2007 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Anglo-American Modernism and the Representations of the Pacific
| Project/Area Number |
16520137
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
ヨーロッパ語系文学
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| Research Institution | Tokyo Gakugei University |
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Principal Investigator |
OTA Nobuyoshi Tokyo Gakugei University, Education, Associate Professor (90233139)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2004 – 2007
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| Keywords | Empire / Liberalism / Englishness / Anglo-American Relationship / The Pacific |
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| Research Abstract |
There has been renewed interest in rethinking the problematics of modernism and imperialism within recent literary and cultural studies of English modernism. Besides critical examinations of the center/metropolis and the periphery/colony, fresh approaches to the decentered organization of the empire and its culture are being explored, at least in part owing to (post)colonial theory, and in part owing to the present process of new imperial globalization. For example, as my review article in T. S. Eliot Review shows, Jed Esty in A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England locates high-modernist literature in the larger historical formation of national culture in England, in which the joint eclipse of modernist aesthetics and British expansionist power is traced from the new concern of the 1930s with the insular integrity of the nation through the emergence of cultural studies in the 1950s. Especially focusing on the late modernist texts of Virginia Woolf's Between the A
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cts and T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, Esty's subtle and shrewd readings reveal that, despite the seemingly fatal effects of declining empire on modernist form, the survivors of the modernist writers participate in the transition from empire to welfare state, from metropolitan art to national culture. While I agree with Esty's contention that the imperial culture of English modernism survives and continues to define the cultural and political meaning of Englishness after the seeming death of liberal England, I find problematic his facile and even overhasty metaphorization between the shrinking of the British Empire (and its culture) and the decline of Europe as the center of reference.
I have argued in "The Culture of Empire and Englishness" that, while the shrinking island of England, Esty presumes, becomes "the governing figure for a paradigmatically English end to the triumph of European civilization," the representation of contracted England in the inter-war period cannot simply be identified with the spatial closure of Europe's hegemonic advancement and the rise of new empire, America. My next article "The (Re)formations of Empire and Lawrence" has also suggested the important role of the global nature of English imperialism within the literary modernist texts of D. H. Lawrence, arguing that the structural meaning of Women in Love and Kangaroo should be interpreted the transnational rearticulations and reformations of the British Empire in connection with the new empire of America, thereby the cultural Otherness of the Asian immigrants being disclosed beneath the textual surfaces. Finally, from the somewhat different viewpoint of the political culture of Thatcherism, the variously contradictory nature of the "special relationships" between Britain and America has been reexamined in "The 'Decline' of the British Empire and Americanization."
Thus, this research project is concerned with various relationships between Britain and America in Anglo-American modernist texts. I have been arguing that the structure of Angro-American literature within the inter-war period determines and is overdetermined by the absent presence of the Pacific as the cultural Other. Less
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Research Products
(10 results)
