Critics have classified “Shooting an Elephant” by George Orwell as an essay rather than a short story on several occasions due to its strong criticism towards the repression imposed by the British Empire on Indian territories. This... more
Critics have classified “Shooting an Elephant” by George Orwell as an essay rather than a short story on several occasions due to its strong criticism towards the repression imposed by the British Empire on Indian territories. This paper discusses how ideological statutes behind the acts of man are represented in “Shooting an Elephant”. It is demonstrated that all acts come from an ideological institution rather than from free will. Likewise, it is established that the ability of man to confront his own consciousness is not always enough to liberate his will from an ideological institution.
The outcome of the Brexit referendum is the apex of a long history of Euro-British relationships characterised by two opposing but coexisting stereotypes. On the one hand, England appears as the freedom-seeking nation resisting... more
The outcome of the Brexit referendum is the apex of a long history of Euro-British relationships characterised by two opposing but coexisting stereotypes. On the one hand, England appears as the freedom-seeking nation resisting restrictive collective policies imposed by a totalitarian EU regime of faceless Brussels bureaucrats. On the other hand, England seems to resurrect its imperialistic superiority against the purported democracy and horizontality of European institutions. Adopting the notion of “cultural intimacy”—with which Michael Herzfeld analyzes the mutual engagement of contrasting positions in political and administrative practices—this paper addresses the equally stereotypical images of an indifferent, inhuman European bureaucracy and of an insular, cynical Great Britain in the works of Malcolm Bradbury and Tim Parks. Be it the allegedly liberal yet nationalistic stance of Thatcherist anti-Europeanism in Bradbury, or the British disaffection with the purported identitarian and cultural levelling within the common borders of the Schengen area and of the single currency, both authors’ symbolic constructions of European institutions and of British Euroscepticism are built as cultural entanglements of these two realities, and show the need to overcome the reductive conception of Europe as a failed super-state.
This book analyses the representation of the past and the practice of historiography in both the fiction and the critical writings of Virginia Woolf. It argues for a critical historiography, distinct from the conventional assumptions of... more
This book analyses the representation of the past and the practice of historiography in both the fiction and the critical writings of Virginia Woolf. It argues for a critical historiography, distinct from the conventional assumptions of history writing, to be found in Woolf's essays and fiction, and links her historiographical imagination with Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history and associated theory of modernity along certain dialectical motifs and emblematic figures. Setting 'in constellation' the ideas of Woolf and Benjamin on the relationship between the past and the present, it inquiries into the intersections of Woolf's literary modernism with (feminist) politics and the experience of modernity, speaking to contemporary critical debates. Benjamin's thought provides an exciting new lens for reading Woolf's work whose historiographical constructions are shown to possess a pronounced political impetus that intervenes with how history is perceived and recorded, also addressing crucial questions about the meaning and status of modern artworks.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Reading Virginia Woolf in Constellation with Walter Benjamin
Modernity, Modernism and the Past
Theories of History, Models of Historiography
Antiquity and Modernity: Jacob’s Room and the ‘Greek Myth’
Historical Fictions, Fictional Fashions and Time: Orlando as the ‘Angel of History’
Natural History and Historical Nature in To the Lighthouse and Other Fiction
Dreaming, History and the Visions of the Obscure in The Years
This Stage of History: Between the Acts and the Destruction of Tradition
A ‘Common History’: Anonymous Artists, Communal Collectivities
On March 17th, the new edition of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles was released (www.dchp.ca/dchp2). As a born-digital lexicographical project, this edition includes a number of features that will only be... more
On March 17th, the new edition of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles was released (www.dchp.ca/dchp2). As a born-digital lexicographical project, this edition includes a number of features that will only be peripherally of interest to the present talk. Instead, we will take a close look at the quotations database behind the Dictionary, the Bank of Canadian English. While common for the OED, with its much larger scope (e.g. Fischer 1994, Beal and Grant 2006, Sigmund 2014), quotation databases have generally not been used for other varieties of English. Containing quotations from Canada from 1505 to 2016 (plus just one from 2017), the Bank of Canadian English consists of just about 2.7 million words but can be harnessed as a linguistic corpus more efficiently than its small size would suggest as result of its structural features.
