Analysis of Philosophy And Poetry In Commonwealth Literature

NAME: - ASHISH B. PITHADIYA

ROLL NUMBER:-2

TOPIC NAME: - PHILOSOPHY AND POETRY in COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE

PAPER NAME: - Post Colonial Study

SUBMITTED TO: - DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

Enrollment no:-2069108420190037

What Is Commonwealth literature?

Commonwealth Literature, Post-Colonial Literature in English, New Literature in English, World Writing in English – these are just some of the terms being used to describe the writings of ‘members’ of the former British Empire.

The number of titles, however, reflects the growing international importance of such writings as evidenced this month at the London Festival of Commonwealth Literature, with writers coming from around the globe. They tentatively include Michael Ondaatje, the Sri Lankan- Canadian author of ‘The English Patient’, the book that inspired the movie that swept the board at the latest Academy Awards ceremony.

The nine-day festival, sponsored by the Commonwealth Foundation and the University of London among others, will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Commonwealth Writers Prize and mark the Year of the Commonwealth in Britain.

It is an important milestone because many universities around the world now have courses in Commonwealth Literature, or some similar nomenclature, and academics are churning out books seemingly at the same pace as the fiction writers, poets and dramatists. Professors who teach the subject say that students who want to study English Literature are increasingly interested in the works coming from the English-speaking Caribbean, Africa, Canada and South-East Asia.

But what IS Commonwealth Literature? Many years after the term came into being, it still causes disagreement, according to Professor Henna Maes-Jelinek, a Belgian expert on the writing from Britain’s former colonies.

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal that covers the field of literature, especially Commonwealth and postcolonial literature, including colonial discourse and transnational studies. The journal's editors-in-chief are Claire Chambers (University of York) and Rachael Gilmour (Queen Mary University of London). It was established in 1966 and is currently published by SAGE Publications.

COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE: PHILOSOPHY AND POETRY

Although Commonwealth literature (from the Commonwealth Nations, hence written in English) and postcolonial literature (translated into English) are taught in many English departments, they remain problematic for at least two reasons. First, taxonomically the designations never escape their flawed origins. Thus Jacana Clerk and Ruth Siegel, editors of a recent anthology (1995), virtually apologize for their title, Modern Literatures of the Non-Western World, saying that they "faced the dilemma of using a negative term that derives from a Western perception" (xvii). Similarly, the rationale for grouping works and the related supposition for survey courses is a sense of an underlying cultural history (e.g., American literature), which also informs other courses of genres that derive from that history. Lacking any comparable unity, postcolonial literature is presented as a hodgepodge assembly and is often associated with minority studies. By definition, minority views are supplemental. Frequently, minority views arise in reaction to majority views. Since they do not voice majority experience, they must remain secondary and somewhat exotic.

Yet the views presented by Commonwealth writers are not minority views, though one would hardly know this from the

Poetry scolding of critics such as Graham Parry who takes the most prominent Indian novelist, R. K. Narayan, to task for "the odd psychology of some of his characters whose emotional responses are often bizarre to a Western reader" (79). Anglo American readers cannot understand the actions of Narayan’s characters until they know something of the Hindu social psychology that defines normal behavior in Indian society. This, then, is the second problem: to understand something of a profoundly alien society requires a deeper shift in outlook than can be accomplished by an examination of an isolated text or even a collection of works.

Commonwealth writers are native to the regions and cultures they write about: the Caribbean, India, China and parts of Africa. In some measure an Anglo-American audience must appreciate the exotic element of such writing: how different the fictional characters and their situations are from what is ordinary and important in our experience. When this is ignored, critics often bluster, scorning the unfamiliar, or preach, asking for tolerance of the unfamiliar. Jayana Clerk and Ruth Siegel hope that their anthology "helps cultivate an awareness that honors different cultural perspectives," as though assuming that it was the professed intent of each author to pitch his culture to an audience of North American undergraduates (xviii). We do not expect great works from our own tradition to be so transparent and pandering. William Walsh illustrates the bluster approach, concluding that Narayan's Mr. Sampath "doesn't quite succeed" because of "an insufficiency of composition. Exasperated because he cannot explain the accomplished work Walsh proclaims, "The novel's shape is oddly hump-backed, and repeated readings fail to convince me that I have missed some deeper and more structurally implicit unifying influence". What Walsh could not feel was the Hindu atmosphere, which provides motives for the characters in the novel and themes for readers.

Criticism has recently become sensitive to the presumptive of male narrative voices, to racially white voices and to colonial voices. Critical explanations proceeding from such sensitivities, however, remain dialectically two dimensional, assuming that truth can be discovered by stretching the text between two poles: male/ female, white/black, majority/minority, America/the world. Moving from one such movement in a protagonist's understanding and his/her subsequent moral growth provides the model for many Western novels. Nonetheless, the change is measured by distance from the initial pole, which continues to broadcast paradigm assumptions that postcolonial writers do not hear, because they the cultural programs which shaped their child-hoods. The non- Western cultures, in which postcolonial and Commonwealth writers typically spend their child-hoods, construe identity and motives that often lack Western counterparts. In some cases there is no second pole, either similar to or opposite from the first.

To read postcolonial literature with insight, Anglo-Americans must recognize that cultures are discrete and incommensurable. Indian Hindus are not bizarre British Christians. Readers must accept that there are not Kantian categories of logic or a grammar that will explain everything. In principle, the notion that critical tools should emerge from the culture they seek to explain sounds unproblematic. Objections arise on two counts. First, the legacy from Plato through Kant, paralleled by theology, claims a transcendental logic capable of giving the true picture. Postmodernism opposes this belief by stressing that any specific claim to the truth is necessarily grounded in a concrete language and historic culture. Second, as Bishop Berkeley might say, we only know what we know. Most readers of postcolonial and Commonwealth literature know only English and its associated culture. The implicit assumption is not exactly that Anglo-American culture is normative, but that readers partially escape or suspend it with difficulty, inevitably smuggling along implicit assumptions. The second point tends to reinforce the first point. Knowing only one view, it would be difficult to imagine exactly where it diverges from the truth.

Two points can now be made in regard to postcolonial literature. The first point is that there is not a neutral or obvious place to begin, place where truth is bare and universal, which consequently becomes a standard. This should not forestall critical effort, but should work recurrently to qualify judgments as cultural instead of true. The second point is that criticism must have a foot in both the

culture of the reader and that of the writer. Because postcolonial novels offer exotic material, the critical enterprise is closer to anthropology, which studies alien cultures, than sociology, which studies one's own culture. A theoretical basis for anthropological criticism is provided by the prolific and readable work of the McGill philosophy professor, Charles Taylor. Midway between such theory and postcolonial literature, the studies of comparative religion and comparative philosophy provide useful critical terms. Pioneered by Huston Smith, William Cant well Smith and Joseph Campbell, the discipline of comparative religions opposes the presumption of Christian apologetics to be the true religion. Comparative philosophy is an even younger field. The works of Roger Ames and David Hall on comparing Confucian China to ancient Greece are exemplary. Although I did not discover it until after I had explicated the Confucian dimension in two of Timothy Mo's novels, Hall and Ames's Thinking through Confucius is perhaps the best critical tool for understanding the Anglo-Chinese novelist's work. I believe that the critical method illustrated in this paper parallels the methods they use in regard to philosophical texts. Bernard Faure's The Rhetoric of Immediacy offers a postmodern reading of Zen Buddhism. The collection, Japan in Traditional and Postmodern Perspectives (1995), offers additional critical tools for readers of Asian postcolonial literature.