National Sun Yat-sen University Institutional Repository:Item 987654321/28100

行政院國家科學委員會專題研究計畫 成果報告

「新興英文文學」與鄰界場域想像 (III-I)

中 華 民 國 93 年 12 月 27 日

建構批判性的跨(國)文化流動研究： 「新興英文文學」與鄰界場域想像(I/III)

關鍵字：全球化、後殖民研究、新興英文文學、鄰界想像、跨國文化研究。

二十世紀後期發端的全球化理論，是個以「流動」的語彙 (rhetoric of flow and fluidity) 編織成的強勢論述。經濟力量的傾斜和單向的語言文化傳輸給它優勢的 動力，蓬勃的跨國市場機能與網路發展更替它舖構了強大、透明且似乎無可遁逃 的「空間機制」(“spatial architectonics,” Lefebvre) 。在這種政治、文化、經濟三合 一的強力現實機能運作下，「異質性」(heterogeneity)一一被加工再製，成為「異 質論」(heterology) 的生產原料與商品，更被供為全球化的標竿性產物。然而全 球化既是一種「流動」的現象，順流 (flow) 之外必有波瀾 (fluctuation) ，波瀾之 上仍有浪花，其下更有逆流，而由波瀾撞擊所形成的臨界場域，正是理解全球化 歷程、批判全球化現象、介入全化發展的必研課題。本計劃的最終目標，正是希 望在「新興英文文學」的興起與演變中，尋找全球化浪潮下的歷史與美學臨界場 域。「新興英文文學」源起於近代殖民與後殖民情境，其中不乏文明衝突、權力 對抗、文化蛻變的書寫；後殖民情境下的「語言轉換」(“linguistic turn”) 也順勢 造成美學典範的擠壓、變形、重鑄與創新；認同和存活的困境不但激起了悲愴， 也惹來笑謔反思。五百多年的全球化歷史，鎔鑄在這一百年不到的「後殖民文學 史」裏：消失與創新都在這個鄰界時空中上演，二十一世紀全球化架構下的跨國 文化生產，能夠從這些壯闊洶湧的波濤裏，擷取哪些浪花？本計劃在過去一年的 時間，沿著「文學語彙」、「歷史書寫」、「和主體時空建構」等三大主題，探討 J.

M. Coetzee, Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipual,以及 Arundhati Roy 等人在批判傳統的文 學與歷史書寫之外，如何致力於創造新的文學語彙與敘事策略，描繪歷史書寫的 多層重力牽引狀態。

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二、研究計畫英文摘要：

Toward Critical Transnational Studies--Theory, Method, Practices: "New Literatures in English" and the Imagining of Liminality(I/III)

Keywords: Globalization, Postcolonial Studies, New Literatures in English, Imagination of Liminality, Transnational Cultural Studies.

The looming presence of modern globalization is projected by a rhetorical powerhouse of flow and fluidity. In the course of the last five centuries, global capitalism has disseminated itself world-wide, generating an uneven flux of cultural, political and economical exchanges—which remains till today the defining feature of modern globalization. During its long, ever-renewing process, modern globalization has transformed from the initial, material conquest of space to the production of such “spatial architectonics” of capitalist production and consumption, as Henri Lefebvre observes in The Production of Space, that heterogeneity has been disappearing into the myriad assembly lines of heterologies (Michel de Certeau, Heterologies). Despite this apparently overwhelming prospect, nonetheless, modern globalization has in fact a deeply convoluted and much contested history. It has been worried over reefs of many folds, marooned on multiple sites of conflicts, engineering many a zone of contact thereon where cultural translation begins to serve an inter-subjective function in the midst of strives and treacheries. Modern globalization can thus be better understood when the production of such trans-national “fleets of islands” (Antonio Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island) is taken into more considered, critical account. This project navigates itself toward this archipelago of capitalist machines of literary and cultural production, seeking to chart its courses and measure the depths of its anchorage, addressing such a rendezvous between the flows and fluctuations in the particular field of what is now known as “New” or “International Literature(s) in English.” In the past year (the first of the three-year project), attention was given to the transcultural imagination in the works of J. M. Coetzee, Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipual and Arundhati Roy, attending in particular to the ways in which the inter-subjective nature of the globalization syndrome has fed into the innovation of literary writing in these authors.

三、報告內容： I. Foreword:

This is the first year of a three-year project. In this initial phase of the research, attention has been given, fundamentally speaking, to the intermediacy between the emergence of modern globalization and the production of literature in select postcolonial settings. It sought to measure in particular the prismatic spectrum of historical re-enlightenment from the fringes, in terms of which liminality has been insinuated into what used to be recognized as either marginality or minority. It ventured the fundamental question of how the study of “New Literatures in English” has and can continue to “unpack the library” of traditional “English Studies,” how, through the on-going re-concatenation and contestation of the unpacked books, old histories can be unearthed and new global visions proposed, how “minority” can be re-situated as new tongues speak the old language in new registers. In examining how the global “modernity” that has gone so far at large can and indeed have been re-writ, it ventured into the texts of V. S. Naiupaul and Arundhati Roy that feature India as a site of cultural liminality, one in which modern globalization meets with its limits of inscription. It continued my previous study of Derek Walcott’s poetics of flow in the Caribbean context, posing against it an “aesthetics of aestivation” in both Naipaul’s and Roy’s works that resists the fluid imagination of the global cultural flow. By looking into the ecological core of literary production in the cases of Walcott, Naipual and Roy, this project brought to light the material grounding of the transcultural production of historicity in the Caribbean and the Indian contexts.

II. Objectives:

This study asks the fundamental question of what makes ecology a deeply radical project, and for that matter one that is always confronted with the limits of its own articulation. A trans-cultural approach would show, as Ulrich Beck argues, that ecology, often taken as nothing more than a mere spatial entity, “presupposes amnesia,” that the concept of nature, which in this case is antithetical to the project of ecocriticism at stake, “simulates a naivety that allows its utterer to lay claim to a naivety of the given, of the prior given, the immutable and good” (Beck 39). This project demands if ecology can be other than naïve and innocent. It is interested in the forgetting, rather than the amnesia, of the trans-cultural enterprises of the empires, and it does so by visiting literary studies and the production of literary production on-site, to wit, on the site of the ecological breaks that must inevitably give “the given” away. This last issue of the meeting of histories in the writing of place, of ecology confronting the imperial gaze, is rendered in Walcott’s poem with an autochthonous vision of place-specific imaginary

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that dives deep and free into the texture of the place’s oceanic topology. This deep diving is done on the parts of both the persona and the animistic rendition of the elements in the natural and the human realms. It cuts deep into the trompe l’oeil of the verduous “nature” that characterizes the object of European enlightenment. In an essay that is now under revision, this project examines the ways in which Walcott’s most recent books of poetry, Omeros and Tiepolo’s Hound in particular, take issue with the problematic of ecological gaze in the postcolonial production of culture, discussing how the micro-materiality of (the Caribbean) place grounds his alternative narration of culture. Another essay (in Chinese, forthcoming in spring, 2005) looks into the alternative habitations of the Indian modernities in Roy’s and Naipaul’s works about the country.

III. Survey of Literature and Research Methods:

In this project I drew upon the critique of trans-cultural inscriptions from Leo Marx, Lawrence Buell, Richard Grove, Alfred Crosby and J. M. Coetzee. As Ulrich Beck argues, ecology has remained a mere variant of the project of modernity itself since the term was coined in 1868 by Ernst Haeckel. Early in 1957, Leo Marx detailed how machine technology had taken hold of the good old American ideal of the Pastoral in his monumental study The Machine in the Garden. Later, both Richard Grove’s and Alfred Crosby’s researches point to the colonial underpinnings behind the rise of modern environmental studies. Deep in the physiocratic and medical practices of modern empires, they argue, there lies a homocentric vision of historicity that constantly demands to be naturalized, indeed to be territorialized into the writing of the landscape. Richard Grove’s monumental study, Green Imperialism, gives an elaborate survey of environmental control in the modern colonial mechanism of trans-cultural signification, of which the American myths of the garden and the wilderness are integral parts. Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism delves deep into the biological texture of modern imperial expansions, finding in them a huge mechanism of investigative ingestion that plays itself out in the territorial, geo-political, commercial-colonial spheres of Western imperial enterprises. Lawrence Buell’s influential study The Environmental Imagination sees this quincentenary tradition of American environmental discourse as a triple-layered palimpsest that features “the old world desire of the pastoral” at the bottom, topped in the medium layer by the American cultural nationalism that celebrates the Edenic wilderness, till it is “reconstructed” since the latter half of the 19th-century, “in a latter-day scholarly discourse of American exceptionalism” (5-6). Deeply inscribed in such a tradition of cultural topography, “the territorial facticity of America has always been both blatant and opaque,” Buell concludes (6).

It is a major concern of this project, then, to examine if historicity is always the irreducible given that governs the practice of historiography. Is the ecological “sense of things” always “plain,” always ignorant of the trans-historical, trans-cultural maneuvers that have walked the forest floors of modern imperial civilizations? Or is there in fact a radical, postcolonial edge in the ecological approach of literary studies? This project addresses Walcott’s Omeros and Tiepolo’s Hounds as verse narratives that stage “counter flows” of the globalized modernity in the history of western art and literature. Omeros is rich with a submarine pull of cultural tides that refuse to settle into its nominal pre-text of the western canon. This project examines the salty, jarring thrust of the Caribbean native materiality of Omeros, arguing that the ecological recalcitrance of the Caribbean settings pervade the syntax, the context and the text proper, in the recital of which the work amounts meta-poetically to a manifestation of ultra modernity that subjectivizes the elemental and the subaltern hybrid just when it subjectifies the many dense layers of cultural inscription. Tiepolo’s Hounds, on the other hand, traces the angst, trauma and ecstasy of Camille Pissarro, whose pilgrimage to the metropolis of European Art took a drastic turn when his followers institutes his Caribbean sensibility of painting into what later became known as the Impressionism. For Walcott to portray the father of the impressionist painting as a hounding colonial does not conflict with the factual, historical progress of modernity, but it certainly unearths, indeed unsettles the treacherous “public sphere” of western modern civilization. And to collocate an autobiographical reflexivity within the narrative about Pissarro (not to mention the 26 water colors insinuated in the text) renders the native settings twice stronger than the nominal, canonic route of the cultural flow.

IV. Results and Attachment:

In this initial year of the three-year project, two essays have been drafted and presented in conferences. The first one, titled “Atavistic Modernity” (「反/返祖現代 性」) was read in the conference “Toward Critical Transnational Studies--Theory, Method, Practices”;「建構批判性的跨(國)文化流動研究研討會」) held at Chio-tung University, Taiwan, on March 27, 2004. It looks into the counter-narration of European modernities in Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound and Omeros, venturing into the roles of arts and literature in the cultural enterprise of the postcolonial alternative historicization in these two books. The second essay, titled “Micro-Ecological Habitations of Historicity and the Indian Modernity” (「唯/微物史觀與印度現代性」) was presented in “The Conference on Asian-Pacific Modernity” (「亞太現代性研討 會」on April 16-17, 2004, at National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan. The second essay is now under the final stage of revision and is forthcoming in a collection of essays that grow out of the conference papers.