Problems with the Term PostcoloniaL

"When," an Indian friend of mine (with a progressive cast of mind and a firm conviction in the idea of technological advancement) asked in exasperation, "does the state of postcoloniality end?" Questions of the same order have been plaguing literary scholars for a while, and a number of profound thinkers and theorists have done their best to abolish the term "postcolonial" altogether. In articles first published in 1994 in the journal Social Text, both Ella Shohat and Anne McClintock point out that "postcolonialism" never really existed except as a designation of convenience, and that it is no more, in essence, than colonialism attached to a "post-" (and straining at its tether to reassert its modes of thought).

In an essay of more than a decade earlier Salman Rushdie made a seemingly parallel argument: he, too, sought to banish an insufficient term, "Commonwealth," which according to him creates an "exclusive ghetto" whose effect is to change the meaning of English literature into "something far narrower, something topographical, nationalistic, possibly even racially segregationist." Rushdie went on to point out that "at best, what is called 'Commonwealth literature' is positioned below English literature proper," placing "Eng. Lit. at the center of the world and the rest of the world at the periphery," a situation which inverts priorities and obscures more fundamental literary issues. (I paraphrase Rushdie's angry essay, "'Commonwealth Literature' Does Not Exist" Imaginary Homelands 61-70.)

There is a distinction, however, between Rushdie's denunciation of "Commonwealth" and the no less passionate attacks of recent critics on "postcolonialism." For Shohat and McClintock the thing described by the offending word is no more real than the world mapped by colonialism, while for Rushdie it is not the thing described (to which he permits a tangible existence) but the concept represented by the term itself which is an insidious "chimera." Rushdie's essay is replete with references to writers -- Indian, Latin American and African -- who do share a certain commonality of experience, and throughout he is a celebrant of what he calls a "transnational, cross-lingual process of pollination" (69) -- what the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin terms, with no less approbation, "polyglossia" Bakhtin introduces the concept of polyglossia in his early essay "Epic and Novel" (The Dialogic Imagination 12), although he elaborates on its import only in his longer works (61-67).) Indeed, even in his fictions Rushdie seems to delight in the word "mongrel," a term he associates particularly with the grand melange that is India, but which can be applied more broadly to a polyglot state.

The occasion for my embracing "mongrel," however, is not Rushdie's predilection for it, but its use in 1996 by an Australian politician to describe the offspring of parents of mixed race. As a term which has already won some celebrity in other contexts, and one which would easily encompass such freckled monsters as Joyce and Yeats in the same polyglot potpourri (and those poor creatures could only wish they were postcolonial), it seems to have no less a ring to it than other fortunate pejoritives like "Impressionist" or "Fauve," and surely could be adopted with no less felicity than Aimé Césaire's "négritude." Moreover, the program for a theory of mongrel literature is already present, albeit in a form I do not find entirely acceptable, in Rushdie's essay:

. . . if we were to forget about "Commonwealth Literature," we might see that there is a kind of commonality about much literature, in many languages, emerging from those parts of the world which one could loosely term the less powerful, or the powerless. The magical realism of the Latin Americans influences Indian-language writers in India today. The rich, folk-tale quality of a novel like Sandro of Chegem, by the Muslim Russian Fazil Iskander, finds its parallels in the work-for instance-of the Nigerian, Amos Tutuola, or even Cervantes. It is possible, I think, to begin to theorize common factors between writers from these societies-poor countries, or deprived minorities in powerful countries-and to say that much of what is new in world literature comes from this group. This seems to me to be a "real" theory, bounded by frontiers which are neither political nor linguistic but imaginative. [69-69]

Where I think Rushdie falters in his definition is in vacillating in his choice of umbrella under which his writers shelter, at one moment an economic and political one, at another "imaginative." Interestingly, long before Rushdie placed the writers from the margins at the center of "what is new in world literature," Mikhail Bakhtin had made rather similar claims about the distinctive and innovative qualities of novelistic discourse; for instance, in "Epic and Novel" (The Dialogic Imagination 11-12).

------
[The essay, which is Part One of Anthony R. Guneratne's "Virtual Spaces of Postcoloniality: Rushdie, Ondaatje, Naipaul, Bakhtin and the Others," has been adapted, with kind permission of the author, from the no-longer extant NUS site on which the original paper for the First Conference on Postcolonial Theory appeared. [External Link] = linked materials not in the original print version.GPL]

Read More......

Poem Review: On Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush"

Thomas Hardy felt compelled to revolt against a degenerate Victorian hyperaesthesia in which exact articulations, the utterances of meaning and ideas were sacrificed to the melody. What I wish to explore is Hardy's modes of corrective style-- that is, diction, syntax, voice, his use of images and figurative language. It is the premise of this discussion that analyzing elements of poetic style in poems that are generally accepted as representative is one method of exploring the poet's ideas and beliefs. How someone takes or perceives the world is revealed in the way they speak Whether springing from a spontaneous effusion or produced through the fullest exercising of word craft, a poet's attutudes toward what poetry can and should be attempting to communicate are exhibited in style. In other words, style is meaningful and how a poem is said is as revealing as what is being said. I have selected Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush" as a representative poem for this discussion.

Hardy in his prolific output of over nine hundred poems, which he describes in his "Apology" as "miscellanies of verse" in "books of various character", reveals a cast of mind able to accept human experience as a provisional reality of chance and change. A poet's "whole-seeing" can, probably must, occur without an integrating system of belief (Hardy, 559). Hardy's autobiography, The Life of Thomas Hardy, written in the third person, exhibits his personal "reticence" as Tom Paulin notes. Although I find the creation of a seemingly detached biographer by the subject himself as an ambiguous procedure because it creates a persona whether it wants to or not, I believe Hardy's motive was to show a reluctance toward asserting convictions and to resist mythologizing the poetic vocation. In Life, Hardy states that "the mission of poetry is to record impressions, not convictions". He delivers a telling description of how his philosophy translates into a theory of poetry: "Unadjusted impressions have their value, and the road to a true philosophy of life seems to lie in humbly recording diverse readings of its phenomena as they are forced upon us by chance and change" (Paulin, 26).

"The Darkling Thrush" is a poem occasioned by the beginning of a new year and a new century. It is formally precise, comprised of four octaves with each stanza containing two quatrains in hymn measure. The movement of the first two stanzas is from observation of a winter landscape as perceived by an individual speaker to a terrible vision of the death of an era that the landscape seems to disclose. The action is in how the apprehension of this particular moment of seeing changes as the emotional impact of the scene solidifies.

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.

The diction is simple and direct, and the tone is the quiet voice of private conversation. The spectral quality of frost is accurate and unforced suggesting a hoary coating, age, and the ghostly quality literal in its Latin root "spectrum", which means appearance or image. The landscape is an "appearance" we are seeing through the eyes of a subjective perceiver. The phenomena of frost are precisely represented but it also coincides with the psychological state of the speaker which becomes evident as the poem develops. Whether he was leaning on the gate at the edge of a wooded grove in casual observation or from fatigue, a sense of oppressiveness is underscored by consonance. The sluggish weight of "Winter's dregs" picks up and compounds the effect of "spectre-gray" which, in turn, leads into an effect of exhalation in "desolate." The word "dregs" with its strong stress and combination of a hard consonant with a sibiliant in "gs" forces a caesura, and then desolate trails off from its strong stress. "DE solate" when spoken as normal speech lengthens its duration in a falling cadence in comparison to "COPpice GATE" even though it maintains regularity metrically. Although the line is enjambed, the tongue requires a little adjusting, and another slowing down occurs with "The", and "weakening" inserts an extra unstressed syllable, (iamb, anapest , iamb), to the full stop of "day".

The figure of the sun as a "weakening eye" is a personification, a trope resonating off Romantic associations such as Wordsworth's "eye of heaven" for the sun in "Resolution and Independence". It establishes the poem's time as at the closing of a particular day at the end of a seasonal year. Whether the Romantic allusion to visionary powers and their ebbing is noted or not, it is a suggestive adjective for a time when seeing is becoming more difficult due to a reduction of light. As the poem moves further away from visual observation to emotional coloration, it replaces concrete detail with pathetic fallacy, a rhetorical device by which we, in Santayana's words "dye the world our own color" (Santayana, 159).

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres . . .


The next two lines also have a Romantic link to Coleridge's aeolian harp and the music it made at another dusk when it exemplified Unity, "one Life within us and abroad/ Which meets all motion and becomes its soul". A "wild harp" is also the image opening Coleridge's own "Ode to the Departing Year", a poem in which the harp is unable to evoke a lasting hope (Coleridge, 56). Now , at the turn of the nineteenth century in Hardy's poem, the lyric instrument is broken. It is important to note that the image springs from a concrete detail. The stems of a climbing vine, such as woodbine or hops, that could be found on a gate and neighboring trees, are part of the actual country scene. Vines, denuded and tangled in wintertime, do look like a mess of sprung strings. The vines elaborate subtly on the idea of dregs, both as the residuals of summer fertility and harvest, and the idea of lees, the base remainder of wine. The verb "scored" has several meanings: the idea of tallying up or recording costs or grudges or numbers in a competition as in time's losses and gains reduced to dead stems; the act of notching the sky which is visually accurate if one is looking up through vines and carries a hint of incisions that are painful, and the idea of a written orchestration or musical score which leads the observer to think of music and stringed instruments that are broken. The images, or the things named, of the first four lines have graduated by degrees from the actual things of the real world that they stand for to metaphor and personification, and then to a simile. This is a movement that widens the frame of reference that the tenor has to the vehicle. Hardy is using figurative devices, metaphor, simile, pathetic fallacy, in a way that increases the tentativeness of the comparisons. They resonate with the speaker's thought and emotion at an increasing remove from simple perception of actual details, a move that becomes full-blown in the second octave.

The first stanza ends with the speaker's awareness of the other humans for whom the landscape is also familiar although their effect on it is minimized by the verb "haunted". He was a solitary spectator. They were like ghostly presences that had retired to the comforts of their homes.

And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The first stanza establishes through a natural setting that a significant time, the end of day at the end of the year, is being recollected and retold by a solitary looker standing at a physical boundary, the edge of the woods. The scene has only the barest traces of life, in which natural and human presences are ghostly. What started as a simple description of a winter scene by a physically passive observer subtly develops into a kind of mindscape that implies a vigil. Although the situation of the poem is related in the past tense as a memory, we experience it as an "eye-record" in process , to use Hardy's own term. Hardy's use of figurative devices such as metaphor and simile, pathetic fallacy, his mini-dramas and dialogue poems are typically means of exploring the activity of perception.

Tom Paulin, in Thomas Hardy: Poetry of Perception, provides many examples from Hardy's prose, private papers, marginalia, etc. as well as examples from specific poems that elaborate on the variety of Hardy's researches into matters of perception, optical visions and illusions, and psychological varieties of perceptiveness. In the poem "Alike and Unlike," the experience of looking shows direct optical experience as a moment of seeing tinctured by the activity of the speaker's mind:

But our eye-records, like in hue and line,
Had superimposed upon them, that very day,
Gravings on your side deep, but slight on mine! --
(Hardy, 789)

Paulin points out a similar idea in Milton, where Satan says "The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven". One condition Hardy often dramatizes is the relationship between human consciousness in a solipsistic state and the external world. This is a condition that the Romantics also acknowledged and strove to overcome. Hardy accepts it as a part of man's emotional life. Hardy laments the losses caused by lack of attention "When Life unrolled its very best" in "The Going." In other poems, he evokes many instances of moments when the scenery or weather coincides and seems to be in collusion with emotional states such as the rain in "She Charged Me," which "Bent the spring of the spirit more and more" (Hardy, 277, 365).

Paulin quotes Hardy's notes on an essay by Ruskin. Ruskin is objecting to how second-rate poetry blurs reality when "it does not matter much what things are in themselves, but only what they are to us". The interest for Hardy seems not to be in deciding whether the received impression is true or false, but in how it is affected by the state of mind of the observer. Hardy quotes Ruskin:

The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. the state of mind which attributes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which the reason is unhinged by grief. All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally categorize as the "pathetic fallacy" ( Paulin, 18).

Hardy's speculations about the faculty of memory were influenced by ideas raised by scientific empiricists who question whether the sky remains "blue" after the gaze is averted, for example. He was vitally interested in the activity of perception and all its variations when the perceiver's state of mind comes into conjunction with the landscape or external reality as it does in "The Darkling Thrush."

The second stanza introduces the fact that this moment in time also marks the end of a century. The landscape's features become like an immense body layed out. The first sentence shows the speaker's mind encompassing huge spaces of land and sky into the frightening spectacle of the Century's corpse in its coffin. It is a vision of death and cessation in elemental proportions. The sky is a lid. The image is the effect of a "vision" that is boxing in the world and time. "Seemed" is a linking verb that is associated with how something appears to an individual's mind. Its tone is non-assertive, implicitly equivocal, and has the informality of common speech.

The land's sharp feature seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death lament.

The second sentence, which completes the octave, emphasizes earthly shrinkage and dessication. The ending of the century is not a simple closing to the speaker, but an end which seems to sever it from any relation to the future. Every spirit, all of vegetal and human life is under the pall of this death.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

"Fervourless as I" is a highly suspicious qualification for anyone who has followed the escalation of emotional pitch in the poem. While the landscape has been painted in all of its funereal hopelessness, the vision is on a grand scale of "ancient" things. The wind "laments". Rather than lacking in intensity and ardor, the speaker's emotions have been boiling up, enlarging the individual response to a universal eclipsing of life force.

At once a voice arose among
The black twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

The third octave is the most irregular metrically, which is fitting because it is the site of a new, active, alive presence in the poem. The darkling thrush, in all its homeliness and diminutiveness, is the corporeal voice of the real world. It is a local manifestation of an aged symbol. The adjective "darkling" can be traced back to Keats, other bird harbingers in Romantic tradition, and Milton. But, for me, the choice to use it is moving because it seems to de-mythologize the event by attaching the noun ending "-ling" to soften "dark", emphasizing the commonal ( as in "worldling"), and diminutive or familiar (as in "yearling", "darling"). The bird's song is spontaneous and unpremeditated art realized. It "fling[s]" its "soul" into the "gloom" in the antithesis of the speaker's previous flinging of his dispirited soul upon the landscape. It breaks through the boxed-in moment in a joyful act. His exuberance appears to the speaker to be a choice, and not for mere survival in the "growing gloom", but for ardent and full-hearted participation. A lesser poet would have ended the poem here. Hardy refuses to provide a purely cathartic moment.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

31 December 1900
(Hardy, 150)

The speaker has not been convinced or transported out of the "growing gloom", but his response has been to "think". The landscape is not rewritten, nor is the fact that an era is over, but his emotional response is to listen to the birdsong and think of hope. Although the "blessed Hope" is a knowledge the bird has and of which the speaker is yet unaware because he cannot see anything in the landscape that justifies it except the bird itself, his acceptance of the unexpected "sign" emanating from a concrete reality, is where I find Hardy at his most humane. Hardy, as the poet outside the poem, is providing a dramatization and a variety of "whole-seeing" as the dialogic voice. And, for all of his negation, the speaker has introduced the ideas of positive opposites to the negatives of death, weakening eyes can strengthen with the new day and new season, broken musical instruments can be repaired, hard and dry seeds can sprout. These implied ideas prepare him, and us as readers, to accept the poem's outcome. The speaker in the poem is taking "a full look at the Worst", a required step in Hardy's thinking toward a "way to the Better" (Hardy, 557). While Hardy states that "we seem to be threatened with a new Dark Age", he shows one imperfect human response through the poem's speaker. In the midst of solipsism and despair, the speaker, nevertheless, is capable of suspending conviction and reacting with joy to possibility. I find the moment believably epiphanic and unsentimental.

Works Cited

# Hardy, Thomas. The Complete Poems. New York: Macmillan, 1976
# Paulin, Thomas. Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Perception. New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1975
# Santayana, George. Interpretation of Poetry and Religion. Cambridge: MIT Press,


--------
written by Gladys.Cardiff@wmich.edu. published at http://unix.cc.wmich.edu

Read More......

Poem for New Year: The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy (1902)


I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

Read More......

Jeanette Winterson: Sexing The Cherry

When The Dog Woman finds a tiny child abandoned in the Thames mud in 17th century London, she adopts him and names him Jordan to always remember his watery origins.

And in the coming years, giantess and boy play their parts in history, from the English Civil War to the restoration to the plague and the Great Fire of London. And Jordan, with his need to roam, sets to sea as an explorer, bringing home the first pineapple to England and meeting fairy-tale princesses on the way.

Sexing the Cherry is an extraordinary and inventive mix. Jeanette Winterson mixes history and fantasy, fairy tales and magic realism in a boisterous and rollicking tale that bends ideas of time and physical reality.

And somehow it all works.

Unsurprisingly, given her own background (see Oranges are Not the Only Fruit), she uses the build-up to the English Civil War and the conflict itself to rail against puritans and religious hypocrites (who overlap here). And she turns conventional morality on its head as Dog Woman acts completely according to her conscience.

But the main themes here are that of finding the self and the nature of relationships: the sexing the cherry of the title is about grafting part of a plant onto another to make a new one. Here, Winterson seems to be saying that relationships make us whole.

Not that those relationships are always easy. Dog Woman and Jordan love each other deeply, but poignantly, neither is able to tell the other what they feel.

And Winterson also explores the idea of heroism and what constitutes it, starting with the 'heroism' of exploration in the 17th century, but also suggesting that there is a heroism in what women do too, as mothers and carers. In what's probably the weakest section of the novel, she brings the plot into the present to focus on environmental campaigners as heroic. It's a noble message, but it feels at odds with the rollicking, colourful, picaresque nature of what has gone before.

The prose is lovely – deceptively simple but with something close a poetic quality about it. And Dog Woman is a magnificent creation.

All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable read.

Read More......

Works about Kafka

Brod, Max. Franz Kafka: A Biography. New York: Da Capo Press, 1995. ISBN 0-306-80670-3

Brod, Max. The Biography of Franz Kafka, tr. from the German by G. Humphreys Roberts. London: Secker & Warburg, 1947. OCLC 2771397

Calasso, Roberto. K. Knopf, 2005. ISBN 1-4000-4189-9

Citati, Pietro, Kafka, 1987. ISBN 0-7859-2173-7

Coots, Steve. Franz Kafka (Beginner's Guide). Headway, 2002, ISBN 0-340-84648-8

Deleuze, Gilles & Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Theory and History of Literature, Vol 30). Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 1986. ISBN 0-8166-1515-2

Glatzer, Nahum N., The Loves of Franz Kafka. New York: Schocken Books, 1986. ISBN 0-8052-4001-2

Greenberg, Martin, The Terror of Art: Kafka and Modern Literature. New York, Basic Books, 1968. ISBN 0-465-08415-X

Gordimer, Nadine (1984). "Letter from His Father" in Something Out There, London, Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-007711-1

Hayman, Ronald. K, a Biography of Kafka. London: Phoenix Press, 2001.ISBN 1-84212-415-3

Janouch, Gustav. Conversations with Kafka. New York: New Directions Books, second edition 1971. (Translated by Goronwy Rees.) ISBN 0-8112-0071-X

Kwinter, Sanford. Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture. Cambridge, MIT Press, 2002. ISBN 0-262-11260-4

Murray, Nicholas. Kafka. New Haven: Yale, 2004.

Pawel, Ernst. The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka. New York: Vintage Books, 1985. ISBN 0-374-52335-5

Thiher, Allen (ed.). Franz Kafka: A Study of the Short Fiction (Twayne's Studies in Short Fiction, No. 12). ISBN 0-8057-8323-7

And most of his actual works have been translated at least twice into English. Given the fact he lived a relatively obscure life, he is amazingly well documented by any standards.

The Wikidpedia article is at:

Franz Kafka - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Read More......

Milan Kundera: Czech's legendary writer

The Czech Republic has its share of controversial writers (not to mention filmmakers - Hrabal, Kafka, and Milan Kundera, whose anti-Party stance tended to get him in trouble with the authorities, and his trouble with the ladies tended to get him labeled as a misogynist (hey, it worked for Hemmingway…). Kundera was an extremely private person and guarded his personal life, which he said was “nobody’s business.” Influenced by Czech structuralism, he thought that literary texts should be perceived on their own merits, without the interference of factors outside the book, like the author’s personal life. Of course, it could be argued that it is impossible to have an objective biography, especially with a writer as dynamic as Kundera.

Kundera was born on 1 April 1929 in Brno, Czechoslovakia. His father was a Czech musicologist and pianist, and Kundera was taught music from a young age; later, musical themes would appear in most of his novels. He completed secondary school in Brno in 1948, then studied literature and aesthetics but soon switched to the Film Academy in Prague, which he graduated in 1952; that year, he was first appointed as a lecturer in world literature at the Film Academy.

Kundera tended to have a complicated relationship with the Communist Party. He belonged to group of young Czechs who didn’t remember pre-war Czechoslovakia, and were mostly influenced by WWII and the German occupation, which propelled them towards Marxism and Party membership. He joined the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1948, but then was expelled for “anti-party activities” in 1950, an event that would greatly influence him and later appeared in his thinly-veiled autobiographical novel The Joke; he re-joined in 1956 and was re-expelled in 1970. Afterwards, he was also expelled from the University, lived among workmen, played the trumpet in a jazz band and wrote poetry. He eventually became disillusioned with the communist system, and in a conference in 1967 called for freedom of writers, stressing the importance of preserving a separate Czech identity, which could only be done if Czech literature and culture are allowed to develop in complete freedom. Optimistic, no?

Kundera’s first book came out in 1953 (Man, a Wide Garden – a collection of poetry); his poetry displayed a critique of “socialist realism,” though still from a Marxist point of view. He tended to reject political propaganda as a theme and instead stressed the importance of natural, authentic human experience. Later, he began to write plays that were actually staged, in an attempt to humanize communism from within its own framework. Kundera eventually came to disown the first 30 years of his life, and the first thing he wrote of importance to him is the first story in the short story collection Laughable Loves, when his “life of a writer began.”

After the Prague Spring in 1968, Kundera was dismissed from his teaching post at the Prague Film Academy, and his books were banned and withdrawn from bookshops and libraries. Paradoxically, after that he experienced the feeling of total freedom in writing, because he knew no censor would be reading his books. Thus in 1975 he emigrated to France with his wife, where he taught at the University of Rennes, moved to Paris in 1978, where he completed his masterpiece, The Unbearable Lightness of Being in 1982, which won him international recognition.

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera presents the lack of values as lightness; necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value. Kundera’s critique of human relationships is interlaced with his critique of the communist system, which obviously made him quite unpopular with the authorities at the time (luckily he was hiding away in France). Though largely philosophical and inevitably influenced by Kundera’s surroundings and experiences in Prague and with the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Kundera’s novels remain popular because they elevate the specific contexts and characters to the universal; the problems faced by characters in 1960s-70s Czechoslovakia are not really that different from the problems faced by us today. In fact, it can be argued that Kundera’s novels are driven by exactly what drives most people – inter-human relationships, addictions, and sex.

Since the fall of communism, Kundera has adopted France as his home and rarely goes back to the Czech Republic, even switching to writing in French in 1995. Though works can be philosophical, Kundera himself is not a proponent of any specific school of thinking. [source: http://www.prague-life.com]

Download Milan Kundera's novel:
Laughable Loves
The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Read More......

Interview with Milan Kundera: The Art of Fiction

INTERVIEWER
Why did you choose the farce form for a novel that is not at all meant to be an entertainment?

KUNDERA
But it is an entertainment! I don’t understand the contempt that the French have for entertainment, why they are so ashamed of the word divertissement. They run less risk of being entertaining than of being boring. And they also run the risk of falling for kitsch, that sweetish, lying embellishment of things, the rose-colored light that bathes even such modernist works as Illuard’s poetry or Ettore Scola’s recent film Le Bal, whose subtitle could be: “French history as kitsch.” Yes, kitsch, not entertainment, is the real aesthetic disease! The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious—think of Cervantes! In The Farewell Party, the question is, does man deserve to live on this earth? Shouldn’t one “free the planet from man’s clutches”?

---------
The interview between Christian Salmon and Milan Kundera was published at The Paris Review on Issue 92, Summer 1984. Check out this issue

Read More......

Christmas Reading: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

The story starts conventionally enough with friends sharing ghost stories 'round the fire on Christmas Eve. One of the guests tells about a governess at a country house plagued by supernatural visitors. But in the hands of Henry James, the master of nuance, this little tale of terror is an exquisite gem of sexual and psychological ambiguity. Only the young governess can see the ghosts; only she suspects that the previous governess and her lover are controlling the two orphaned children (a girl and a boy) for some evil purpose. The household staff don't know what she's talking about, the children are evasive when questioned, and the master of the house (the children's uncle) is absent. Why does the young girl claim not to see a perfectly visible woman standing on the far side of the lake? Are the children being deceptive, or is the governess being paranoid? By leaving the questions unanswered, The Turn of Screw generates spine-tingling anxiety in its mesmerized readers.

read the online text here and join the discussion about this topic here

Read More......

Haruki Murakami: A Wild Sheep Chase

A Wild Sheep Chase was first published in Japan in 1982. It was a third novel in the so called Rat Trilogy and the first two have not been translated into English as Murakami felt they are weak efforts. After boiling and simmering it can be reduced to a linear plotted mystery slash adventure slash quest that takes place in Tokyo and the wilds of northern Japan in the 1970’s. The holy grail of the quest is a singular sheep of unknown breed bearing a star shaped mark on its back.

follow the discussion here

Read More......

Chinese poet Duo Duo (Li Shizheng) awarded Neustadt Prize

An international jury representing nine countries selected critically acclaimed Chinese poet Duo Duo (多多) as the 2010 laureate of the $50,000 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, sponsored by the University of Oklahoma and its international magazine, World Literature Today. The decision was made during deliberations on Oct. 22 on the OU Norman campus.

Duo Duo (Li Shizheng) was born in Beijing in 1951. He started writing poetry in the early 1970s as a youth during the isolated, midnight hours of the Cultural Revolution, and many of his early poems critiqued the Cultural Revolution from an insider’s point of view in a highly sophisticated, original style. Often considered part of the “Misty” school of contemporary Chinese poetry, he nevertheless kept a cautious distance from any literary trends or labeling. After witnessing the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Duo Duo left China and did not return for more than a decade. Upon his return to China in 2004, the literary community received him with honor and praise. Duo Duo currently resides on Hainan Island and teaches at Hainan University in China.

Chinese poet Mai Mang (Yibing Huang), who currently teaches Chinese literature at Connecticut College, served on the Neustadt Prize jury and nominated Duo Duo for the award. He notes that “Duo Duo is a great lone traveler crossing borders of nation, language and history, as well as a resolute seer of some of the most basic, universal human values that have often been shadowed in our troubled modern time: creativity, nature, love, dreams and wishful thinking.” Robert Con Davis‐Undiano, WLT’s executive director, adds that “Duo Duo is foremost among a group of first‐rate Chinese poets who deserve serious attention and recognition in the West.”

The Neustadt Prize, awarded every two years, is the only international literary award from the United States for which poets, playwrights and novelists are given equal consideration. It is widely considered to be the most prestigious international prize after the Nobel Prize in Literature and, in fact, is often referred to as the “American Nobel” because of its record of 27 laureates, candidates or jurors who in the past 39 years have been awarded Nobel Prizes following their involvement with the Neustadt Prize. Duo Duo is the 21st Neustadt laureate and the first Chinese author to win the prize. Duo Duo will visit OU in fall 2010 to accept the award. [source]

Read More......

Bet Choice for VPS hosting

When choosing a VPS web hosting service, you’ll need to assess your needs in the same manner as you would a traditional web hosting service. You’ll need to assess how much disk space your website will use. Typically, large websites will need more disk space and you will want to allow for growth when you look at pricing plans. You’ll need to also take into consideration the bandwidth you’ll need for your website. Think about the type of information you’ll have stored on your server and what sort of information you’ll want to have transmitted to your customer.

A virtual private server is a good choice for a business that has an active website and a website owner who wants control over his website. A VPS server is also a good choice for an active business because the ability to be independent prevents disturbances connected to other websites on the same server. It’s important to the integrity of some business sites that they are always functional. Often, the support of a traditional web host is enough assurance for a website owner. Sometimes, however, it’s important to push past that and to have the extra reliability that a VPS offers.


A Virtual Private Server or VPS is basically a server partitioned into multiple servers such that each has the capabilities and appearance of being its own dedicated server. The benefit of course is you have a Dedicated type server for 1/4 of the price.

InMotion Hosting is our best vps web hosting. Their VPS packages offer premium features including a full unlimited domain cPanel license, 24x7 semi-managed support, burstable RAM allowance and up to 10 dedicated IPs.

A critical benefit is InMotion lets you choose between an East Coast and a West Coast data center. This is unique and very popular with users seeking the fastest vps out there.

Read More......