrey Hartman, The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke, and Valéry (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), 156.
- 32.
Hartman, quoted in Pieter Vermeulen, Geoffrey Hartman: Romanticism after the Holocaust (London: Continuum, 2010), 18.
- 33.
Derek Walcott, Conversations with Derek Walcott (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), 162.
- 34.
Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 5.
- 35.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 10.
- 36.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 53.
- 37.
As I explain in more detail in the next chapter, Marion conceives of phenomenology as a philosophical mode committed to the question of showing rather than proving, or of letting things show themselves. His key idea of the given relates to the capacity of what Adorno would call the ‘nonconceptual’ to give itself, and so to be received rather than produced by the perceiving, writing subject.
- 38.
See Sam Durrant’s reading of stupidity as the ‘anti-telos’ of Coetzee’s fiction (Sam Durrant, ‘J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, and the Limits of the Sympathetic Imagination’, in J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual, ed. Jane Poyner (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 121.).
- 39.
Derek Walcott, Collected Poems, 1948–1984 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 432.
- 40.
J. M. Coetzee, edited by David Atwell, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (Cambridge, MA: 1992), 65.
- 41.
William Wordsworth, The Prelude: The 1805 Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 8.700–705.
- 42.
Pieter Vermeulen includes Terada and François in his survey of a post-Hartmanian mode of Romantic criticism faithful to Hartman ’s interest in ‘the phenomenological role of literary form’, its implication in the ‘ecology or interanimation of mind and world’ (‘Geoffrey Hartman and the Affective Ecology of Romantic Form’, Literature Compass 8, no. 10 (2011), 758.).
- 43.
Paul Youngquist, ‘Introduction’, in Race, Romanticism, and the Atlantic, ed. Paul Youngquist (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 1.
- 44.
Paul de Man, Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism: The Gauss Seminar and Other Papers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 3.
- 45.
Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
- 46.
Stephen Slemon, ‘The Scramble for Post-Colonialism’, in De-Scribing Empire: Postcolonialism and Textuality, ed. Chris Tiffin, and Alan Lawson (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994), 17.
- 47.
Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 184.
- 48.
Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 13.
- 49.
Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 218–19.
- 50.
Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 261.
- 51.
Roy Osamu Kamada, Postcolonial Romanticisms: Landscape and the Possibility of Inheritance (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 4.
- 52.
Srinivas Aravamudan, ‘The Colonial Logic of Late Romanticism’, South Atlantic Quarterly 102, no. 1 (2003), 179.
- 53.
Khalip and Pyle, ‘Introduction: The Present Darkness of Romanticism’, 6.
- 54.
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), 267.
- 55.
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (New York: Routledge, 2002), 32.
- 56.
Ankhi Mukherjee, What is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2014), 116.
- 57.
Mukherjee, What is a Classic?, 4–5.
- 58.
Mukherjee, What is a Classic?, 7–8.
- 59.
John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 36. Quoted in Mukherjee, What is a Classic?, 13.
- 60.
Chase, ‘Introduction’, 1.
- 61.
Redfield, The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism, 9.
- 62.
Where the Renaissance, for example, is now usually referred to as the Early Modern period, the designation ‘Romantic period’ still inscribes Romanticism at its centre—and even efforts to bypass such terminology altogether, by referring to literature from 1789 to 1832, for instance, ironically further entrench the sense that the period must be held apart, even if its content must remain sublimely nameless.
- 63.
Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 82.
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Dickinson, P. (2018). Chapter 1: Romanticism and Postcolonial Writing: Living Thoughts, Breathing Worlds. In: Romanticism and Aesthetic Life in Postcolonial Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70341-1_1
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