Close Readings At its worst, these responses entirely neglect the performative dimension of the text as a whole. Gilmore , , the remaining third attribute, that of sexual potency, expands to clinical proportions. Heavily mis using Fanon, MacLeod accordingly proposes that the perpetual desire to conquer white women in The Lonely Londoners really only displaces the desire for white masculinity.
While it is possible to take all sorts of issues with this conclusion — a conclusion which apparently conflates the diametrically opposed politics of Selvon and V. Naipaul, the more in famous and infinitely more anglophile of the two major Indo-Trinidadian writers of the Windrush generation — its major problem is that it ignores the fact that The Lonely Londoners programmatically exceeds ethnographic realism. Houlden , 34— Yet of course, it also comes at a certain cost: This may less be Western readers on whom the Caribbean generic dimensions of performance are lost and who see their prejudices confirmed in seeming social and psychological realisms.
The Lonely Londoners performatively redraws the map of the city, and claims it as a West Indian metropolis by way of its narrative manoeuvres. This concerns particularly the use of language and naming by the narrator and characters, as well as their various movements and everyday practices.
Bayswater to you until you living in the city for at least two years. Is a bay? It have water? It is remarkable in this context that Selvon did not originally intend a novel entirely in creole.
He comments on the genesis of the novel: I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. The people I wanted to describe were entertaining people indeed, but I could not really move. At that stage, I had written the narrative in English and most of the dialogues in dialect. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along. Selvon qtd. The narrative subject in The Lonely Londoners undercuts the notion of monadic subjectivity installed by the bourgeois interventions of the European Enlightenment whose universalist projections of a common humanity were from its inception flawed by an endemic racism cf.
James Instead, the authorial self is inherently relational and collective, extending into and blending with the performed voices of characters, refraining from judgement or a drive toward closure. He remarks: I did not pick the Jamaican way of talking in London. I only tried to produce what I believed was thought of as a Caribbean dialect.
The modified version in which I write my dialect may be a manner of extending the language. It may be called artificial and fabricated.
The way I treat the language is not the way it is spoken in Jamaica, or Barbados, or Trinidad either, for that matter. Yet in a more profound sense it is inclusive in not rejecting, but adopting and syncretising Western literary traditions within the alternative epistemologies of West Indian styles.
Close Readings The Lonely Londoners does not subvert, or write back in anger to the English novel, the more recent histories of which are unfolded in this handbook.
Rather, it generously endows an ossified tradition with new aesthetic and ideological possibilities. Most fundamentally, it explores ways of writing beyond the endemic loneliness not only of its characters, but of the modern literary condition. The Lonely Londoners is in this sense a novel that is not only to be read, but also to be carefully listened to, as its ballads call for a communal response.
That response is triggered, first and foremost, by the artful musicalisation and seemingly effortless flow of language. And surely, his most outstanding performance in The Lonely Londoners is the syncretistic incorporation of realist and modernist techniques into the antiphonic ethics of Caribbean orality. It is here, as well as in more recent criticism much of which has informed this chapter, that The Lonely Londoners begins to trigger productive controversies on the politics of race, class and gender, syncretistic narrative strategies and interepistemic challenges.
Given its amazing potential for postcolonial thought, however, the overall critical attention to the novel has remained comparatively sparse. That may still be true to some extent, and it may include this essay.
The Lonely Londoners. New York: Longman, []. Close Readings Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. London: Routledge, Bentley, Nick.
In Praise of Creoleness. Paris: Gallimard, Birat, Kathie. Birbalsingh, Frank. Burton, Jonathan, and Ania Loomba, eds.
New York: Palgrave, Courtman, Sandra. Davies, Barrie. Dawson, Ashley. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, []. Dyer, Rebecca. Edwards, Paul. The Lonely Londoners. Plot Summary. All Symbols Hyde Park. LitCharts Teacher Editions. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts.
The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of every Shakespeare play. Sign Up. Already have an account? Sign in. From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. Literature Poetry Lit Terms Shakescleare.
Download this LitChart! Teachers and parents! Struggling with distance learning? Themes All Themes. Symbols All Symbols.
If you would prefer not to lend your voice to LibriVox , you could lend us your ears. Proof listeners catch mistakes we may have missed during the initial recording and editing process. Readers record themselves reading a section of a book, edit the recording, and upload it to the LibriVox Management Tool. For an outline of the Librivox audiobook production process, please see The LibriVox recording process.
We require new readers to submit a sample recording so that we can make sure that your set up works and that you understand how to export files meeting our technical standards.
We do not want you to waste previous hours reading whole chapters only to discover that your recording is unusable due to a preventable technical glitch. A book coordinator commonly abbreviated BC in the forum is a volunteer who manages all the other volunteers who will record chapters for a LibriVox recording.
Metadata coordinators MCs , help and advise Book Coordinators, and take over the files with the completed recordings soloists are also Book Coordinators in this sense, as they prepare their own files for the Meta coordinators.
0コメント