Rudyard Kipling, Edward Morgan Forster, William Somerset Maugham and Joseph Conrad: The British Imperial Tradition and the Individual Talent
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Date
2012-10
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Publisher
Université Mouloud Mammeri
Abstract
This thesis studied the dialectic of imperial tradition and individual talent in the non-fictional
and fictional works of Rudyard Kipling, Edward Morgan Forster, William Somerset
Maugham and Joseph Conrad. Taking its bearings from the postcolonial theory and critical
categories elaborated by Edward Said, it argued the point that variation on the theme of
commitment to Empire is close to “degree zero” in the four writers’ works in spite of their
significantly different ideologies. “Authorial ideology” is superseded by the “general
ideology” of Empire as each and every author invests his “talent” in enhancing that imperial
tradition that Said calls Orientalism. In their texts, it is the “textual attitude” that prevails in
their perception of the Other in the opposition of the Oriental man’s primitiveness and the
Western man’s progress. I also argued that if the authors wrote in support of Empire, it was
because it was the imperial ideology that enabled them to circulate their “talents”. One of my
assumptions in developing the argument is that literature is just like money or currency.
Writing at a time of high imperialism, the four authors could not have coined their artistic
talents and put them into circulation without confirming to the general culture of empire that
percolated to their respective audiences. It is the numismatic mark of empire on their talent
that enabled them to be listened to and read by the public and this numismatic mark as I tried
to demonstrate throughout the dissertation is characterized by monologism. The
intertextuality between the four authors at the level of content is of the domain of pastiche as
there is no significant “clash of referent” of the Empire. The Other voice in the writers’
intertexts remains the same in spite of individual attempts to differentiate their style. The four
of them are preoccupied with the maintenance of empire through the proposition of solutions
and strategies to that shared goal. In short, I attempted to illustrate the ideology of difference
in the four writers’ works in the opposition they establish between narrative and vision in the
representation of the Other (the Orientals) versus the Same (the Westerners) and the
association of the Oriental space with the demonic, the abnormal, the diseased and the
marginal, and the Western space with the norm and the centre. This binary aesthetics is
underpinned by the assumption that the Orient and the Oriental man are there to be studied, to
be controlled and restored to the Western rational norms. The writers’ allegiance to art and the
development of individual talent comes second to the allegiance to the country and its
imperial interests. Thus, whether their personal style is classified as realist or modernist, it
does not question the existence of empire, and as such their works read as allegories of
empire. In this sense, the dialectic of imperial tradition and individual talent turns short.
Description
363 f. ; 30 cm. (+ CD-ROM)
Keywords
Dialectic, Imperial tradition
Citation
Literature