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Loading... The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century…by Rosemary Marangoly George
   None No current Talk conversations about this book. I know nothing of American poets. I read it just as Eileen Simpson's memoir. the poets were all drunks and/or crazy. (  ) mahallett | May 31, 2020 |  The author is a professor of "Literatures in English and Cultural Studies". I have begun dipping into the theses of this book, and have becomes engrossed. The subtitle of the Epilogue, "All homesickness is fiction" first caught my attention. Then, (prefaced with two quotes, one from Simone Weil and one from Rushdie) comes the brilliant first sentence :' If "roots" are a conservative myth, then all homesickness is fiction. ' I then turned to the Prologue and found the intended counterpoint of subtitle : "All fiction is homesickness". I randomly started out at chapter three,-- having been forewarned that chapter two had a feminist slant,-- and searched out analyses of the few authors I was familiar with. (Btw, her writing is so compelling, and her extracts, from fiction, or from crtitical works, are so well-chosen and woven into a non-dry style of writing, that I am currently adding to my wish list of books and new authors to read.) Her characterization of "House of Mr. Biswas" was spot-on. This is extracted from the chapter with the premise that "For the global writer of literature in English, Conrad is a body of work that one has to work through *if* one is interested in positioning one's own work in relation to the 'Great English Tradition'." She prefaces her sympathetic crticism of the native home-builder's preference for "real" building materials and "real" houses, somewhat akin to Marlow's description (this is a quote from the text too) in Heart of Darkness that "normal" temperatures are those of England's climate, with the most pithy of backhanded compliments: "First published in 1961, Naipaul's A House for Mister Biswas is a partly autobiographical novel that is written with a wisdom and generosity that his later work lacks." Take that Sir Vidiya!! sthitha_pragjna | Jun 24, 2006 | no reviews | add a review
The Politics of Home draws attention to the multiple relocations that take place in literatures in English in the twentieth century by examining the changing representation of 'home' in such narratives. Through an exploration of imperial fiction, contemporary literary and cultural theory, and postcolonial narratives on belonging, Rosemary Marangoly George argues that complex literary allegiances are visible in textual reformulations of 'home' and that George's concept of 'global English' challenges the very logic of literary landscapes organised in accordance with national boundaries. Reading Englishwomen's narration of their success in the empire against Conrad's account of colonial masculine failure, Frederic Jameson alongside R. K. Narayan, Anita Desai and other contemporary Indian writers with the British Romantic poets in mind, Edward Said next to M. G. Vassanji and Jamacia Kincaid, and Conrad through Naipual and Ishiguro, The Politics of Home explores the privilege and pain underlying 'feeling at home' in literature. No library descriptions found. |
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