Browsing by Author "Aravamudan, Srinivas"

"Scriblerian Ethics" proposes that the aesthetic and ethical standpoint of the writings of the Scriblerians (Pope, Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot, Oxford, Parnell) can be better understood through an attunement to their orientation towards the Longinian sublime and to the metamorphic poetics of Ovid. The project holds the negative and critical features of the group's writing in abeyance, as it attempts to account for the positive, phenomenological concepts and features of Scriblerian satiric and non-satiric writing. The intensities and affiliations of Scriblerian writing that emerge from this study gesture aesthetically and ethically beyond historical subjectivity to an opening to alterity and difference. This opening or hope for the achievement ethical dimension of writing is divulged as the intimate motivation of the literary or aesthetic components that accompany the negative, referential, and critical features of Scriblerian writing.

Examining closely the major writings of Pope and Swift in conjunction with the collaborative writings of the Scriblerus club, the project describes the concern with temporality that emerges from Longinian and Ovidan influence; the Scriblerian reflexivity that culminates in a highly virtual aesthetics; and the ethical elaboration of an orientation toward hospitality that emerges from this temporal and virtual aesthetic orientation. A "Scriblerian ethics" is an affinity for a hospitality not yet achieved in political, economic, and cultural life. Finally, the project analyzes throughout its readings of Scriblerian writing the violence that nevertheless accompanies Scriblerian aesthetics, examining the figures of modernity, criticism, and sexual violence (rape) that permeate Scriblerian texts as barriers or resistances to the achievement of an ethical orientation to alterity.

ABSTRACT

This study is concerned with the process of the making of a postcolonial poet persona where the poet is addressing multiple audiences and is trying to speak for, and speak to, multiple constituencies through poetry. The poets examined here, Rabindranath Tagore, Derek Walcott, and Mahmoud Darwish--arguably among the best-known poets of the modern world--sought to be heard by various sensibilities and succeeded in reaching them. Outside the fold of the Western Metropolitan world, they as a trio have much to teach us about how poets living under three different phases of colonial hegemony (colonial India, postcolonial West Indies, and neocolonial Palestine/Israel) manage to speak. Their presence in their poetry, or the pressure their life stories and their poet personae, becomes an essential part of reading their work. Desiring to speak themselves, the poets chosen here have necessarily had to speak for their regions, peoples and cultures, alternately celebrating and resisting the burden of representation, imposed on them by both their own people and by the outsiders who receive them. How does a postcolonial poet address changing contingencies--personal, social and political-- while continuing to hold the attention of a global readership? How have their formal and esthetic approaches shifted as they responded to contingencies and as they attempted intervene in local and global conversations regarding the fate and future of their societies? An examination of the genre of poetry and postcolonial agency, this study addresses these and other related questions as it looks at the emergence and evolution of Tagore, Walcott, and Darwish as postcolonial world poets.