Suchergebnisse

Introduction : the adrenaline aesthetic : speed as culture -- Speed theory -- Thriller : the incitement to speed -- Gaining speed : car culture, adrenaline, and the experience of speed -- Blur : rapid eye movement and the visuality of speed -- Crash culture -- Epilogue : overdrive.

Fredric Jameson's seminal text The Political Unconscious is one of the great works of post-war critical theory. It launched a materialist cultural studies in American university humanities departments and beyond. Its mandarin Marxism adapted the 'Late Marxism' of Lukács, Bloch, Adorno and others for the academy and for the post-modern era, focussing on Marxism's singular capacity to offer a total reading of an artwork. It also implicitly faces Marxism off against a wave of French theory that was new when the book was written, especially those theories of power being developed by Foucault and Deleuze. This essay makes the case that Jameson's book gives us a Deleuzian Marxism avant la lettre, and that the book should be reread with care now, when eco-critique has embraced a Deleuzianism that needs the heft of a class politics.

Is it possible to be a postcolonial critic without being an historical materialist? In other words, is it possible to articulate a critique from a postcolonial perspective of various colonial discourses without taking into account the specific nature of the material conditions, the exact quality of the oppressions, repressions, cajolings, brutalities, pleasures, and desires which these discourses represent? Can one assume an appropriate position of critical authority from which to critique and make after-the-fact judgments on the discourses of western colonists, hangers-on, visitors, journalists, travel writers, and the like, without taking into account the specifics of the practices that these discourses describe, praise, celebrate, ignore, or elide?

In bulletins from Britain and Ireland since 1969, Glengormley, like dozens of other place-names in Northern Ireland, has come to signify a site where more violence has occurred: another shooting, bombing, riot. In the context of a politics so grim that it never allows cultural productions the luxury of mere introspection, Mahon's surreal figure of earnest and extravagantly self-tormented intellectuals becomes a vivid image of victims of Irish political violence. Given that the "Troubles" (as the violence is known) in the North of Ireland have lasted for a quarter of a century, and that they are the current manifestation of a history of violent opposition to colonial oppression in Ireland, Irish writing, more than any other from Western Europe, seems to support Fredric Jameson's controversial opinion that postcolonial literatures, whatever else their effect, also function in the final instance as national allegories. In his brilliant and deeply committed discussions of a series of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers and genres, David Lloyd implicitly accepts the notion that Irish literature works as national allegory, but he does not leave unquestioned the terms upon which this relation between text and nation is negotiated. In readings of texts ranging from Irish nineteenth-century street ballads to Samuel Beckett's first work in French, he meticulously delineates the overlapping of the political and the poetic in Irish writing. He wants his readers to be clear about whose interests are being served and whose are being ignored when the political realities underlying Irish literary production are obscured. For Lloyd, Irish political reality is the result of the island's, or at least the Republic of Ireland's, postcoloniality; one claim implicit in the title of the collection is that while this postcoloniality, given the particular divisions marking Irish politics and culture, is anomalous, from the viewpoint of the diasporan intellectual this very anomaly can be a useful challenge to accepted models of postcolonial history. Lloyd's essays contribute to, and critique, debates in Ireland on viable versions of postcolonial identity; they do so by raising issues that reach beyond the matter of Ireland. In particular they encourage diasporan intellectuals to examine more rigorously the nation-state's function as clearinghouse of ideologies of community.

The growing debate over British national identity, and the place of "Englishness" within it, raises crucial questions about multiculturalism, postimperial culture and identity, and the past and future histories of globalization. However, discussions of Englishness have too often been limited by insular conceptions of national literature, culture, and history, which serve to erase or marginalize the colonial and postcolonial locations in which British national identity has been articulated. This volume breaks new ground by drawing together a range of disciplinary approaches in order to resituate the relationship between British national identity and Englishness within a global framework. Ranging from the literature and history of empire to analyses of contemporary culture, postcolonial writing, political rhetoric, and postimperial memory after 9/11, this collection demonstrates that far from being parochial or self-involved, the question of Englishness offers an important avenue for thinking about the politics of national identity in our postcolonial and globalized world