Studying English Literature and Language

@ PART FOUR

KEY TERMS, CORE TOPICS

These are full entries on some further terms and topics that prove powerful across the full range of English Studies, in Language, Literature, Culture and Communication. The ones here are slightly more specialised or theoretically challenging than those featured in the book. Addresser, address, addressee, for example, draws primarily on linguistics and communication studies but is widely applicable in areas beyond. Difference and similarity, preference and re-valuation draws together a complex configuration of concepts which extend the notion of perceptual differentiation to aesthetic and ethical discrimination. Some of these terms signal areas of growing interest and importance that are pushing at the edges of what counts as literary or even linguistic activity. Auto/biography and travel writing is one such traditional area that is currently being revitalised and reconfigured. Multimodal, cyber and hypertexts, however, is a technologically vibrant and to some extent entirely new domain: it is opening up fresh perspectives on what texts can be and do, while also prompting radical revisions of the multidimensional nature of words in the world pre-print and performance-based cultures. All these terms and topics are still ‘key’ and ‘core’. But they turn in partly different locks, and confirm that cores are always plural and re-forming.

@ 4 contains the following entries (in alphabetical order)

Addresser, address, addressee

Aesthetics and pleasure, art and beauty

Auto/biography and travel writing: selves and others

Bibles, holy books and myths

Creative writing, creativity, re-creation

Difference and similarity, preference and re-valuation

Multimodal, cyber and hypertexts

Subject and agent, role and identity

ADDRESSER, ADDRESS, ADDRESSEE

This is a handy way of distinguishing the three main components in any act of communication: someone (addresser) communicates something (address) to someone else (addressee). In terms of subject positions and personal *pronouns, we may say there is the ‘speaking subject’ (ﬁrst person ‘I/we’); the ‘spoken-about subject’ (third person ‘she/he/they/it’) and the ‘spoken-to subject’ (second person ‘you’). We may also re-express the addresser–address–addressee distinctions in a variety of ways, depending on the medium: speaker–speech–audience (for speech); writer–text–reader (for writing and print); performer–play–audience or producer–programme/film– viewer (for theatre, ﬁlm and TV). But whatever terms we use, the advantage of an addresser–address–addressee model is that it insists we see speeches, texts and other artefacts as intermediary products caught in the process of communication between a producer and receiver. We are thereby discouraged from concentrating exclusively on ‘the words on the page’ (in NEW CRITICAL fashion) or the form and structure of the text in itself (in FORMALIST fashion), as though these could be fully grasped independently of the relationship between the participants. We are thus encouraged to adopt a FUNCTIONALIST and contextual approach to COMMUNICATION. The linguist Roman Jakobson developed an inﬂuential version of this addresser–address–addressee model by drawing attention to other components of the communicative event. These are represented diagrammatically in Figure 5.

Figure 5 Jakobson’s model of communication

This can be explained as follows. The address as a whole:

takes place in some general context (e.g., 1960s Nigeria, America last week);
involves a speciﬁc moment of contact (e.g., a chance encounter in a particular bar);
takes the form of a speciﬁc message (e.g., a particular sequence of words or images);
draws on a particular *code (e.g., spoken or written English, photography, ﬁlm).

Jakobson also argues that every communicative act tends to emphasise one or more of its constituent dimensions:

Addresser-centred communication is expressive (e.g., ‘I feel I need to tell someone’). Addressee-centred communication is directive (e.g., ‘You, tell him!’).

Context-centred communication is referential (e.g., ‘That is what she said’).

Contact-centred communication is phatic and checks that channels are kept open (e.g., ‘You know she said that, OK?’).

Message-centred communication is poetic and plays around with the materiality of the message (e.g., ‘Telling-schmelling! I’m telling yooouuuuu!’).

Code-centred communication is metalinguistic, a comment on language in language (e.g., ‘I’m telling you in her very words’).

This model has been used to frame a wide range of analytical and theoretical projects. It is particularly useful when trying to break down a communicative act into its constituent layers or levels and then relating these to functions. A big disadvantage, however, is that this is essentially a monologic (one-way and linear) model. It emphasises a unidirectional ﬂow of information from addresser to addressee. As a result it tends to ignore or misrepresent dialogic (two- and many-way) models of communication. In fact, in most actual communicative events addressers and addressees are constantly changing places. There is a process of exchange and interaction, not simply transmission of unchanged information. We must thus acknowledge the kind of ﬂuid swapping of roles and switches of topic found in both spontaneous conversation and play scripts. We also need to distinguish between ‘actual’ and ‘implied’ addressers and addressees: who actually tells or is told something as distinct from who it appears to be delivered by and for (see narrative). We also need to be careful to specify various moments of address; for there is invariably more than one moment of production, reproduction and reception involved (see 2.2). Nonetheless, if we bear all these things in mind, the model of addresser, address and addressee proves to be remarkably durable and serviceable.

Activity

Addressing the text Apply the above model of addresser, address and addressee to a text you are studying or one from Part Five. (Comparison of the ﬁrst three texts in the ‘Versions of aging’ cluster, 5.4.4, is especially fascinating; so in a different way is weighing the various actual and implied addressees in ‘War on – of – Terror’, 5.2.5.) How useful do you ﬁnd Jakobson’s further distinctions (contact, code, expressive, directive, etc.)? Go on to consider the fact that you, the reader, are both being addressed by and in your turn addressing the text. How does this complicate the analysis?

Discussion

A letter does not always reach its destination . . .

Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1848)

Also see: COMMUNICATION; model of text in 3.1; FORMALISM INTO FUNCTIONALISM; speech, conversation and dialogue; narrative; writing and reading

READING: Introductory: Wales 2001: 7–8; Selden, Widdowson and Brooker 2005: 5—6; Hawkes 2003, esp. chapter on Jakobson. Core readings: Jakobson and then Bakhtin in Lodge and Wood 2008 and in Leitch 2010 and in Rivkin and Ryan 2004.

Here is a relevant website:

‘Narrative communication’, Manfred Jahn (2005) http://www.uni-koeln.de/~ame02/pppn.htm#N2.3

AESTHETICS AND PLEASURE, ART AND BEAUTY

Aesthetics derives from a Greek word meaning ‘things perceptible to the sense’, ‘sensory impressions’. At its broadest, anything could have an aesthetic effect simply by virtue of being sensed and perceived. From the late eighteenth century, however, aesthetics became narrowed to mean not just sense perception in general but ‘perception of the beautiful’ in particular. Thus by the late nineteenth century aesthetics was chieﬂy identiﬁed with the cultivation of ‘good taste’ in anything and everything from ﬁne wine and clothes to literature, painting and music. As such, it melded with highly idealised and often socially elitist notions of ‘the sublime’ and ‘the beautiful’. At its crudest, an aesthetic sense was simply a sign of good breeding.

Art, meanwhile, was undergoing a corresponding process of narrowing in meaning and elevation in social status. Initially, the term ‘art’ had derived through French from a Latin word (ars/artis) meaning ‘skill’, ‘technique’ or ‘craft’. At this stage anything requiring practical knowledge and technical expertise could be an art, from the arts of husbandry (i.e. farming and housekeeping) to the arts of writing and building. Moreover, the ‘seven arts’ of the medieval universities (later called the Seven Liberal Arts) did not recognise modern distinctions between sciences on the one hand and arts and humanities on the other. The seven arts thus comprised Grammar, Logic and RHETORIC (the trivium) along with Arithmetic, Music, Geometry and Astronomy (the quadrivium). But all were ‘arts’ in that they required technical knowledge. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, ‘Art’ was increasingly being used as a singular and with a capital letter. Art was also being used as an umbrella term for what were now being called the ﬁne (as distinct from the applied) arts: architecture (as distinct from building); sculpture (as distinct from carving), chamber and orchestral music (as distinct from popular singing and playing), ballet (not just any dance), painting on canvas (rather than, say, house-painting); poetry (as distinct from verse and song) and LITERATURE in the sense of ‘belles lettres’ (as distinct from writing in general). Signiﬁcantly, at the same time, the sciences were also tending to be split into pure and applied (e.g., physics as distinct from engineering).

The overall result was that henceforth Art was increasingly distinguished from other forms of representation and signiﬁcation. By the same gesture, artists (who were supposedly preoccupied with the sublime) were carefully distinguished from their more humble and practical counterparts, artisans. The former, it was argued, made beautiful things; the latter made useful things. (Incidentally, it was precisely against this divisive state of affairs that William Morris and Company and the related ‘Arts and Crafts’ movements came into being. They resisted the split between fine and applied art, as well as that between artist and artisan.) At any rate, notwithstanding the efforts of Morris and Co, from the late nineteenth century to the present it has been common to assume that art is ultimately a matter of ‘art for art’s sake’, and that it is either ﬁne and pure or impractical and useless, depending on your point of view. At the same time ‘the aesthetic’ is casually assumed to be nothing more nor less than a sensitivity to the sublime and the beautiful and an aversion to the ordinary and ugly.

For English Studies, especially for the study of Literature, the legacy of such a division has been profound. Many traditional English Literature courses still concentrate substantially on just one side of the divide: on a canon of literature treated as high art (poems, plays and novels revered as classics), as distinct from popular writing and mass media production in general (magazines, news stories, songs, soap operas, adverts, etc.). All the latter tend to be treated as artisanal, applied, commercial and ephemeral, and therefore left to courses in CULTURAL, COMMUNICATION, AND MEDIA Studies (see 1.3.3). The former, meanwhile, still tend to be treated as artistic, ﬁne and in some sense timeless, and privileged as certain kinds of aesthetic literary object. The narrowed sense of aesthetic, meaning tasteful, reﬁned and discriminating (rather than ‘sense perception in general’) has played a crucial role in maintaining the boundaries. So has a willingness to play down the fact that many works currently canonised as timeless classics (e.g., Shakespeare’s and Dickens’s) were highly popular and commercial and designedly ephemeral in their own day.

But contemporary understandings of both aesthetics and art are far more various and contentious than one might casually expect. They also tend to be materialist in emphasis and have a radical political edge. In English and Literary Studies, for instance, the two dominant aesthetics of the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century have been effectively challenged. NEW CRITICS had approached texts as semi-sacred art objects (‘verbal icons’) and had asserted an aesthetics which resolves tensions and ambiguities and celebrates organic unity, balance and harmony (see 3.2). FORMALISTS had concentrated on literariness and *poetics in so far as these *defamiliarise routine language and sharpen dulled perceptions (see 3.3). Both these critical movements, for all their differences, were therefore upholding positions consistent with late nineteenth-century versions of aesthetics and art. Nowadays, however, such positions are much harder to maintain and in many areas have been substantially superseded. FUNCTIONALISTS and reader-reception critics, for instance, argue that every period or culture develops its own aesthetic principles, often deﬁned against those which precede or surround it. They point out that the Romantics challenged an earlier eighteenth-century neo-classical aesthetic based upon symmetry, variety within unity and the reasoned subservience of parts to whole. In its place Romantic artists and writers developed an aesthetics based upon dislocation, multiplicity as it exceeds unity, and the emotional power of parts to shatter wholes. In a similar way, Modernism then POSTMODERNISM challenged and changed the dominant tenets of realism. We are thus left with competing aesthetics (plural), not just one.

Many modern views of aesthetics are politically charged, therefore, and reject the view that art is somehow above or to one side of social struggle. MARXIST, FEMINIST and POSTCOLONIAL writers, especially, all insist in their various ways that a traditional aesthetics of harmony, balance and unity is often maintained only by ignoring or playing down potentially disruptive issues of class, gender and race. They point to the existence of opposed and alternative aesthetics based upon different versions of beauty and visions of pleasure (e.g., representations of labourers, women, people of colour and the family that resist or replace stereotypes based upon Western European aristocratic, bourgeois and patriarchal values). Often, too, there is a radical revision of what we understand by pleasure. Desire, for instance, may be perceived as a power which blasts apart stale social forms, not simply as something to be restrained by reason or religion. Pleasure, meanwhile, may entail participation and collaboration (in its extreme form Barthes’s ecstatic ‘jouissance’) rather than a sensation derived from mere spectating and voyeurism.

It is also now commonly insisted that ‘the aesthetic’ is not an inherent property of objects at all – artistic or otherwise. Rather, it is argued, an aesthetic experience is what is generated in the encounter between specific artefacts and specific readers, audiences and viewers in speciﬁc conditions. Different aesthetics are thus conceived as dynamic relationships not intrinsic essences: ongoing dialogues and exchanges in speciﬁc material conditions, not the observance of ﬁxed codes. POSTMODERNISTS, moreover, point to the commodification and globalisation of all cultural products and processes. They observe that modern technologies of reproduction and communication are effectively abolishing any ﬁnal division between ‘high’ and ‘low’, ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ arts. In fact the dominant characteristic of postmodernist aesthetics is its hybridity and changeability. Such an aesthetics may be treated as a common currency and have nothing to do with art in a narrow sense at all. The complex matter of valuepersists, however, depending upon the notions of cultural propriety and economic property in play (see difference . . . re-valuation).

Activity

Aesthetics (plural) Identify two or more texts which seem to be constructed according to different aesthetic principles: perhaps one which appears to celebrate order and wholeness, harmony, balance and variety within unity; and another which appears to celebrate disorder and fragmentation, cacophony, imbalance and variety beyond unity. Also consider the possibility that these categories are themselves – along with notions of ‘beauty’ – partly in the eye, ear and mind of the reader, audience or viewer. (Clusters of texts which work well here, for stark contrast and subtle comparison, are those in Performance poetry (5.1.5); Novel voices (5.3.2); Voice-play (5.3.3) and the poems, adverts and journals in ‘Daffodils?’ (5.4.1) and ‘Versions of aging’ (5.1.4).

Discussion

(i) In any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends.

F.R. Leavis, Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (1930) (1979: 3)

(ii) I would regard with dismay a politics which subtracts the aesthetic and refuses it cultural meaning and possibility. [. . .] But the best answer to this case might well be to retheorize a ﬂagrantly emancipatory, unapologetically radical aesthetic.

Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (2000: 30)

Also see: ETHICS, AESTHETICS, ECOLOGY (3.9); LITERATURE; CULTURE; FORMALISM INTO FUNCTIONALISM (3.3.); canon and classic; creativity; poetry and word-play; difference . . . re-valuation.

READING: Introductory: Bennett et al. 2005: 1—3; Cuddon 1999:10–13; Williams 1983: 31–3, 366–417;O’Sullivan et al.1994: 6–7; Eagleton 1990: 1–30, 366–417; Core: Mukarovsky 1936; Benjamin 1970: 211—244; Armstrong 2000; Rancière 2004. Readers: Singer and Dunn 2000; Cazeaux 2000; Kearney and Rasmussen 2001.

Here is a relevant website:

‘Aesthetics and Literature: a Problematic Relation?’, Peter Lamarque (2008)

http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/3502/1/Lamarque_2007_Aesthetics.pdf

AUTO/BIOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL WRITING: SELVES AND OTHERS

It is conventional to distinguish between autobiography (a life of the self ) and biography (a life of another). Conventional, too, is the expectation that autobiography will be written in the ﬁrst person singular by an ‘I’ who is both subject and object of the narrative, while biography will be written about a third person ‘she’ or ‘he’ who is quite distinct from a more or less invisible narrator. Often such conventional distinctions hold: the autobiography and biography sections of large bookstores are full of examples. However, there are also plenty of instances where writers choose to write about themselves as or through third persons (James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist and Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas are famous modernist examples). It is therefore important to recognise that there is a continuous and complex relationship between writing about oneself and writing about another. The processes are closely analogous, even if not identical. Both autobiographers and biographers select and combine elements as they see ﬁt. The result in both cases is ‘a life’ (i.e., one of many possible lives) not ‘the life’ (i.e., the one and only deﬁnitive life). Moreover, it is virtually impossible to write one’s own life, autobiographically, without in some measure writing about the lives of others, biographically. (Try a brief run-down of your own life-story to date to demonstrate this point.) Nor is autobiography necessarily any more ‘subjective’ and biography any more ‘objective’: both can be equally (un)reliable and (im)partial. There is thus no necessary link – though one is often assumed – between literary ﬁction and autobiography on the one hand and historical fact and biography on the other hand. It all depends upon what kind of ‘truth’ the reader is prepared to accept.

More generally, it also depends upon the notion of self and other in play. In PSYCHOLOGICAL terms, for instance, the self is split into a variety of roles: conscious and unconscious, expressive and repressive. In later Freudian terms there is ceaseless negotation between the ‘I’, the ‘above-I’ and the ‘that (other)’ (ego, super-ego and id). Lacan characterises the psyche as a site of ‘lack’, Kristeva sees it as a place of desire. Meanwhile, in socio-political terms the person can be seen not as a ﬁxed entity but as a changing and changeable identity (see subject). Who ‘I am’, ‘we are’ and ‘s/he is’ then depends as much upon social-historical conditions as upon psychological predispositions. Most pointedly, in a ‘them and us’ situation, this comes down to who counts as one of us (identiﬁed with self) and who counts as one of them (identiﬁed as other).

For all the above reasons, many contemporary theorists and practitioners prefer to talk more capaciously of life-writing or use the slashed form ‘auto/biography’. Both leave open the matter of precisely who is writing whose life. (For much the same reasons, some POSTMODERNIST writers and discourse analysts prefer to talk of all writing as faction rather than some as ‘ﬁction’ and some as ‘fact’ (see realism); or of hi/story – also with a slashed – so as to suggest the radical continuity between forms of ‘story’ and ‘history’ (see narrative).) The term life-writing also has the advantage of all verbal nouns in that it implies an activity as well as a thing: lives in the writing as well as already written. An emphasis on ‘lives’ as things we actively construct and do not just have constructed for us is especially important in the increasing numbers of critical-creative courses in life-writing. These encourage participants to write their own and other people’s lives even while they analyse previous attempts at auto/biography. The latter may range from St Augustine’s or Rousseau’s Confessions to magazine ‘True Life Confessions’, and from Johnson’s Lives of the Poets through Pepys’s Diary to Frame’s To the Is-land. Letters and postcards, and even personal ads, c.v.s and interviews may also be grist to the auto/biographical mill. Blogs, Facebook and all sorts of web-based personal logs and social networking sites are major areas of current development and experiment. Multimodal as well as verbal, and with various kinds and degrees of access and interaction – these are the virtual spaces where a vast variety of contemporary life-writing (imaging, file-sharing, self-projection and relationship building) go on. And on, and on . . . There are therefore pressing questions about quantity and quality, form and function, immediately personal and social and other kinds of value (many are addressed in the readings below).

Travel writing is a closely related area increasingly recognised to be of crucial cross-cultural signiﬁcance. In this case the ‘lives’ and ‘people(s)’ in question are framed in terms of a comparison, and sometimes a clash, of cultures. And often the activity of travel writing is incidental to some other purpose – administrative, military, commercial or scientiﬁc: Raleigh’s military expedition to Guiana in search of gold; Darwin’s trip to South America to observe the geology and ﬂora and fauna (see @ 5.4.2. Sometimes the travel is an end in itself, as with modern professional travel writers and journalists such as Bill Bryson (see 5.4.2), researchers such as those represented by Sebald (5.4.3) and, more generally, tourism and tourists – on which there is vast literature as well as expenditure. And sometimes the notion of ‘travel’ – like that of ‘mapping’ – is both metaphor and actuality: standing for any journey or movement across space, time, cultures and experience. Phillips’s Crossing the River, retracing the diaspora of the slave trade, and Jamie’s ‘Pathologies – a startling tour of our bodies’, tracking the mass movements and individual fortunes of stomach bacteria through an electron microscope, are both actual and symbolic journeys in these respects (see 5.4.2). But whatever the aim or occasion, as with all life-writing – to which again we may need to act imaging, sounding, and so forth – the result will be in some measure ﬁctional as well as factual, a story as well as a history. There will also be an inescapable tendency to construct ‘other’ cultures in relation to one’s own, and vice versa. This is comparable to the self–other dynamic in auto/biography. With travel writing, typically, those ‘others’ are initially seen on a scale of ‘more or less’ relative to the observer’s own culture: more or less exotic/expected, savage/civilised, natural/artificial, reasonable/emotional, etc. (see the POSTCOLONIAL mind-sets on p. 149). Subsequently, however, evaluations tend to be more subtle and complex. Other people may gradually be seen in and on their own terms – and therefore not strictly as ‘other’ at all.

Inevitably, then, travel involves the naming and mapping of persons and times as well as places. Indeed, sometimes that is the prime purpose of the journey: to make maps (generally for those from elsewhere) and perhaps to re-name or at least ‘standardise’ the names accordingly. This is the central bone of contention in Friel’s Translations (5.4.3), a play which re-creates the British military’s Ordnance Survey mapping of nineteenth-century Ireland, Anglicising Irish place-names in the process. This reminds us that translation is a virtually inevitable consequence of travel. It is also, so to speak, how languages travel: how speech or a text in one language becomes speech or a text in another – the ‘same thing’ made substantially of differences.

Historically, travel writing tends to be associated with a range of colonial and imperial projects and their characteristically national, commercial and religious perspectives. But some sense of ‘travelling’ in space and time is entailed by just about any act of writing and representation, and ultimately this extends to the imaginative travels and mind-scapes of Science and Utopian or Dystopian Fiction (see 5.2.4). Meanwhile, in the modern media, current counterparts include TV and ﬁlm travel documentaries, whether for broadly educational or speciﬁcally touristic purposes. Many of these tend to be neo-colonial in their construction of ‘abroad’ as a richly appealing – and, if things go wrong, wretchedly appalling – place. It is a commodity, too, most palpably in the ‘package holiday’ with the all-in price tag. To be sure, a few programmes, books and newspaper articles seek to set the record straight, drawing on a variety of ‘native’ perspectives. But even then the authorial or directorial voice controls the perspective and often the questions; as do the nature and needs of domestic viewers and readers as prospective consumers. Conversely, and paradoxically, when travel writing in some sense ‘goes native’ by sympathising and identifying with its objects, it ceases to be travel writing as such.

One of the most fascinating and pressing topics in what is variously called ethnobiography or ‘crosscultural life-writing’— ‘psycho-geography’ when conceived more personally – focuses on the process of reciprocal representation when people from different cultures or communities meet. That is, whether nominally the objects or the subjects of the others’ gaze, representatives of each group offer themselves up in suitably hostile or hospitable poses, depending how they think they are seen and how they wish to be seen. Such complex reﬂections and refractions are what Pratt (see Reading below) inﬂuentially refers to as ‘the arts of the contact zone’. And as any walk down a city street will remind you, such ‘contacts’ are potentially being made all the time and the ‘zones’ – however apparently familiar – are all around us. They require us to exercise our ‘arts’ (social skills, curiosity, respect) all the time; and indeed they can be textualised in all sorts of more or less ‘artful’ (artisanal, fact-filled or fanciful) ways. The walks and talks and texts featured in ‘Actual and Virtual ‘English’, Local and Global Communities’ (@ Prologue) are instances of just such ‘arts of the contact zone’. They are what we all can and do routinely engage in – and may be thereby drawn to reflect on and realise remarkably differently. Crucially, all this can take place in words and images, spoken, written and otherwise recorded, on our own and with others, in person and on paper, through a specially configured intranet site and connected to the web at large.

The implications of auto/biography and travel writing for English, Literary and Cultural Studies are therefore profound. Whereas earlier PRACTICAL and NEW CRITICS assiduously rejected both the autobiographical and biographical dimensions of a work as irrelevant (instances of an ‘intentional fallacy’), many modern critics insist on the complex interconnectedness of the lives and works of both writers and readers. FEMINIST and POSTCOLONIAL writers, in particular, are committed to rediscovering, recovering and, if necessary, re-visioning or re-membering previously neglected or marginalised lives. In this they are often indebted to PSYCHOLOGY for interiorised images of selves which lay claim to kinds of anthropological and historical truth, even where an actual person has been ‘hidden from history’. The current resurgence of novels styled on journals, letters and travelogues is one symptom of this, and increased attention to slave narratives is another (see 5.2.2). In fact, auto/biography and travel writing are currently among the most lively (and lucrative) of contemporary genres, inside and outside academic circles. So are stories and histories of war, which range from the documentary and sobering (see 5.2.5) to the sadistic and sensational. As a peacetime advert for the British Army in the 1970s used to say: ‘Join the Army. Go to interesting places, meet interesting people’. This tended to attract the graffiti ‘And kill them!’ when peace-keeping turned to war, before the ad was dropped and replaced.

Activity

Whose ‘life’ is it anyway? It is possible to look for and ﬁnd (or avoid and ignore) the ‘auto/biographical’ and ‘travel’ dimensions of any writer’s writing – or for that matter any reader’s reading. With this proposition in mind, tackle a text that interests you. The latter need not be a text overtly dedicated to life-writing or travel; but you may ﬁnd it initially most helpful to focus on one that is. Who is writing and reading whom? (Suggested focuses in Part Five are: ‘I’dentity in the balance, 5.3.4; Mapping Journeys, 5.4.2; Media messages and street texts, 5.2.6; Translations / Transformations, 5.4.3 and Epitaphs and (almost) last words, 5.4.5.

Go on to reﬂect upon the various constructions of your own ‘selves’ for ‘others’ when writing in genres such as diary, e-mail, postcard and academic essay, when talking over coffee with friends or in seminar, or when social networking on the web or using a virtual learning environment. Who and what is it that writes and speaks your ‘lives’? How? For whom? What if it were other done otherwise? With yet other others?

Discussion

An individual’s origin is of great relevance to the way he or she experiences the subject [English] [. . .] but for many the formative experience is of discovering identity by crossing boundaries.

Colin Evans, English People: The Experience of Teaching and Learning English in British Universities (1993: 194)

Also see: PSYCHOLOGICAL, 3.4; ETHNICITIES, 3.8; Narrative in story and history; Realism and representation; Subject and agent, role and identity. Part Five: ‘I’dentity in the balance, 5.3.4; Mapping Journeys, 5.4.2. @ Prologue is an extended work-out and play-around with a rich array of selves and others through Actual and Virtual ‘English’ in Local and Global Communities.

READING: Introductory: Anderson 2001 (autobiography); Cuddon 1999: 63–7, 83–7; Wellek and Warren 1963: 75–93; Evans 1993 (‘English’ people); for paper and web correspondence, see Maybin and Goddard in Swann, Pope and Carter 2011: 141—171. Advanced: Benstock 1988; Ward Jouve 1991; Pratt 1992; Marcus 1994; Plasa and Ring 1994; Gikandi 1996. Core: Pratt in Bartholomae and Petrosky 2008; Anzaldua in Leitch 2010; Kincaid in Rivkin and Ruan 2005. Also see ecological readings at end of 3.9.

Here is a relevant website:

‘Autobiography / Biography: Narrating the Self’, Roundtable discussion at Philoctetes Centre (2010) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHdXMsZKXbs

BIBLES, HOLY BOOKS AND MYTHS

The word bible derives from Greek biblia, meaning ‘little books’. The Bible (deﬁnite article, capitalised and singular) is the name of a particular – though to some extent variable – collection of books bearing witness to Jewish (Old Testament) and Christian (New Testament) history and belief. Both parts of the Bible have supplied myths, stories, topics, themes and allusions that pervade Western, Eastern and global literature and the arts. They have been used as the primary texts for teaching *literacy and, indeed, have often been its main object. They have been translated from and into more languages than any other books in the world. And they have been used to underpin and give authority to a wide variety of belief systems and social orders, not all of which are consistent with one another. (For instance, Jews see Jesus Christ as simply another prophet not the son of God; while Catholics, Protestants, Liberation Theologists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and assorted tele-evangelists cite the same or different parts of the New Testament to very various social and spiritual ends.) At any rate, the Jewish and Christian faiths have been so culturally pervasive and politically contentious that it is almost impossible to read anything in English from before the mid-twentieth century (and much after it), whether from Britain, America, Africa, the Caribbean or Australasia, without encountering direct or indirect evidence of biblical inﬂuence. From the early seventh-century ‘Dream of the Rood’ and the fourteenth-century ‘Maiden in the mor lay’ (5.1.1 – a song about Mary?), through Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Behn, Defoe, Austen, Byron, Dickens and T.S. Eliot, up to and and beyond Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (5.1.5 – ‘Beelzebub has a devil set aside for me . . . ’), the strains and stresses of two of the world’s major religions and their founding books can be heard.

The implications for students of English LANGUAGE, LITERATURE and CULTURE are prodigious. It is necessary

to be at least acquainted with such biblical stories as the creation of the world and of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac, Noah’s Flood (e.g., @ 5.3.1 a), the Nativity, Cruciﬁxion and Resurrection of Christ, all the way through to the Last Judgement (‘Doomsday’);
to recognise that myriad phrases such as ‘Let there be . . . ’, ‘In the beginning was . . . ’ and being ‘worth one’s salt’, as well as whole styles of speech, derive from the Bible (often from speciﬁc translations such as the Tyndall or the ‘Authorised’ versions);
to be aware that many of the dominant models of oppositions between good and evil, heaven and hell, body and soul, light and dark – as well as dominant representations of men and women, believers and pagans/heathens – are based upon appeals to biblical authority and Judaeo-Christian doctrine.

At the same time it is important not to concentrate exclusively on the Bible. There are many other ‘holy books’ as well as whole oral and artistic traditions which celebrate other religious systems and social moralities. Myths, stories, rituals and representations may also be identified with specifically Greek, Roman, Celtic, Germanic, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, African and Aboriginal belief systems. These too have impinged upon and helped conﬁgure the languages, literatures and cultures we call ‘English’, as they have many others. So these too at least need to be acknowledged as relevant for all of us engaged in English Studies. Such adjustments are especially important in that the subject is still sometimes casually assumed to have a Christianising mission as well as a partly Christian history. After all, English as an educational subject cultivated by Church and state partly grew out of Christian theology and Sunday and Mission schools as well as Dissenting academies. It has thus often been identified with various forms of Christian humanism, from Matthew Arnold to the NEW CRITICS (see 1.5.1 and 1.5.5). As far as the Bible and English Studies are concerned, a number of further distinctions and qualiﬁcations therefore need to be made.

‘The Bible’ is itself not one but many languages, literatures and cultures. (Remember biblia = ‘books’.) The Old Testament, initially written in Hebrew, consists of a wide range of genres representing the historic mission of the Jews: mythic and epic narratives (Genesis to Exodus); chronicles (Kings); laws, moral codes and proverbs (Leviticus, Ecclesiasticus, Proverbs); prayers and love songs, sacred and erotic (Psalms, Song of Solomon); and lives of individual heroes and prophets (Job, Jonah, Ruth). The New Testament, initially written in Greek, also consists of many different genres: multiple narratives of the life of Christ (the four Gospels); extended letters (the epistles of St Paul to the early churches), and a mystical and highly poetic vision of apocalypse (the Book of Revelations). Moreover, various other books have been hailed as either authentic or ‘apocryphal’ by different sects at different times. They have accordingly been counted in or out of various canons of holy books. The so-called Gospel of Nicodemus, for instance, was accepted as a faithful account of Christ’s harrowing of hell during the early Middle Ages, only to be dropped later. Roman Catholics still accept more books as canonical than do Protestants. Meanwhile, the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints has its own special Bible-sized extra book, the Book of Mormon (1830).

Bibles have existed in many different translations and adaptations and have served many different functions. The Bible exists primarily as ‘holy scripture’ (i.e. sacred writing). Consequently, for much of its history, most people have not actually read the Bible at all. The illiterate majority have had selections from it read to them, and represented for them by clerics and artists in sermons, prayers, hymns, paintings, stained glass and carvings. The medieval Mystery Plays were one such highly dramatic and visual representation (see @ 5.3.1 a). Indeed, the story of the Bible’s transmission is generally one of a tension between a literate priestly caste and a more – gradually less – illiterate populace. The chief Bible of the Middle Ages, for instance, was called the Vulgate (i.e. Common) Bible of St Jerome (AD 405). However, this was in Latin and only ‘common’ to those educated in reading that language. Thereafter Bibles in the various European vernaculars began to appear: in England, notably, the Wyclifﬁte version (c.1380); Tyndale’s and Coverdale’s (1526, 1535); the ‘Geneva’ Bible (1560); the so-called ‘authorised’ King James version (1611) largely based on the three former versions and itself revised 1881–5; and the New English, Good News (American) and New International versions (1970, 1976, 1979). Parts of the Gospels in particular have also been translated into varieties ranging from Glaswegian dialect to Jamaican *creole. Musical, stage and ﬁlm adaptations range from Handel’s Messiah (1742) to the 1960s’ rock musicals Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Godspell, and Monty Python’s parodic Life of Brian (1979). (For translations and versions of Psalm 137, see @ 5.4.3.)

There are many other ‘holy books’, myths and belief systems that we also need to acknowledge. English Literature – and even more so Literature in English – is far from exclusively Christian in its religious roots and emphases. It is more properly conceived as a cross-cultural, and speciﬁcally cross-religious, hybrid. Earlier English texts are teeming with CLASSICAL gods and heroes and their associated myths, legends and stories, from Mars and Venus to Zeus and Leda (most famously in Shakespeare’s ‘Venus and Adonis’ and Yeats’s ‘Leda and the Swan’). The chief sources are Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid. Germanic and Celtic gods and heroes also have a large part to play, notably in Anglo-Saxon poetry (e.g., the epic Beowulf ) and in later medieval Arthurian legends. From a narrowly Christian point of view all these materials are pagan or heathen. Nonetheless, they freely blend and sometimes contend with the ofﬁcial religion of court, church and state. Evidently they supplied people with imaginary resources for exploring other world-views and other moral frames. A few instances from Part Five will help conﬁrm how various these are. Chaucer shows himself well aware of the presence and obviously felt the threat of ‘hethen’ religions to the east (5.1.1). Shakespeare attempts to represent an encounter between a Western European Christian gentleman-cum-magician (Prospero) and various benign and malign nature spirits from the Americas (Ariel and Caliban) in The Tempest (e.g. @ 5.3.1 b). Defoe and Behn bear witness to the collisions and coalescences of Western European, African and American cultures, religions and il/literacies (5.2.2). Byron blithely mimics and mocks religious forms that Milton took so seriously – yet himself assiduously blended with elements of classical mythology (5.1.3). Kipling shows himself to be fascinated by, yet excluded from, Muslim funeral practices (5.2.1). Conrad is both attracted and appalled by the image of African rites he conjures up at the The Heart of Darkness – an image which is grotesquely inverted and inﬂated by Caryl Churchill in her post/colonial black/white comedy, Cloud 9. More recently, we may readily turn to a widening array of writings which openly celebrate and revalue religions and belief systems which the colonial imposition of Christianity had obscured or downgraded. Examples represented here include: Seminole chants (5.1.5); Nigerian Igbo and Caribbean funeral rites (Achebe and Nichols, 5.4.5); myths and legends from Australian Aborigine (Marshall-Stoneking, 5.1.5); the Caribbean (Scott, 5.4.4) and Nigerian Yoruba (Tutuola, 5.3.2). The palpably oral and performance aspects of many of these pieces also remind us that most of these religions and cultures have not depended upon scriptures and ‘bibles/books’ at all.

The religious beliefs and ideological positions of readers and critics necessarily affect what books they value – ‘holy’ or otherwise. Many of the ﬁrst New Critics were Christians based in the American Southern States. They tended to assume the centrality of the Bible along with the authority of its ultimate ‘author’, God. All this is in line with their devotion to literary texts as ‘verbal icons’ and their commitment to a traditional canon. Many later critics take issue with them, however. POSTSTRUCTURALISTS contest the absolute authority of all books and would tend to celebrate the sheer plurality of materials and the plethora of discontinuous historical moments which make the Bible not one but many. MARXISTS may see the Bible as an instrument of social control wielded by a privileged caste of literate clergy complicit in the maintenance of social hierarchy. But they may also recognise its potential for constructive dissent and emancipation, especially as invoked by political radicals outside as well as within the ranks of the clergy. FEMINISTS would add that most of the clergy were male and the social hierarchy was patriarchal, even while recognising that the Church often offered one of the few opportunities for women to get formally educated and organised. Feminist readings of the Bible therefore tend to draw attention to the ways in which female stereotypes are, for better and worse, reinforced or revised: Eve, Delilah and Jezebel as temptresses and deceivers; Noah’s wife as shrewish gossip or faithful female companion (see 5.3.2 a); Mary as patiently suffering mother; Martha as a good housewife; Ruth as patient servant and wife; etc. Feminists also look to other religious traditions and myths for more powerful role models, e.g., Lilith, who according to the Talmud was the strong-willed wife of Adam before Eve, or Cassandra, the female prophetess of Troy. POSTCOLONIAL critics also have their say. They often observe the ‘white mask’ routinely placed by Western European writers and artists upon the faces of Christ and his parents, notwithstanding the fact that the holy family were Palestinian Jews, presumably dark-skinned and perhaps African by background. But such critics may also draw attention to the potentially productive and emancipatory aspects of the Christianising mission: its resistance to as well as complicity with slavery; and its double-edged legacy of *literacy, spreading the power of a printed word that was not always wielded by the black reader in her or his own right/write. More recently, the case of Salman Rushdie was a stark reminder that none of this is a simple matter of black and white. The author of The Satanic Verses lived for several years under sentence of death by Muslim fundamentalists because of alleged blasphemy against the word and spirit of their holy books (the Koran and associated apocrypha). That too was a religious dimension of writing in English.

Activities

(a) Same Psalm? Compare the various translations and adaptations of the opening of Psalm 137 (@ 5.4.3). Add a version of your own if you wish.

(b) The Bible as Literature. Select a passage from the Old or New Testaments and analyse it in terms of language, genre and narrative or dramatic structures.

(c) Un/authorised versions. Investigate the precise handling of the material in a text which has an overtly biblical theme or frame of reference (e.g. Paradise Lost 5.1.3 and The Vision of Judgement, 5.1.3). What has been added, removed or modiﬁed compared with the Bible?

(d) Cross-cultural tensions. Concentrate on a text which exposes the tensions between one religion or belief system and another (e.g., Chaucer 5.1.1; Kipling 5.2.1; Roy 5.2.5) or a text which – depending upon your background – explores a religion or belief system unfamiliar to you (maybe Seminole chants 5.1.5, Tutuola 5.3.2 or Marshall-Stoneking 5.4.2).

(e) Made-up myths. What mythic world-views do you infer from the words of Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (both in 5.2.4)? How would you characterise these myths in terms of structural oppositions and premises about the ‘human-nature’ relation?

Go to consider the kinds of made-up myth and worl(d)view developed in, say, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale – if you know one of them. (If you don’t, get to know them some time.)

On the basis of all the above analysis and reflection, consider how you might go about making up a myth of your own – complete with characteristic ways of saying, seeing and being, as well as characters and plot to suit. Contemporary games and gaming, on board and screen, are teeming with them. You might therefore want to think of one in narrative, dramatic and/or game mode. (see @ 2.3, English at the edge: games—playing).

Discussion

(i) You just can’t expect knowledge of the Bible any more. Adverts, pop and sport, sure – and maybe the odd Maori myth. But not the Bible . . . Retiring university English lecturer, New Zealand 1996

(ii) Bibles are, by their very nature, partisan. As that plural suggests, there are many bibles, even in English, and each is the product of a particular interest group – whether religious, commercial or, increasingly nowadays, both.

Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett (eds) The Bible: Authorised King James Version with Apocrypha (1997: preface)

Also see: POSTCOLONIALISM AND MULTICULTURALISM, 3.8; CLASSICS and THEOLOGY, (@ 1.4. author and authority; canon and classic; discourse; narrative in hi/story; translation and literature in translation.

READING: Introductory: Head 2006: 99—102; Wynne-Davis 1989: 353–4; Carroll and Prickett 1997 (Bible Preface); Prickett in Coyle et al.1990: 653–64, 951–62. Coupe 1997 (myth). Core: Barthes 1957 (Mythologies); Said 1978, 1993 (Orientalism and Empire); Hawkes 2003, for Levi-Strauss, Barthes and myth.

For rewritings of the Bible at large, see P. Boitani (1999), The Bible and its Rewritings, Oxford: Oxford University Press, and for rewriting and adaptation of the Biblical ‘Ten Commandments’ in particular – from stone and papyrus to film and Lego – see Pope in Swann et al. 2011: 250—264.

‘Bible as Literature’ (2002) at: http://crain.english.missouriwestern.edu/bible_as_literature/

CREATIVE WRITING, CREATIVITY, RE-CREATION

Creative writing refers to the practice of writing prose fiction, poetry, scripts and sometimes auto/biography, chieﬂy in educational contexts. In fact, the primary association with creative writing courses is constitutive: outside education ‘creative writers’ usually refer to themselves simply as ‘writers’, and in bookshops ‘creative writing’ is not recognised as a general category such as Fiction, Non-Fiction, Biography and Poetry. The modern expansion and current consolidation of Creative Writing courses in and around English Literature represents one of the most significant transformations of the subject and has already been highlighted in the Prelude: Changing ‘English’ Now. The present entry concentrates on the theoretical-conceptual and practical-pedagogic dimensions of these key terms, rather than their broader institutional and intellectual histories (though the Reading below embraces both).

Creativity is here defined as the capacity to make something original and fitting, where ‘original’ can mean both ‘novel, innovative’ (its modern sense) and ‘going to the origin, essential’ (its ancient sense), and where ‘ﬁtting’ means appropriate for some purpose and to some person. Creativity is therefore recognised to be something common as well as special, ordinary as well as extraordinary, collaborative as well as individual. These distinctions are important because creativity often gets loosely associated with notions of divine ‘creation from nothing’ (ex nihilo) on the one hand, and stereotypes of individual ‘geniuses’ – often male, sometimes mad – on the other.

Re-creation is here offered as a crucial bridging term. It refers to the fact that in practice creation always involves making something new out of something old and something else out of what already is. The stress is put ﬁrmly on active re-creation (as distinct from the relatively weak notion of ‘recreation’ meaning pastime, leisure activity) and deliberately draws on association with such concepts as re-vision, remembering and re-collecting. All these ‘re-’ terms involve an insistent, often radical re-visiting and re-valuing of the past in the present in order to gesture to ways forward. Initially developed by writers such as Adrienne Rich, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Louis Gates to refer to the dual ﬁnding and making of traditions of women’s and black writing, such terms are now widely applied to all sorts of ﬁctional and factual projects, in story and history. Re-creation is the corresponding term in the area of creativity. Like rewriting, it offers a bridge between the notions of reading and writing (see writing and reading). And like critique, it supplies a crucial linking term between creativity and criticism.

We now consider some instances of what actually goes on in creative writing classes. The following extract from the course description of a well-established Introductory Course in Creative Writing will help set the scene (with thanks to Tony Lopez and Paul Lawley at the University of Plymouth). The aims of the course are:

1 to introduce a range of writings as the basis for a study of composition

2 to establish a workshop that will foster students’ creative writing

3 to establish the importance of revision in the process of composition

4 to challenge commonplace notions of creativity and originality.

The assessed skills are: (a) research for writing; (b) writing practice; (c) critical self-reflection; (d) drafting, rewriting and editing. Clearly, then, the kinds of skill and knowledge cultivated are comparable to those on most ‘Literature’ courses. The only, and major, difference is in the emphasis: creative writing foregrounds one’s own writing rather more than writing about other people’s writing; doing it rather more than describing it. But otherwise the skills and knowledge involved are similar or complementary. They are not – or need not be – in conﬂict.

Having established a broad outline, here is some representative detail. Geoff Holdsworth’s ‘I call him Tuesday Afternoon’ (5.2.2) and Chan Wei Meng’s ‘I spik Ingglish’ (5.1.4) were writing exercises produced in response to, respectively, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (the ‘I call him Friday’ chapter, 5.2.2) and Caribbean texts including those by Scott and Nichols (5.4.4, 5.4.5). That is, strictly, they were rewriting activities. The students took an existing text and either systematically changed it (a little or a lot) or used it as a prompt for some writing of their own. Kinds of rewriting of classic texts and topics by established writers featured in the present book include:

Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, the classic prequel writing back to Brontë’s Jane Eyre in the light and shadow of later Caribbean culture, Rochester as coloniser and his Creole wife, Antoinette, as far more than merely ‘mad’ (5.2.3);
Fanthorpe’s ‘Knowing about Sonnets’, a rewrite of Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ partly in response to Eagleton (5.1.2 );
Bolam’s ‘Gruoch’, a realisation of Lady Macbeth in and on her own terms and with an authentic Gaelic name of her own (5.1.4);
Coeztee’s novel Foe as a response to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (also in 5.2.2), but now with a female castaway as narrator (Sue Barton), a tongueless, dancing Friday, a morose Crusoe and an elusively enigmatic author figure;
Self’s novel Dorian as an updating and adapting of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray for an increasingly AIDS-aware and video-tuned generation (5.2.3);
Jones’s novel Mr Pip, putting Dickens’s Great Expectations at the heart of an informal literacy programme on a Pacific island ravaged by civil war (5.3.1).

Meanwhile, Atwood’s short story Happy Endings (5.2.1) offers a wide range of alternative endings. All these texts are re-creations in a more or less constrained or free sense: they extend from pastiche and parody through adaptation and critique to free-standing texts in their own right/write. Indeed a point at issue is how far these or any other texts are written entirely ‘in their own right’, and how far in some sense they always represent a response to other texts and a re-creation of one’s self through engagements with others. This is a principle of writing as practice no less than of dialogue and intertextuality as theory. To be sure, none of this need undermine the sense of uniqueness and wonder involved in creative activity; indeed, it may actually enhance it. But it should, in Lopez and Lawley’s phrase, ‘challenge commonplace notions of creativity and originality’.

With all this in mind, we look at a clutch of texts by the writer, performer, teacher and scientist Mario Petrucci (5.1.4). These were generated inside and outside educational and other institutions, including a laboratory and a museum. They may themselves be used as frameworks or prompts for work in creative writing classes; but they also gesture to words and worlds beyond. In this, crucially, they remind us that writing is creative and critical and that it takes place in, about, from and for a variety of actual and possible worlds. ‘The Complete Letter Guide’ (i) is an example of ‘cut-up’, a kind of ‘collage’. It draws together different parts of an early-twentieth century guide to writing letters for all occasions (the kind of guide Richardson’s epistolary novel Pamela started off as). The various parts were selected and recombined, lineated and grouped as shown. ‘Mutations’ (ii), as the attached note indicates, is a kind of ‘computer-generated’ poem. It is what might happen if a computer engaged in random re-combination of the letters in the opening words of the nursery rhyme ‘Little Bo-Peep’. However, as Petrucci demonstrates, the apparently random nature of the process has been subject to design and crafting. This may be ‘chaos’, but it is informed by a variety of orders and logics (including that of genetic ‘mutations’, as the title suggests). As a consequence, by the close the reader has been treated to a curious cacophony of semi-Englishes (resonant of Dutch, Scots or something else, depending how you pronounce them) and a succession of variously innocent or salacious, half-sensical or non-sensical variants on a scheme. As with most poems, this one is best tried out on the tongue and ear as well as the eye, with an audience as well as to oneself. Performance is a crucial aspect of the ‘publication’ (i.e. making public) of creative writing; as is the showing and sharing of one’s work in progress in workshops. The same – palpably, orally, aurally – goes for Agbabi’s ‘The Word’ (5.1.5). Generated primarily for the poetry scene and on the performance circuit, it also circulates – and continues to resonate – in live educational contexts, printed text-books and web-sites such as this.

A sense of occasion and context is especially important with a site-specific text such as ‘Trench’ (iv). For this text, as the supporting notes explain, was composed for and in every sense sited (sighted, cited) in the Imperial War Museum, London. It is a particularly pointed instance of text in context and poetry as performance. ‘Occasional’, ‘installation’ pieces such as this can be generated with many specific locations and purposes in mind. Meanwhile, a more free-standing piece such as ‘Reﬂections’ (iii) sports with inversions and perversions of familiar phrases. ‘Sting like a bee’, ‘as tough as a nut’, and ‘harebrained schemes’ are all subjected to subtly different pressures. The result is a text which *de-familiarises aspects of the world beyond, even as it draws attention to the artiﬁce of its own deviant structures.

What really matters, then, is not whether we label such activities critical or creative, but the quality and value (see difference . . . re-valuation) of the experience generated by such experiments. In this respect, recalling the initial deﬁnitionof creativity as the production of something ‘original and fitting’, a critical essay may be judged both whereas a poem may be judged neither. It all depends upon the kinds of re-creation or critique in play and what we expect or demand from the particular discourses and genres. A playful, punning essay by Derrida may be a source of delight or derision. So may the most solemn pronouncement by F.R. Leavis. Or me. Or you.

Activities

(a) Draw on one of the texts, techniques or ideas featured above as a prompt to fashion a text of your own. Then reﬂect on and write up the process.

(b) Experiment with the problems and possibilities of both ‘free writing’ and ‘set writing’. ‘Free writing’ means that you write down whatever comes into your head for, say, ten minutes, without pausing for more than a second or two to think what comes next (ignoring formal punctuation or sentence structures if you wish). Set writing means that you write with some speciﬁc constraint, purpose or topic in mind, whether formal or functional; for instance, you may write in a sonnet or haiku or ‘problem page’ form about something that happened last night (cf. 5.1.2 and @ 5.4.3) .2), or try to write in your mother’s or father’s voice, and so on. Having experimented with both ‘free’ and ‘set’ writing, go on to consider what might be worked up from both; also to reﬂect upon just how creative, or re-creative, you judge the various processes and products to be.

Discussion

(i) The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

Oscar Wilde, Intentions, 1891.

(ii) I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.

William Blake, Annotations, 1790s.

(iii) Compare (a) ‘Your own life is the ﬁrst source of your writing’.

(b) ‘Reading is the best source of inspiration’.

(Both from Jenny Newman et al. The Writer’s Workbook 2000: 3, 27.)

Also see: Prologue: English Literature and Creative Writing; LITERATURE; writing and reading, response and rewriting; Part Two, Critical and Creative Strategies for Analysis and Interpretation, esp. Further strategies for critical-creative writing, 2.3.3.

READING: Creative Writing textbooks: Anderson 2005, Morley 2007; Newman, Cusick and La Tourette 2004 (2nd edn); Harper 2006 (teaching), 2010 (theory). Creativity across language and literature: Carter (conversation); Maybin and Swann 2006 (everyday creativity); Goodman and O’Halloran (literary creativity). Re-creation in general, theoretical and historical: Currie in Wolfreys 2001: 152–168; Pope 2005; Pope in Maybin and Swann 2010: 122—131; Pope in Sefton-Green et al.2011: 107—116. Critical-creative writing in and around ‘English’: Scholes 1985, 1998, 2002; Pope 1995; Nash and Stacey 1997; McGann 2001, 2007; Scholes, Comley and Ulmer 2002; Knights and Thurgar-Dawson 2006; Bartholomae and Petrosky 2008.

Here is a useful website:

‘Free Writing’, (n.d.) http://web.mst.edu/~gdoty//classes/concepts-practices/free-writing.html

For further examples of Petrucci’s and Agbabi’s creative work, in and out of educational ‘English’ contexts such as the present one – along with their personal and critical reflections on the many processes and products involved – see Swann, Pope and Carter, 2011: 29—38, 113—128, 181—3. There is a specific case made for ‘Rewriting the Critical—Creative Continuum’ in the same volume, pp. 231—244.

DIFFERENCE AND SIMILARITY, PREFERENCE AND RE-VALUATION

All the terms in this entry have to do with perceiving similarities and differences and expressing preferences. These are basic operations of analysis and evaluation. Hence the persistence in essay questions of such formulas as ‘Compare and contrast . . . ’ and ‘How far do you agree . . . ?’ Moreover, because different people – or each of us at different moments – may perceive other differences and express other preferences, these are also operations that involve forms of re-valuation.

In LANGUAGE, similarity and difference are fundamental principles at every level because we only know one sound, word or structure to the extent that it is more or less similar to or different from others. Thus in terms of sound ‘pin’ is almost the same as ‘bin’: there’s just one *phoneme different, a voiced/unvoiced difference between /b/ and /p/. But at the same time, in terms of meaning, ‘pin’ is almost the same as, say, ‘needle’ but very different from ‘bin’. In this way language offers an interplay of similarities and differences at a variety of levels. When actually using language, we select from the available resources: we use one sound, meaning, word or structure rather than another.

In LITERATURE, similarity and difference are also fundamental concepts. First, in order even to construct a category of texts called Literature, we need to posit some kind of similarity amongst all the items included. Inevitably, at the same time, this means deciding which items are to be excluded. We thus construct the categories Literature/Non-literature by a dialectical principle of ‘is’ (similar to, includes) versus ‘is not’ (different from, excludes). Hence fundamental arguments about whether Literary Studies should include or exclude drama, performance, TV, advertising, news reporting, etc. (see 1.3.1 and @ 1.4). Another area where the play of similarity and difference is crucial is that of genre. Whether we are sorting texts into the categories of comedy and tragedy or, for that matter, ‘shopping list’ and ‘answer-phone message’, the same analytical and dialectical operations apply: is this but not that; includes this but not that; similar to this but different from that. The matter of re-valuation most obviously comes into notions of Literature when we are constructing a canon of great, classic works or, more pragmatically, a syllabus built round ‘set’ texts. For at that point all the potential similarities and differences must be resolved into provisional preferences. What shall be read and why? Answers vary, of course, hence alternative canons, traditions and courses of women’s, black, POSTCOLONIAL writing, etc.

CULTURE is also constructed from the perception of myriad permutations of similarity and difference.

A ‘sameness’ concept of culture tends towards the view that globally or nationally there is one model to which all aspire and against which all others can be placed and graded. Hence such monolithic notions as Civilisation and English Culture (capitalised and singular). An emphasis on sameness generally entails monoculturalism, homogeneity, centralising and unity. There is a promise of coherence but with a threat of intolerance.
A ‘differences’ concept of culture tends towards the view that globally, nationally or locally there are many models to which different people aspire and relate, and that there is no overarching model within which cultures (lower case and plural) can be placed. Such MULTICULTURALISM is usually expressed in terms of variety and variation, multiple centres and hybridity. There is a promise of tolerance but with a threat of fragmentation.

Not surprisingly, all genuinely dynamic conceptions of culture tend to move between and beyond these polarities. Though even then they may stress difference within sameness (i.e. variety within unity) as well as difference beyond sameness (i.e. variation which exceeds unity). It all depends how closed or open, finished or in process, the system(s) of culture(s) are reckoned to be.

Difference is a term that has become very prominent in critical theory over the last thirty years. It derives from Latin differre, meaning ‘to move in two directions’ or ‘to carry away’, and both senses can be traced in current usage of the term. Two distinct traditions converge to make difference a key concept: one political, the other philosophical. First, there is the political pressure of FEMINIST and POSTCOLONIAL approaches. In these cases it is the fundamental differences between ‘female’ and ‘male’ (in gender terms ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’) and between ‘black’ and ‘white’ that constitute the initial parameters of critical discourse. In sophisticated models these differences are always recognised as shifting and plural rather than static and *binary. That is, there are many more permutations of gender and shades of colour than two. It is also recognised that differences of gender and ethnicity interact with one another and with other differences based upon class, education, religion and region.

The second major force behind contemporary interest in differences derives from POSTSTRUCTURALIST philosophy, especially the writings of Derrida. Drawing on the ambiguity of the French verb différer (which can mean both ‘to be different from’ and ‘to delay/defer’), Derrida, proposes that différance be conceived as an activity whereby terms and concepts not only differ from one another but also engage us in an endless process of deferral or delay. Every act of ‘differentiation’ is, in effect, a delaying tactic. At its most basic, the principle of différance is confirmed by the fact that one dictionary deﬁnition leads to another, which leads to another, then another – and so on. Eventually, it may well come back to the term with which you started (look up ‘language’ and ‘words’ to see this circularity in motion).

Significantly, the only way to arrest the potentially infinite play of difference/ deferral in language is to insist upon a *reference in the non-verbal world; and that in turn means expressing a preference for certain ways of saying and seeing the world. For instance, I (like you) may be known by all sorts of different labels: in my case ‘father’, ‘husband’, ‘son’, ‘lecturer’, ‘citizen’, ‘patient’, ‘cyclist’, ‘guitarist’, and so on. But which one is actually used at any one time will depend upon which aspect of me is being referred to (and whether I’m on a bike, in a lecture theatre or a hospital, say). It will also depend upon which aspect I and other people prefer to draw attention to.

Preference may therefore be deﬁned as the resolution of differences and the ﬁxing of references. (A related but somewhat narrower sense of preference is current in MEDIA studies. Preferred readings are those interpretations which appear to be offered by the text as ‘natural’ or ‘neutral’; e.g., a right-wing account of a political demonstration in terms of a challenge to law and order – rather than as legitimate protest or a fun day out.)

Re-valuation is the term preferred here to introduce the tricky concept of value (literary and otherwise). This is because re-valu-ation puts the emphasis ﬁrmly on evaluation as a continuing process rather than on value as an intrinsic property. It also draws attention to the revisionary nature of a process in which values are constantly challenged and changed, never simply enshrined and accepted (hence revaluation). Value may be understood in at least three senses:

1 absolute worth in some scale of ‘universal values’;

2 relative worth in variable conditions (hence ‘exchange value’);

3 relative signiﬁcance of one sign with respect to others within the same sign-system (a specialised sense from Saussure’s valeur).

Clearly, the last two, relative senses of value do not sit easily with the ﬁrst, absolute one. Do we, for instance, treat Shakespeare’s Hamlet as though it has intrinsic qualities and embodies universal values (e.g., ‘the human predicament’, ‘human nature’)? Or do we treat Hamlet as something caught in shifting patterns of exchange, always open to renegotiation and revaluation? (See 3.1) In this respect, it is worth adding that what is considered ‘valid’ or to ‘have validity’ in interpretation (both these terms are directly related to ‘value’) may have as much to do with the status and role of the valuer as with any intrinsic property of the thing being valued. The question ‘Is this a valid interpretation?’ therefore leads to further questions: for whom? for what purpose? when, where and why?

Activities

(a) Similarities and differences. Concentrate on a single short text and consider all the ways in which you might apply to it the principles of ‘similarity’ and ‘difference’. What other texts is it similar to and different from with respect to form, subject matter and genre? How are patterns of similarity established in the areas of sound, visual presentation, word choice and word combination – and where are differences introduced which break or extend those patterns? How are differences of, say, gender, class, ethnicity and education represented (or ignored) within the text? Finally – or perhaps first – how far are the wor(l)ds offered by the text similar to or different from your own? (Suggested focuses in Part Five are: Shakespeare’s ‘My mistress’ eyes’

(5.1.2 ) or Nichols’s ‘Tropical Death’ (5.4.5); Tan’s ‘Feathers from a thousand li away’ (5.2.1); McDonagh’s The Pillowman (5.3.3).)

(b) Preferences and re-valuation. Analyse and evaluate the same text using two of the approaches featured in Part Two. Which of the ‘How to practise . . . ’ methods do you consider more valid for that text? Repeat the exercise with a very different kind of text that treats a relatable topic or subject, so as to give yourself some common ‘ground’ for the comparison/contrast. See how far your grounds for preference and (re)valuation tend to shift or even switch completely. (Many of the clusters of texts in the Anthology will serve for this purpose; that is a principle on which they aer organised. But comparison across clusters is obviously possible too. In this case, for example, you might pair Oswald’s Dart (5.3.3) with Jamie’s ‘Pathologies – A startling tour of our bodies’ (5.4.2), which represent very different kinds of inhabited water/landscape.)

Discussion

(i) A ‘differences’ view of culture is no good without a decent politics. It can lead to civil war as easily as Utopia.

Paul O’Flinn in conversation, 2001

(ii) ‘[T]exts, like all the other objects we engage with, bear the marks and signs of their prior valuings [. . .] and are thus, we might say, always to some extent pre-evaluated for us.

Barbara Herrnstein Smith, ‘Value / Evaluation’ in Lentricchia and McLaughlin (1995: 182)

Also see MARXISM; FEMINISM; POSTCOLONIALISM; POST-STRUCTURALISM; absence and presence; aesthetics; foreground, background and point of view.

READING: Introductory: Bennett and Royle 2009: Ch. 20 (sexual difference); Ch. 26 (racial difference); O’Sullivan et al.1994: 89–90; Williams 1983:3 13–15; Herrnstein Smith in Lentricchia and McLaughlin 1995: 177–85; Brooker and Humm 1989: 106–18. Advanced: Derrida 1978; Attridge 1988; Bourdieu 1984; Mukarovsky 1936; Spivak 1996; Weedon 1996; Haraway 2004.

Here is a useful website:

‘Deconstruction and difference’, by Lucie Guillemette and Josiane Cossette (2006) at http://www.signosemio.com/derrida/deconstruction-and-differance.asp

MULTIMODAL, CYBER AND HYPERTEXTS

Multimodality

Multimodal texts are texts which integrate multiple semiotic modes in their communication of meaning. Advertisements are a simple example of such texts, in their common employment of image, colour, layout, text, and typography for attention-grabbing and persuasive effects. Printed multimodal literary fictions tend to employ a similar range of codes, being limited to the printed novel form, but as part of communication of a narrative. Such literary works might arrange the text in non-linear ways around and across the printed pages, offering multipath options, some of which may be contradictory, and the act of choosing between which will shape the reader’s interpretation. The text may interact with images, symbols, shapes and colours, may be printed in a range of fonts, or may disturb the integrity of the page or book itself. In fact, all texts are inherently multimodal, in that, for example, a conventional published poem will consist of text, typography, graphological layout, all of which construct literary prose likewise. Texts categorised as multimodal, though, tend to be recognised as such for the *foregrounding and thus implied interpretative significance of interaction between multiple modes. The postmodern employment and exploitation of semiotic modes is often meta-semiotic in its confrontation of the functioning of signs, symbols and icons, in its exploration of material constraints, in its interrogation of *logocentricism and in its engagement with simulacra. Multimodal theorists within the fields of social semiotics, COGNITIVE POETICS, and STYLISTICS are continuously endeavouring to create a grammar of semiotic modes from which they can more systematically explore interactions between them.

Digital literature

Digital literature utilises new computing devices (being more portable, easier to position, with anti-glare screens, etc.,), new computer operating systems, and particularly new graphical user interfaces (methods of manipulation of on-screen objects, such as through the keyboard, mouse, game handset, and more recently through voice activation and motion sensors) to create interactive texts in which the reader (or player, or user) takes a more consciously active role in the construction of the literary experience, by engaging with the program’s designated system of visual-spatial tropes, paths, rules of interaction, and choices in such a way as to create their own path through the various scenes, screens, or, more properly, ‘lexia’ of the text. The act of reading necessarily entails a performative contribution through active use of onscreen icons, scroll bars, menus and so on. Such texts are more overtly free of the constraints of linearity than printed texts (though the freedom to navigate a printed text as one chooses should not be ignored). Digital texts blend narrative, performance and game play, and often side-step literary conventions requiring narrative arcs, consistency and some form of closure.

Hypertexts are texts which are constructed through a series of linked textual units which subvert linear reading conventions. Digital hyperfictions integrate digitized sound, graphics, and text in lexia navigable through hyperlinks and the like.

Cybertexts are texts which thematise or in some way explicitly explore the nature and social impact of information technology. Digital mediums have become the obvious choice for such texts.

Activities

a) Explore the various semiotic modes at work in a printed advertisement, and consider how they are working together.

b) Read one of the digital texts referenced below (Link 7, Fast City, and 10:01). How do you feel about your reading experience? What choices were you offered? How usable or interfering was the graphical user interface? What semiotics modes did the text employ, and how did they work together?

Discussion

(i) all texts are multimodal

Nina Nørgaard, Beatrix Busse and Rocío Montoro (2010: 119)

Also see: POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND POSTMODERNISM; LINGUISTICS, STYLISTICS AND COGNITIVE POETICS; representation; image... imagination,

READING: Introductory: Ensslin 2007*; Nørgaard, Busse and Montoro 2010: 30-34; Advanced: Aarseth 1997*; Baldry and Thibault 2006*; Gibbons 2011*; McGann 2001*

(*Bibliographic references further to those in the book)

Aarseth, E. J. (1997) Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Baldry, A. and Thibault, P. (2006) Multimodal Transcription and Text Analysis. London: Equinox.

Ensslin, A. (2007) Canonizing Hypertext: Explorations and Constructions, London: Continuum.

Gibbons, A. (2011) Multimodality, Cognition, and Experimental Literature, London; New York: Routledge.

McGann, J. (2001) Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web, London: Palgrave.

Nørgaard, N., Busse, B. and Montoro, R. (2010) Key Terms in Stylistics, London: Continuum.

The cybertexts referred to above, along with other relevant sites, can be found at:

Bosco, Don (2007) Fast City, http://cyberartsweb.org/cpace/fiction/bosco/index.html

Lamb, Malcolm et al., Link 7 (n.d.) http://www.eastoftheweb.com/interactive/index.php?p=ht_wordia

Guthrie, Tim and Olsen, Lance (2005) 10:01 http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/olsen_guthrie__10_01/1001.html

‘Hypertext: Gender Matters’ (n.d.) http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/cpace/ht/genderov.html

‘The aesthetics of materiality in electronic literature’, by Serge Bouchardon http://www.utc.fr/~bouchard/articles/bouchardon-bergen-materiality.pdf

The Aesthetics of Net Literature: Writing, Reading and Playing in Programmable Media, Peter Gendolla and Jörgen Schäfer (eds.) (2007), e-book available at

http://www.brown.edu/Courses/GM/GRMN144/transcoop/wardrip-fruin.pdf

SUBJECT AND AGENT, ROLE AND IDENTITY

All the terms featured here have to do with constructions or representations of people, in and out of language. They partly – but only partly – correspond to traditional terms such as author, character, individual and person. However, they so radically challenge and change these concepts that any grounds for comparison soon dissolve. The basic difference is that talking about people as ‘subjects’ and ‘agents’, ‘identities’ and ‘roles’ tends to emphasise the social and historical constructedness of their relations and the political power (or powerlessness) those relations entail. Talk of ‘authors’ and ‘characters’, ‘individuals’ and ‘persons’, however, tends to emphasise their uniqueness and/or their universality. This is why the former terms are often found in politically self-conscious critical discourses such as those of CULTURAL MATERIALISM, FEMINISM and POSTCOLONIALISM (usually in harness with notions of ideology and power); whereas the latter are often found in more overtly liberal or humanist critical discourses such as those of NEW CRITICISM and Leavisism (usually in harness with notions of truth and human nature). To be sure, these various critical vocabularies and the positions they represent can, for a while, be tied into the same critical project. But ultimately they operate in different dimensions and are pulling different conceptions of LANGUAGE, LITERATURE and CULTURE in different directions.

Subject is a term with a complex history and wide range of applications. It is helpful to distinguish four meanings:

subject matter or topic: what a particular text, ﬁlm or picture, etc. is about (e.g., ‘It’s about Russia!’, as the speed-reader remarked of Tolstoy’s War and Peace);

academic subject or discipline: the particular configuration of knowledge and skills associated with a speciﬁc area of expertise and a speciﬁc institutional slot (e.g., English Studies, Psychology, Computing, Environmental Sciences);

the grammatical subject: what controls the verb in traditional grammar, as distinct from the grammatical object (‘She threw the ball’, for instance, has the structure subject ‘She’, verb ‘threw’ and object ‘the ball’);

an ideological or psycho-social subject: someone implicated in and subjected to a particular personal-political structure and its associated world-view. Thus, archaically, we talk of people being ‘royal’ or ‘British subjects’, meaning they are subject to the power of the monarch or are British citizens subject to the laws of that country. More recently and specifically, in the contemporary usage of such Social Sciences as psychology, anthropology, sociology and politics,it is common to talk of persons being the ‘subjects of’ (i.e. subjected to) cultural institutions and discourses of all kinds. Althusser explores the conﬂictual nature of this kind of subject in a political sphere (see MARXISM). Freud and Lacan explore it in a speciﬁcally psychoanalytic sphere (see PSYCHOLOGY). Relatedly, the linguist Benveniste was careful to distinguish two dimensions of the ‘I’: the ‘I-who-speaks’ (le sujet d’énonciation) and the ‘I-who-isspoken’(le sujet d’énoncé).The ‘I-who-speaks’ is always to some extent mis- or underrepresented by the ‘I-who-is-spoken’.

The fourth meaning of ‘subject’ (ideological subject) has bulked largest because it is the most complex and contentious and also perhaps the least familiar. However, it is a central term in cultural debates of all kinds, so we shall look at its precise implications more closely, as well as alternatives to it.

Subject derives from the Latin verb subiacere: ‘to throw under’ (subjectum, the past participle, means ‘thrown under’). This derivation may help explain some people’s resistance to the term. If one is ‘thrown under’ something by someone, then this implies a kind of passivity. Subjects are perhaps thereby cast in the roles of victims, those who are ‘done to’ rather than those who themselves ‘do’ (despite the grammatical sense of subject (3) above). For this reason some people prefer the term participant, which refers to anyone who takes part in an event, regardless of their activity or passivity. Still others prefer the term agent because it implies a degree of activity and independence, even if the agent is partly acting on behalf of someone or something else. Moreover, there is a strong tradition in philosophical discourse of agency meaning ‘the power to do’, ‘the force that causes effects’. (The word derives from the Latin verb agere: ‘to act, to make happen’; hence English ‘agitate’, employment and advertising agencies, and secret agents.)

A handy compromise is to recognise subject and agent as the passive and active dimensions of the same process. That is, each of us is potentially a subject/agent (a subject and an agent, simultaneously or by turns). We are subjects in so far as we are ‘thrown under’ things – politically oppressed or psychologically repressed. But at the same time we are also agents, capable of ‘doing things’ and ‘making things happen’, politically and psychologically active in our own remaking. In terms of history, we may therefore see ourselves as both making and being made by it. In terms of narrative, we may see ourselves as both the teller and the told.

Referring to people in terms of their roles is another alternative. Often found in such phrases as ‘playing a role’, ‘adopting a role’ or ‘role play’, the concept of role obviously depends upon a dramatic or theatrical metaphor. So do the concepts ‘mask’ and ‘persona’ (cf., ‘dramatis personae’) when applied to non-theatrical contexts. Such analogies are most famously put by Jaques in his Seven Ages of Man speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (Act II sc. vii): ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players . . . ’. This play/world, player/person analogy has been highly productive in many areas of thought, not only in Literary Studies. It has been especially powerful in the Social Sciences where it is now routine to talk of, say, ‘roles within the family’ or ‘social roles’, ‘role models’ and ‘switching’ or ‘modifying’ roles. By extension, ethnographers and others now commonly talk of scripts, scenarios and *schemata when referring to predictable genres of speech and other discourse activity in routine (i.e. non-theatrical and non-filmic) situations. Thus we can legitimately and quite suggestively talk of real – not just fictional – judges, police ofﬁcers, students, lecturers speaking and behaving ‘in role’ and ‘playing their parts’. Still other analysts prefer to talk of these same situations in terms of frames and schemata, thereby drawing on analogies with the visual arts, especially photography and cinema, as well as logic.

Identity is another relatable term which has achieved wide critical currency in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Philosophically and in Mathematics, the term has been around for a long time with the specialised sense of ‘absolute sameness’ or ‘absolute equality between two equations’ (see OED; the Latin root is idem, meaning ‘the same one’; cf. idiosyncracy and *idiolect). During the past thirty years, however, ‘identity’ has been increasingly used to refer to the social and historical make-up of a person, personality as a construct. Sometimes such identities are conceived in narrowly psychological, individualist terms, as the cumulative result of personal experience and family history. Sometimes identities are conceived in broadly sociological, constructivist terms, as the cumulative result of public pressure and larger historical circumstance. However, the most subtle and resourceful approaches to identity always draw upon a fusion of – or tension between – these two approaches. Identity is thereby recognised as a product of private and public histories, a richly psycho-social and personal-political process of becoming (i.e. auto/biography in the fullest and most challenging sense).

Identiﬁcationtoo, we may note, is a suggestively ambiguous process. The ambiguity hinges on the difference between the concepts ‘identiﬁcation of ’ and ‘identiﬁcation with’; also the distance between other and self:

Identiﬁcation ‘of’ someone or something entails pointing to, labelling and in effect ‘naming’ them as other (as in an identity parade).

Identiﬁcation ‘with’ someone or something entails sympathising and, in extreme cases, empathising and confusing our selves with someone or something else (as when we identify with a character/cause).

The process of identiﬁcation in a fully dynamic sense therefore involves perceiving identity as other and as self. Arguably, some such complication occurs when we identify with characters in plays or novels, or when we identify with ﬁgures in life generally (by falling in love, for instance). The aesthetics and politics of identiﬁcation are much more complex and contentious than ‘identity politics’ conceived as a mere process of labelling.

Activities

(a) A matter of people. Choose a short story, novel or play and weigh the advantages and disadvantages of approaching the ﬁgures represented as subjects, agents, identities and roles, or as individuals and persons. What differences in emphasis and approach are entailed? Alternatively, can everything be covered by notions of character and characterisation? (Suggestions: compare Kipling’s The Story of Muhammad Din withAtwood’s Happy Endings or Carter’s The Werewolf with Eggers’s What the Water Feels Like to the Fishes – all in 5.2.1.)

(b) ‘I’dentities in crisis. Concentrate on a text which features a ﬁrst person speaker or narrator, an ‘I’ (e.g., those in 5.3.4). How would you identify that ﬁgure in terms of gender, class, race, education, attitudes, expectations? And how far do you identify with him or her? In what ways are these two processes of identification connected?

(c) Tran/scripts and roles. Cut a script or transcript at a potentially signiﬁcant point. Consider the various roles in play up to that point and plot two alternative outcomes from there onwards. (Explore this through role-playing with colleagues if you wish.) Go on to discuss the nature of roles, masks, scripts, scenarios, frames and schemata in life at large. (Any of the texts in 5.3.3 will do, or the first two in 5.3.1; there are also some transcripts and scripts in 5.2.6.).

Discussion

(i) The subject is seen no longer as the source of meaning but as the site of meaning.

Raman Selden and Peter Widdowson, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory 3rd edn (1993: 226)

(ii) It is not theatre that is able to imitate life; it is social life that is designed as a continuous performance.

Umberto Eco, ‘Semiotics of Theatrical Performance’ (1977) in D. Walder, Literature in the Modern World, 1st edn (1990: 120)

(iii) All the world’s a Visual Display Unit – and all the men and women merely cyphers in cyber-space . . .

Members of the Language, Literature, Discourse III group, Oxford, Spring 1997

Also see: PSYCHOLOGY; POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND POSTMODERNISM; author; auto/biography; character; drama and theatre. @ Prologue: Actual and Virtual . . . Local and Global.

READING: Introductory: Bennett and Royle 2009, Chs 8 (character) and 15 (me); Culler 1997: 108–120; O’Sullivan et al. 1994: 157–8, 309–11; Green and LeBihan 1996: 40–3, 271–305. Extensive: Belsey 2002; Pope 1995: 47–69 (literature work-shops); Boal 1992; Culpeper 2001 (the two latter on drama and performance).

Here is a useful website:

‘Research Guide: Ethnicity and Identity in Literature’ (2006) http://people.wcsu.edu/reitzj/subj/ethnic.html