Unit 9: The Twentieth Century

Is there a comparison to be made between Kafka's Metamorphosis and Ovid's Metamorphoses?

Like Ovid's Metamorphoses, Kafka's novella seems to deal with the capricious desires of its characters. Yet, while privy to the minds of the gods' in Ovid, we get no such honor in Kafka's work — just the opposite in fact. While Ovid's work provides reasons why bad things happen to people, Kafka's shrugs its shoulders as the seemingly quixotic vicissitudes of nature as if to say, Yes, weird shit happens, but you'll never know why, and you'll just have to deal with it. two similar themes, isolation, and transformation Metamorphoses (Ovid) TRANSFORMATION: As its title suggests, Metamorphoses is an exploration of transformations of all kinds, from the pedestrian and obvious to the literary and oblique. Some of the metamorphoses are straightforwardly literal: Diana turns Actaeon into a deer, for example, or Juno changes Callisto into a bear. Others are more metaphorical and subtle. Many metamorphoses clarify and highlight an essential quality of the transformed person. When Jupiter turns Lycaon into a wolf, he is responding to Lycaon's bloodthirsty, wolfish character. Other metamorphoses are still subtler. Pentheus's transformation, for example, is figurative. His mother and aunt hunt him down not because he is actually an animal but because they perceive him as one. The worship of Bacchus morphs the women's mindsets, rather than Pentheus's body. Ovid suggests that subtle or figurative transformations can be just as dangerous as literal ones. Pentheus may not have transformed, but he is torn to shreds nonetheless. Metamorphosis (Kafka) ALIENATION Perhaps the greatest consequence of Gregor's metamorphosis is the psychological distance it creates between Gregor and those around him. Gregor's change makes him literally and emotionally separate from his family members—indeed, from humanity in general—and he even refers to it as his "imprisonment." After his transformation he stays almost exclusively in his room with his door closed and has almost no contact with other people. At most, Grete spends a few minutes in the room with him, and during this time Gregor always hides under the couch and has no interaction with her. Furthermore, he is unable to speak, and consequently he has no way of communicating with other people. Lastly, Gregor's metamorphosis literally separates him from the human race as it makes him no longer human. Essentially he has become totally isolated from everyone around him, including those people he cares for like Grete and his mother. But as we learn over the course of the story, this feeling of estrangement actually preceded his transformation. Shortly after waking and discovering that he has become a bug, for example, Gregor reflects on his life as a traveling salesman, noting how superficial and transitory his relationships have become as a result of his constant traveling. Later, Gregor recalls how his initial pride at being able to support his family faded once his parents began to expect that support, and how he felt emotionally distant from them as a result. There is also no mention in the story of any close friends or intimate relationships outside his family. In fact, the alienation caused by Gregor's metamorphosis can be viewed as an extension of the alienation he already felt as a person. METAMORPHOSIS The Metamorphosis depicts multiple transformations, with the most significant and obvious example being Gregor's metamorphosis into an insect. Though Gregor's physical change is complete when the story begins, he also undergoes a related change, a psychological transformation as he adapts to his new body. Grete experiences her own transformation in the story as she develops from a child into an adult. (In fact, in zoology the word metamorphosis refers to a stage in insect and amphibian development during which an immature form of the animal undergoes a physical transformation to become an adult.) At the beginning of the work, she is essentially still a girl, but as she begins to take on adult duties, such as caring for Gregor and then getting a job to help support her family, she steadily matures. In the story's closing scene, her parents realize she has grown into a pretty young woman and think of finding her a husband. The scene signals that she is now an adult emotionally and also physically, as it describes the change her body has undergone and echoes Gregor's own physical change. The family as a whole also undergoes a metamorphosis as well. Initially, the members of the Samsa family appear hopeless and static, owing to the difficulties resulting from Gregor's transformation as well as their financial predicament. But over time they are able to overcome their money problems, and when Gregor finally dies and the family no longer has to deal with his presence, all the family members are reinvigorated. As the story closes, they have completed an emotional transformation and their hope is revitalized.

How do the formal and thematic resources of Endgame compare to A Doll's House?

- Codependent relationships = Clov and Hamm are in a submissive/dominant relationship and cannot function or live without the other = Torvald treats Nora like a child, he wants her to be 100% subservient to him and his needs another example of a dom/sub relationship - End of an Unhealthy relationship = Clov and Nora at the end of the respective plays finally leave their "abusive" partners to discover themselves as individuals

What is the essential dilemma expressed in "A Far Cry from Africa"?

A Far Cry from Africa by Derek Walcott deals with the theme of split identity and anxiety caused by it in the face of the struggle in which the poet could side with neither party. It is, in short, about the poet's ambivalent feelings towards the Kenyan terrorists and the counter-terrorist white colonial government, both of which were 'inhuman', during the independence struggle of the country in the 1950s. The persona, probably the poet himself, can take favor of none of them since both bloods circulate along his veins. He has been given an English tongue which he loves on the one hand, and on the other, he cannot tolerate the brutal slaughter of Africans with whom he shares blood and some traditions. His conscience forbids him to favour injustice. He is in the state of indecisiveness, troubled, wishing to see peace and harmony in the region. Beginning with a dramatic setting, the poem "A Far Cry from Africa" opens a horrible scene of bloodshed in African territory. 'Bloodstreams', 'scattered corpses,' 'worm' show ghastly sight of battle. Native blacks are being exterminated like Jews in holocaust following the killing of a white child in its bed by blacks. The title of the poem involves an idiom: "a far cry" means an impossible thing. But the poet seems to use the words in other senses also; the title suggests in one sense that the poet is writing about an African subject from a distance. Writing from the island of St. Lucia, he feels that he is at a vast distance- both literally and metaphorically from Africa. "A Far Cry" may also have another meaning that the real state of the African 'paradise' is a far cry from the Africa that we have read about in descriptions of gorgeous fauna and flora and interesting village customs. And a third level of meaning to the title is the idea of Walcott hearing the poem as a far cry coming all the way across thousands of miles of ocean. He hears the cry coming to him on the wind. The animal imagery is another important feature of the poem. Walcott regards as acceptable violence the nature or "natural law" of animals killing each other to eat and survive; but human beings have been turned even the unseemly animal behavior into worse and meaningless violence. Beasts come out better than "upright man" since animals do what they must do, any do not seek divinity through inflicting pain. Walcott believes that human, unlike animals, have no excuse, no real rationale, for murdering non-combatants in the Kenyan conflict. Violence among them has turned into a nightmare of unacceptable atrocity based on color. So, we have the "Kikuyu" and violence in Kenya, violence in a "paradise", and we have "statistics" that don't mean anything and "scholar", who tends to throw their weight behind the colonial policy: Walcott's outrage is very just by the standards of the late 1960s, even restrained. More striking than the animal imagery is the image of the poet himself at the end of the poem. He is divided, and doesn't have any escape. "I who am poisoned with the blood of both, where shall I turn, divided to the vein?" This sad ending illustrates a consequence of displacement and isolation. Walcott feels foreign in both cultures due to his mixed blood. An individual sense of identity arises from cultural influences, which define one's character according to a particular society's standards; the poet's hybrid heritage prevents him from identifying directly with one culture. Thus creates a feeling of isolation. Walcott depicts Africa and Britain in the standard roles of the vanquished and the conqueror, although he portrays the cruel imperialistic exploits of the British without creating sympathy for the African tribesmen. This objectively allows Walcott to contemplate the faults of each culture without reverting to the bias created by attention to moral considerations. However, Walcott contradicts the savior image of the British through an unfavorable description in the ensuring lines. "Only the worm, colonel of carrion cries/ 'waste no compassion on their separated dead'." The word 'colonel' is a punning on 'colonial' also. The Africans associated with a primitive natural strength and the British portrayed as an artificially enhanced power remain equal in the contest for control over Africa and its people. Walcott's divided loyalties engender a sense of guilt as he wants to adopt the "civilized" culture of the British but cannot excuse their immoral treatment of the Africans. The poem reveals the extent of Walcott's consternation through the poet's inability to resolve the paradox of his hybrid inheritance.

What is the political significance of Césaire's use of the French language?

Cesaire's political struggle on behalf of France's former colonies went hand in hand with his literary works, in which colonial oppression and liberation figure as prominent topics. In both his poetry and plays, he exposes the cultural and ideological strategies that subject black people to white domination, and he outlines counter images of a rebellious, imaginative, and self-confident black culture. But this difficulty itself has a political thrust: By writing poetry that even French readers find challenging, Cesaire, as the poetic voice of the colonized, thrusts all the weight, complexity, and beauty of French education and the French language back at his oppressors. This certainly, is a message that no French reader of the poem could miss. The Francophone Caribbean subjects were usually looked upon as French citizen if they affiliate themselves to the French norms and standards by learning the metropolitan language of the colonizers. Fanon here argues that learning the language of the French colonizers was an added advantage for the black colonized because in this way they can put a white mask on their black skin. The knowledge of the French language has always given them an advantage among the black people in the archipelago but they encounter a fiasco when they tried to become more French in France

Why might Kafka have employed allegory rather than writing a realistic story of everyday life?

Existential (and politcal) allegory: Capitalism and bureaucracies of the modern day dehumanize people and force them to live lives that are insect-like in quality (living in close quarters, often dirty; families torn apart by financial stress; identifying oneself primarily with one's job). An allegory is a story that represents abstract ideas or moral qualities; an allegory has both a literal and a symbolic level of meaning (example: Gulliver's Travels). As an allegory--a story more symbolic than realistic--the story could be read as a dark fable about the effects of capitalism and greed on the family unit. In this sense, one may argue there is not enough "Realism" to qualify as Magical Realism, and that the story is more like a dream (consider the fact that Gregor WAKES UP from a troubling dream in the beginning). Allegory for Disability The trajectory of Gregor and his family is a drama that is tragically replayed daily all over the world in families living with disability. The tragedy is uniquely Gregor's. He is the one suffering the limited mobility and inability to speak, the rejection, his diminished status, and his having become a burden to those who loved him. Gregor Samsa's story, of course, has wider applicability than the just the compelling reading based on disability. Vladimir Nabokov has said about this story, "Kafka's private nightmare was that the central human character belongs to the same private fantastic world as the inhuman characters around him but pathetically and tragically he attempts to struggle out of that world into the world of humans and dies in despair." Metamorphosis as an Metaphor for Human Isolation Kafka's Metamorphosis is an existential allegory of human isolation. Throughout his narrative, Kafka employs various symbols and metaphors in order to convey his theme about the isolation of modern man. There is a lot in this note; I am providing this as a further review of the story's symbolism; these observations may apply to ANY assessment of the story's ideas and its style: Gregor: In the allegory, Gregor, on some level, represents all of humankind. By using the allegory to describe Gregor's isolation, Kafka alludes to the isolation of the human condition overall. Job: Gregor's job as a traveling salesman is one of deep isolation and displeasure. Living in constant fear of his manager and his family debt, and constantly moving from place to place without establishing any long-term human relationships, Gregor's job symbolizes the fear, isolation, and meaninglessness of Gregor's life, even before his metamorphosis. . .the human condition deep down is marked by the deepest form of isolation and hunger for relatively non-existant human contact. Door: The door symbolizes the threshold that separates Gregor from his family and thus represents the ability to establish human contact. When Gregor's father pushes him through the door causing him to bleed, Kafka is metaphorically describing the pain Gregor experienced from being so shunned by his own family - or more generally, the pain we experience from our relative isolation from other human beings. Similarly, through the irony that Kafka establishes in the fact that his family refused to enter when Gregor's door was finally opened, Kafka alludes to humans' inability to meaningfully interact, even when they are physically able to do so. The fact that his sister and mother only entered Gregor's room sparingly, briefly, and only when absolutely necessary represents the notion that humans interact only when circumstances absolutely require, but no more than that. Dung beetle: In writing Metamorphosis, Kafka made a conscious choice to depict Gregor as a gigantic insect, specifically a dung beetle, as opposed to some other creature. The symbolism of this selection is that humans have a natural aversion to insects, especially such unhygienic creatures as dung beetles. By depicting Gregor in this way, Kafka alludes to the scorn with which Gregor was shunned by his family and the rest of humankind, thus enhancing his theme of the isolation of the human condition. Hissing: The irony that Gregor's family perceives his words to be hissing while he himself perceives his father's words to be hissing highlights the contrast between Gregor and his family, thereby referencing their growing isolation from each other. The fact that Gregor and his family could not understand one another symbolizes the way in which human beings can never truly communicate or interact on any meaningful level either. Picture frame: Gregor's cherished picture of the woman dressed in furs, which he keeps in a frame, symbolizes human loneliness and longing for meaningful interpersonal contact. The fact that Gregor cannot truly interact with the picture, however, highlights the theme that modern human beings are essentially isolated from one another. Furniture: Gregor's furniture, which his sister and mother eventually resolve to remove from his room, represents his humanity. The decision his family makes to clear his room of all symbols of his personality and former self represents the way in which he was stripped of his humanity. Gregor's attempts to salvage the picture frame represent his ineffectual efforts to salvage human contact. However, his efforts are of course to no avail, and his room becomes a sort of clearinghouse for junk. Symbolically, his room becomes a wasteland of meaninglessness, totally devoid of any marks of humanity or human relationships. Crawling: Like Gregor's changes in diet, his changes in behavior, including crawling on the ceiling and walls, represent his accelerating metamorphosis and the idea that all humans are essentially nothing more than insects. Losing vision: As Gregor becomes more and more of a beetle, he also begins to lose his vision. Looking out the window, he observes that the sky blends into the horizon in the distance, as an indiscriminate gray field of nothingness. Like Gregor's other changes in behavior, the losing of his vision further symbolizes his accelerating transformation. Sheet: In consideration of his sister's and mother's feelings, Gregor convers himself with a sheet in order to shield them from his ghastly sight. The pathos Kafka develops through this pitiful imagery alludes to the guilt and pain Gregor experienced. In this way, Kafka creates the impression that humans, represented by Gregor, are inherently shamed and disgraced by their own isolated existence and repulsion from one another. Apple: Like the door through which Gregor was painfully shoved, the apple buried in his back symbolizes the pain Gregor experienced when his father developed such a strong aversion to him that he even tried to kill him. Kafka here makes a biblical allusion to the apple as Adam and Eve's fall from innocence in the Garden of Eden, thus portraying mankind's fall from innocence given our natural aversion to and disdain for one another. Lack of burial: The fact that Gregor's family fails to bury him symbolizes how his family no longer regarded him as a human relative, near the end. In this sense, the disposal of Gregor's body represents the cruelty with which humans forget about each other after death, and, more generally, the way in which humans never truly establish meaningful bonds during life. Bright skies: The bright skies on the final pages of the novella symbolize and foreshadow the way in which Gregor's family may happily move on with their lives after his death. The morose and somber nature of this ironic circumstance serves to reinforce Kafka's morose and somber themes about human isolation and aversion. Death: Gregor's death reinforces the morose theme of human isolation. At the end of the novella, Gregor finally succumbs to death only after realizing that it was absolutely necessary for him to leave in order for his family to move on. This characterization of Gregor as weighing down his family symbolizes the way in which all humans naturally burden each other, offering no real joy, intimacy, or human contact to each other's lives. Only with Gregor gone could his parents and sister finally move on and establish a brighter future.

Is Endgame an existential play about the human condition, or does it also speak to the practical life experiences of twentieth-century Europeans?

Existentialism is a philosophical movement which rejects the idea that the universe offers any clues about how humanity should live and focuses on individual existence, freedom and choice. It basically came into being as a reaction to the Age of Reason. The philosophers of that age like Spinoza, Leibniz, Hobbes, Hume, Locke, Voltaire, Bacon and Rousseau, regarded reason not only as man's highest faculty which is capable of solving all problems and providing him with complete knowledge in the end, but it was also seen as completely positive, with which the quality of being flawless is meant. In other words, reason was considered to be absolute, which explains why those philosophers, who were proud of being reasonable and rational, overstated their case. Evident from the Beckettian characterization, setting and use of language in Endgame, Samuel Beckett writes on some existentialist themes like despair, nothingness, facticity and anguish, which discloses his existentialist inclination. In this way, the Beckettian characters in both plays display a state of suffering in which they are indeed experiencing a difficult journey to authenticity although both plays are almost reduced to immobility. None of his characters can attain full authenticity in the plays since Beckett's plays are closed to change. However, the frozen pictures of extraordinary characters, who are exposed to the unbearable tiredness of the way leading to authenticity, and the weird setting in addition to a reduced language of less communication have an impact on both the readers and the audiences of Endgame. While Beckett's characters fail to be authentic men, the playwright manages to show what sort of a thing to exist is, and the fact that man is obliged to attain authenticity in order to avoid nothingness, and thus, he has to invent himself. In a way, Beckett makes use of Sartrean negation in his characters. It is known that positive can only come from negative; the characters are like the negations of the audiences and the readers. Consequently, putting the experience of existence by means of his characters on the stage is what Beckett does so as to make authenticity accessible to the audience and the reader.

Upon what grounds has postcolonialism been proposed as a new world literature?

Homi Bhabha proposed that postcolonial literature might be the new world literature. For him the literature of the displaced, the exiled, the uprooted, the marginalized, more accurately reflected the state of the present-day world than the postmodern literature produced by so-called mainstream literatures in the West. Bhabha suggests that world literature might be based not on the recognition of what is common in all literatures, as has often been the interpretation put upon Goethe's Weltliteratur, but rather rooted in "historical trauma". As Bhabha puts it: "The study of world literature might be the study of the way in which cultures recognize themselves through their projections of 'otherness'". Hence, he proposes, "where, once, the transmission of national traditions was the major theme of world literature, perhaps we can now suggest that transnational histories of migrants, the colonized, or political refugees - these border and frontier conditions - may be the terrains of world literature." Amitava Kumar argues that present-day expositions about world literature routinely by-pass the economic issues at the back or at the heart, of the texts in question, and equally routinely select texts on the basis of so-called universal values. Instead, he argues, what we should do is pay attention to how literature comprises and reveals local or national economic realities of dominance, suppression, oppression and exploitation in a global context, or in the context of globalization. Rather Bhabha envisages new "modes of cultural identification and political affect that form around isues of sexuality, race, feminism, the lifeworld of refugees or migrants, or the deathly social destiny of AIDS". In this new "geopolitical space," Bhabha argues, "the Western metropolis must confront its postcolonial history, told by its influx of postwar migrants and refugees, as an indigenous or native narrative internal to its national history".

Do Césaire and Walcott respond similarly to colonialism?

In a way both the poets represent two different phases of Caribbean responses to colonialism. Their socio-cultural milieu has determined their poetic sensibility because the French colonial policy and the British colonial policy were not similar. Aimé Césaire was a politician but Derek Walcott was never. Therefore, Aimé Césaire's works have always been motivated by the political agenda. Moreover, Aimé Césaire represents quite an earlier phase of colonial response to colonialism but contrarily, Walcott represents the post-1960s decades of the Caribbean colonial responses. In this context it should be pointed out that the British colonial policy and the French colonial policy were basically different. In case of the French colonial strategy, the colonized part of France was usually looked upon as another France. Aimé Césaire, the great Francophone Caribbean poet and playwright, represented the Martinique constituency in the French Assembly in Paris. Contrarily, the British colonial policy never allowed the colonized natives as the citizen of the Great Britain but they had to tolerate similar colonial experiences in the archipelago. In a similar way, the Anglophone Caribbean pupils were taught to believe their rootlessness and in spite of Caribbean flora and fauna, their geography lesson include European geography and history. Aimé Césaire, one of such black students who bears the marks of French colonial education and culture, never assimilated spiritually to the colonizers' tradition and in spite of having all the qualities to serve as a civil servant; he preferred to teach the students of Le lycée Victor-Schœlcher, a French colonial school in Martinique capital Fort-de-France. He always talked about restoring the ancestral African past and tradition because it will substitute the discourse of colonial cultural tradition. Though he propagated the restoration of African past, he himself contrarily follows the legacy of European literatures and cultures. His poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of Return to the Native Land) is marked by his use of surrealist literary manner which emerged in early twentieth century Europe. But his use of Surrealist techniques is quite different from that of its European practitioners. Derek Walcott, on the other hand, has used modernism in the postcolonial Caribbean context. According to Charles W. Pollard, Walcott is one of the Caribbean exponents of New World Modernism. His use of inter-textual references, his transformation of the Modernist crisis into postcolonial Caribbean crisis of identity, his adaptation of the European literary modes, his painterly exploration of the poetic imagination have given his poems and plays a unique Modernist flavor. Born and brought up in the island of St. Lucia, Walcott realized that he belongs to the minority Methodist community among the Catholic islanders. Though the colour of his skin is white among the black population of his native island, the grandmothers of his parents were actually the black African descends. After seventeen times' continuous battle between the French and the British, when the island finally became British colony, the language of the island was French based 'patois' but Walcott belongs to the minority English speaker. Like the diverse cultural tradition of his islanders, Walcott himself felt the diversity in him which nourished his sensibility as an artist and poet. His postcolonial experience of Modernism actually assisted him to express the anxiety of his cultural and identity crisis. Poems like "Green Apple Kingdom", "The Schooner Flight", "Ruins of a Great House", "A Far Cry from Africa" etc encapsulate his cultural crisis from a modernist perspective.

How do the multiple perspectives and complex poetics of Notebook of a Return to the Native Land speak back to colonialism?

In the Notebook, Cesaire addresses the situation of the Caribbean in particular and colonized black cultures in general, using a series of different voices and perspectives; while it is tempting to identify his own view with only one or two of these voices, his full understanding of what negritude means emerges only from seeing the different perspectives in the poem together. By turns outcry, lament, prophecy, and manifesto, the Notebook deploys a wide range of poetic strategies from allusions to the Bible and Shakespeare all the way to the striking metaphoric juxtapositions of surrealist poetry. Cesaire uses these resources to evoke visions of Caribbean misery and beauty, the suffering of African slaves on their journey West, and the self-confidence of blacks rising up against their oppressors. Though the overall thrust of the poem isn't difficult to understand, the details are often quite hard to grasp, as they are in the surrealist poetry that influenced Cesaire deeply.

How does Notebook of a Return to the Native Land represent what Césaire called négritude?

Negritude, the international black consciousness movement that challenged colonialism and racial inferiority. The epiphany or turn in the poem starts to come with the introduction of the concept of negritude. While Cesaire explicitly spells out all of the things that negritude are not, he never provides an exact definition for what negritude is, exactly. Upon closer analysis, it appears that negritude is more than a simple state, concept, or theory, but an action pertaining to intense self-analysis and redefinition. The narrator of the poem is unable to create an idea of a people based solely on African heritage and tradition, for as he states: "No, we've never been Amazons of the king of Dahomey, nor princes of Ghana with eight hundred camels, nor wise men in Timbuktu under Askia the Great...I may as well confess that we were at all times pretty mediocre dishwashers, shoeblacks without amition, at best conscientious sorcerers and the only unquestionable record that we broke was that of endurance under the chicote [whip]..." In order to create a new identity that is more than just fantasy or wishful thinking, the narrator must accept both his African heritage as well as the legacy of slavery, poverty, and colonialism. He will never be able to be a voice for his people or represent an idea of an integrated, whole person if he does not face his very real history. And negritude, more than just a feeling of pride in the color of one's skin, or in one's origins, is to be found within this process of self-and cultural discovery.

In light of the work of Césaire and Walcott, can Montaigne's "Of Cannibals" be viewed as an early instance of postcolonial expression?

Postcolonial literature is the literature of countries that were colonised, mainly by European countries. It exists on all continents except Antarctica. Postcolonial literature often addresses the problems and consequences of the decolonization of a country, especially questions relating to the political and cultural independence of formerly subjugated people, and themes such as racialism and colonialism. Montaigne believes eloquence comes in two forms: naked and clothed. Naked eloquence is refined, courtly, and follows the rules of decorum (hierarchical) ---the conventional idea of eloquence. Clothed eloquence is complete, open, guile-less self-expression --- nakedness as innocence, not savagery. Montaigne also calls this second kind democratic eloquence. He strives for this democratic eloquence, but cannot attain it because he is civilized, controlled, and not "savage" enough. While Europeans see this free expression as savage, he believes it is desirable because it is natural. In his essay, Montaigne describes the native population of Brazil. He accepts the cannibalism and reports of human sacrifice described in reports about the people, but accounts for this behavior from the perspective of the Amerindians. He compares these with practices of sixteenth century English society (torture, heinous public executions, displaying the heads and body parts on pikes to deter crime/treason), and the comparison makes the English look more savage than the "savages." It is contention that people call behavior of the Other barbarous because it is different from their own. Montaigne explains the lives of the cannibals in terms that are understood within the confines of the conventional society (clothed eloquence). He says that translation is the only way to give the Amerindians a voice because there is no language that expresses their unconventional society in its own terms (Naked eloquence). He purports the view of "the noble savage." This is called "cultural relativism." This gives a view of the "noble savage" that is in opposition to the unfavorable view of Caliban (anagram of cannibal) as the cannibal in The Tempest. It seems that the two notions were competing at the time, and eventually Shakespeare's representation prevailed. I tend to think of the two as both coming from the same time, because looking back from our perspective it is close. However, I have to think about what difference thirty years have made on our culture. In a period of rapid change, thirty years can be a lot. While we don't see the views from the 1980s as antiquated, we certainly see them as outdated. That was a time of rapid social and economic change in England, and I must consider this when I asses the difference between 1623 and 1719.

What are the ramifications of writing postcolonial literature in English?

Postcolonial world literature has in practice largely meant English-language postcolonial literature. One suspects that Spivak would judge the danger just signaled all the more acute as postcolonialism, in theory as well as in the primary literature it focuses upon, has mostly been confined to the Anglophone realm, thus even further prejudicing the world literature it potentially comprises in favour of an already hegemonic construct. Wail Hassan notes, postcolonial studies seems to confine its attention to literatures written in former colonies or by authors emanating from former colonies and in the language of the ex colonizer, in practice English and French (and even the latter only very recently, I might add). Therefore, he continues, "postcolonial studies profess to make the balance of global power relations central to its inquiry, yet seems to inscribe neocolonial hegemony by privileging the languages of the major colonial powers, Britain and France ... even the substantial colonial writing in other European languages such as Dutch, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, is no less excluded from post-colonial debates than texts written in the languages of the colonies: Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu, not to mention the oral literatures of Africa, Native Americans, and Australia's Aborigines, which pose a serious challenge to postcolonial theories based on contemporary notions of textuality. If we translate some of the literature as pertaining to postcolonial postmodern writers they can be seen as "subalterns" that cannot truly speak either but only ventriloquate in the language of "the master." Spivak enlarged on her suspicions to the use of English as the necessary lingua franca for the study of world literature through anthologies. Marjorie Perloff lamented that, because the United States is currently the only superpower in the world, it gets to call the shots when it comes to a lingua franca, and that such essentializing of English ... perpetuates the old notion of centers and margins which the new comparative literature model is supposedly countering. Instead if "world", which as we have seen always implies someone's world, or "globe" which is tainted with the economic power imbalances of globalization, "planet" infers a view from outside, in which all is equal in its alterity, that is to say in that which we cannot, that we must not, fully apprehend of the other, but that we must nevertheless respect precisely in its difference. Spivak's call for a planetary approach, although it seems to me that she has not done so with an eye to the alterity that Spivak calls for, but rather in the sense of "englobing" the world through, and in, American literature.

To what extent is postcolonialism a Western creation?

Postcolonialism can be seen as a projection of, rather than resistance to, Western thought. Proponents of multiculturalism and postcolonialism will hardly feel like quarrelling with the emancipatory prospects sketched here for their respective constituencies. At the same time they may well fear this latest avatar of postmodern thinking to be yet another sly maneuver on the part of the West via theory to preserve its "imperious" grasp on an ever more refractory literary production worldwide. The room here made for multiculturalism and postcolonialism under the umbrella of "postmodernism" invites the risk of being construed as yet another attempt on the part of the West to appropriate to itself "some of the more forward-looking products" of "marginal" cultures, meaning not only some of the more highly regarded literary works from these cultures but likewise the very theory underlying multiculturalism and postcolonialism. A world literature under the aegis of postmodernism and/or postcolonialism, then, at least in some interpretations projects a world that remains relentlessly "Western," whether in extending the postmodernism of the West, and perhaps even of only one nation of the West, to comprise all of the world, as happens for instance in Bertens and Fokkema's International Postmodernism, or in countering such postmodernism with a postcolonialism that for its definition is finally dependent upon what it subverts.

What is the nature of the debate around la Francophonie?

Recently, the debate on postcolonialism has also erupted in the French language context, with heated debates around "la francophonie." As in almost of all of Rene Etiemble's work, was a plea for comparativism truly encompassing "the world," and not just a tin Eurocentric part of it. For French comparative literature, let us recall, it was French literature that had always remained the yardstick of the discipline. So too had French literature remained the ideal against which were measured the "other" literatures in French, or of the so-called "francophonie," a term that always implied a second best next to the "real" thing - that is to say, French literature from France, the "hexagone" itself. Noting that in autumn 2006 five of the seven major French literary prizes had gone to foreign-born authors, the manifesto proclaimed that this was a historical moment that signaled a Copernican revolution because it revealed what literary milieu already knew without admitting it: the center, from which supposedly radiated a franco-French literature, is no longer the center. The result, the manifesto claims, is the end of francophone literature - and the birth of a world literature in French. At the same time, it also means the return of the world, the subject, meaning, history, the referent in French literature, and the overcoming of the stale pre-occupation with self-reflexivity that, for the longest time - in fact, ever since the nouveau roman - had plagued French literature. In France, foreign-born authors were still expected to "blend in" and become "French" to the core. Now, however, all was different: the emergence of a consciously affirmed, transnational world literature in the French language, open to the world, signs the death-certificate of so-called francophone literature ... no one speaks or writes 'francophone'. In fact, the manifesto claims, in a strict sense the francophone concept presents itself as the last avatar of colonialism.

How does the spare, literal style of Kafka's prose reflect or reproduce the major themes of the work?

The spare, literal style of Kafka's prose reflect or reproduce the major themes of the work is offset with Kafka's use of parables. The reason that it is often difficult to decide which of these and other interpretations might be the most appropriate lies in the fact that many of Kafka's stories have the structure of a parable, a story that describes concrete and everyday events in order to illustrate an abstract concept or condition; unlike allegories, parables are usually not self-explanatory but require interpretive comment. An understanding of Kafka's texts is further complicated by the fact that even in the most literal level of the plot, they don't remain in the realm of ordinary experience in the way biblical parables do. In The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes up in the morning with every intention of going to work, only to find himself transformed into a beetle lying on its back. Kafka's literary mastery, is most obvious in his ability to make such fantastic occurrences appear perfectly real to the reader.

How might the change undergone by Gregor Samsa and his family have been read as a product of world history?

The story could be read as a dark fable about the effects of capitalism and greed on the family unit. Became one of the most towering achievements of European modernism: Throughout the twentieth century, Kafka's stories deeply influenced writers across different continents and languages, from the Argentinean short-story writer Jorge Luis Borges to the Japanese novelist Abe Kobo and the American cartoon artist Art Spiegelman. Indeed, in several languages the adjective "kafkaesque" has become part of the common modern vocabulary as a description of situations that are difficult, intricate, alienating, or absurd. This usage loosely reflects the kind of predicament Kafka's protagonists typically find themselves confronted with. An event occurs that can't really be explained in terms of ordinary experience and commonsense rationality; as they investigate what the meaning of this event might be, Kafka's characters move gradually away from normal life and become more and more deeply entangled with incomprehensible processes and authorities. In the encounter with immensely powerful but impenetrable structures of authority - whether they are familial, civic, legal or religious - Kafka's characters come to question their own identities and beliefs about the world, but they are unable to formulate more adequate ones. As they find themselves in an environment that is unintelligible at best and hostile at worst, Kafka's characters experience what is often considered one of the quintessentially modern conditions: alienation, the estrangement of the individual from normal social bonds and activities. The reasons for this alienation in Kafka's fictional world have been hotly debated over the decades. Some readers have claimed that Kafka's characters exemplify the predicament of a humankind that needs and seels out religious redemption but is forever cut off from divine mercy or access to salvation. Others emphasize that Kafka's descriptions of impersonal, inefficient, and incomprehensible institutions reflect some aspects of German sociologist Max Weber's famous characterization of modern bureaucracies. In this view, Kafka's characters would illustrate the condition of the typical modern citizen, whose life, in large part, is determined by abstract bureaucratic networks. Yet others have argues that Kafka's stories refer more specifically to the experience of a particular social group, the bourgeois middle class in an advanced capitalist society, and even more specifically to the double alienation implicit in Kafka's own status as a Jew of mixed German and Czech heritage living in Prague in the waning years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And finally, it has been suggested that the best way to approach Kafka's stories is through a psychoanalytical perspective that would foreground Kafka's own extremely troubled relation to his father as one of the basic sources of his characters' conflicted encounters with authority.

How do "A Far Cry from Africa" and "Volcano" set forth complementary problems?

The two poems illustrate two major sides of Walcott's response to colonial and postcolonial conditions: "A Far Cry from Africa" expresses the divisions of history and self that arise from so mixed a heritage. "Volcano" pays affectionate, ironic homage to his modernist predecessors Conrad and Joyce - artistic exiles both and prime models for the transmutation of colonial experience into lasting art.

If Endgame is a play about nothing, why is there so much dialogue?

There is a lot of dialogue because there is little movement in the play, and almost all of the characters are stationary. This play being what it is, we might better classify this section as "lack of actions." Yet, we learn a lot about Clov from that opening scene where he draws back the curtains of the windows, but keeps forgetting the ladder when he does so. Through Clov's actions, we get a sense of his absent-mindedness and also of his absurdity. We also learn a lot about Clov by the way that he constantly goes back and forth from his kitchen. He is incapable of actually leaving Hamm, so he substitutes in a bunch of these false departures. We get into the significance of the kitchen at more length in the "Setting" section. Because Hamm and his parents are immobile, we don't learn as much by their actions. Yet, we do notice that Nagg lets himself out of his bin and goes back into it as he pleases, whereas Nell waits for someone to call her or put her back. This might suggest that Nagg still possesses more agency and hope then Nell does. We also notice that Hamm wants to be taken around the room frequently, and that he attempts to move himself with the gaff, the poll used for sailing. He is not content being physically handicapped, and has not yet given the hope of being in control of his own body, no matter to how small an extent. One of the most quoted lines in Endgame is when Clov asks Hamm what there is at Hamm's house to keep him from leaving. Hamm responds, "The dialogue" (1.582). Dialogue in the play is the way that the characters keep up their hope, the way that they keep from giving up. Hamm is the one who most often pushes the language along; at times, he chides Clov for not keeping up with him. The result of this situation is that the language they use is not quite natural. It is theatrical; the characters are speaking because they feel that they must speak, not just because they feel like it. They are performing, not just for us, but for themselves, reminding themselves that they are still alive and capable of continuing.

What is it that makes Endgame so relatable across cultures?

What makes Endgame so relatable across cultures are the universal themes it depicts: CYCLICAL, REPETITIVE NATURE OF BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS Endgame's opening lines repeat the word "finished," and the rest of the play hammers away at the idea that beginnings and endings are intertwined, that existence is cyclical. Whether it is the story about the tailor, which juxtaposes its conceit of creation with never-ending delays, Hamm and Clov's killing the flea from which humanity may be reborn, or the numerous references to Christ, whose death gave birth to a new religion, death-related endings in the play are one and the same with beginnings. While Hamm and Clov are in the "endgame" of their ancient lives, with death lurking around the corner, they are also stuck in a perpetual loop that never allows final closure—Hamm claims he wants to be "finished," but admits that he "hesitate[s]" to do so. Just as death cannot arrive to seal off life, neither can Hamm or Clov escape to close the book on one existence and open another—note Clov's frequent failed attempts to leave the room (and his final return after vowing to leave) and Hamm's insistence on returning to the center of the room. Nell's death may be an aberration in a play where death seems impossible, but since she is the one character who recognizes the absurdity of the situation, perhaps she is rewarded by dying. Several of Beckett's dramatic designs elucidate this notion of a circular existence. As mentioned above, Hamm has a compulsive need to return to the exact center of the room after Clov takes him on chair-rides. His oblique comments about the environment—beyond the hollow wall in their hole is the "other hell"—suggest an allusion to Dante's Inferno, another work that used images of circularity. And just as Dante's infernal images emphasize the eternal misery of its inhabitants, Beckett's characters are stuck in eternally static routines. They go through the "farce" of routine actions, as they call it, because there is nothing else to do while they wait for death. Even the environment around them is static; everything outside is "zero," as Clov reports, and the light, too, is forever gray, stranded between light and dark. Beckett also makes use of repetitions to underscore the cyclical stasis in Endgame. The play systematically repeats minute movements, from how many knocks Hamm makes on a wall and how many Nagg makes on Nell's ashbin to how many steps Clov takes. The repetitions prohibit the discernment of meaning, since there is never a final product to scrutinize. At the start of the play, Clov questions when individual grains become a "heap." In his view, the heap is "impossible"; any single grain is not a heap, and a "heap" is just an accumulation of single grains. When Hamm later considers how individual moments make up a life, the analogy should hold—it is an "impossible" life, consisting not of a life but of discrete moments, until death terminates it. At one point, Hamm excitedly believes he is "beginning" to make some meaning out of the environment, but he will keep beginning to make sense of it and never finalize the meaning. EMPTINESS AND LONELINESS The constant tension in Endgame is whether Clov will leave Hamm or not. He threatens to and does sometimes, but he is never able to make a clean break. Likewise, Hamm continually tells Clov to leave him alone but pulls him back before an exit is possible. Both wonder out loud why they stay with each other, but both men give reasons in long monologues for why they put up with each other: their empty lives are filled only with unyielding pain, and none of life's typical consolations help them—there is no cure for being on earth, as Hamm often says. One of the unspoken themes in the play is that having someone else around, even an irritant, helps assuage that pain. But Hamm and Clov's unwillingness to face this pain alone somehow makes the pain greater, and their complementary, dominant-submissive pairing (a staple of Beckett's plays) highlights their numbing dependency. Beckett has compared Hamm and Clov's tense co-dependency to his own relationship with his wife in the 1950s; both wanted to leave the other, but were afraid to. Nagg and Nell have a happier marriage in part because Nell, at least, is willing to accept that they cannot rely on each other (she calls their futile kissing routine a "farce") and must exist in their separate ashbins. THEATRE OF THE ABSURD Beckett was one of the lynchpins behind the French theatrical movement called the Theatre of the Absurd. The Absurdists took a page from Existentialist philosophy, believing that life was absurd, beyond human rationality, meaningless, a sentiment to which Endgame subscribes, with its conception of circularity and non-meaning. Beckett's own brand of Absurdism melds tragedy and comedy in new ways; Winnie gives a good definition of his tragicomedy when she says, "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness" (Beckett believes this was the most important line of the play). Self-conscious form in the theater was another feature of Absurdism, and there's no shortage in Endgame, from Clov's turning the telescope on the audience to Hamm's showy references to his own acting. But Beckett's self-consciousness is not merely for laughs. Just as the characters cannot escape the room or themselves, trapped in self-conscious cages, neither can the audience escape their lives for a night of theatrical diversion.

Is it possible for a writer to be postmodern and postcolonial?

Yes! Postcolonialism and postmodernism, supposedly each other's opposites as expressions of, respectively, resistance and accommodation to the Western world, in fact have a tangled relationship. Postmodernism and postcolonialism meet in Bhabha's new "geopolitical space, as a local or transnational reality." For Bhabha, postcoloniality is "a salutary reminder of the persistent 'neo-colonial' relations within the 'new' world order and the multinational division of labour," while at the same time bearing witness to what he call cultures constituted "otherwise than modernity." Such "cultures of postcolonial contra-modernity," he contends, "may be contingent to modernity, discontinuous, or in connection with it, resistant to its oppressive, assimilationist technologies." Some see postmodern works as directly translating late capitalism's commodifying influence into an "aesthetic" experience, reduplicating as it were the very personality make-up multinational late capitalism needs: functional man, broken up in disparate units, without any essence to him, man as malleable putty, what Gerhard Hoffmann has called "situational" man. The fact remains that some of the best-known postcolonial authors, Salman Rushdie probably being the prime example, on the basis of their literary techniques can be categorized just as easily as postmodern. Adam and Tiffin, for example, note that, "there is a good deal of formal and tropological overlap between "primary" texts variously categorised as "post-modern" or "post-colonial". But, they also note, "If there is overlap between the two discourses in therms of 'primary' texts ... there is considerably less in the 'secondary' category ... it is thus in the selection and reading of such 'primary' texts, and in the contexts of discussion in which they are placed, that significant divergences between post-colonialism and post-modernism are most often isolated. As Bhabha puts it in "The Postcolonial and the Postmodern": "We see how modernity and postmodernity are themselves constituted from the marginal perspective of cultural difference ... they encounter themselves contingently at the point at which the internal difference of their own society is reiterated in terms of the difference of the other, the alterity of the postcolonial site".