Missionary positions: reading the Bible in Forster's "The life to come".
E. M. Forster's short story "The Life to Come" intersects the concerns of both his colonial fiction (A Passage to India) and his homosexual fiction (Maurice). The confrontation in the story between a native chief and a missionary serves initially to explore the differences between permissive and prohibitional readings of the Bible, which reflects Forster's dislike of restrictive English morals. However, contextualizing the story within the project of translating Vedic scripture that attended British imperialism near the turn of the century demonstrates that Forster, like his contemporary and mentor Edward Carpenter, found within colonialism access to a mode of thinking that ultimately questioned the validity of either permission or prohibition as foundations for political argumentation.
The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from the Tempest to Tarzan.
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book Cheyfitz charts the course of American imperialism from the arrival of Europeans in a New World open for material and rhetorical cultivation to the violent foreign ventures of twentieth-century America in a Third World judged equally in need of cultural translation. Passionately and provocatively, he reads James Fenimore Cooper and Leslie Marmon Silko, Frederick Douglass, and Edgar Rice Burroughs within and against the imperial framework. At the center of the book is Shakespeare's "Tempest," at once transfiguring the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown and prefiguring much of American literature. In a new, final chapter, Cheyfitz reaches back to the representations of Native Americans produced by the English decades before the establishment of the Jamestown colony.
Who Is Sylvia? On the Loss of Sexual Paradigms
When Thomas Kuhn, whose work on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions gave the word "paradigm" a new currency, was taken to task for employing the term ambiguously, he undertook to rethink its usage. In a postscript to a new edition of his book, he sorted out four major connotations of the term. They can serve equally well as guidelines to the present inquiry. To wit: As an overall descriptive equivalent of "paradigm" Kuhn chose the phrase "a disciplinary matrix." One component he labeled "symbolic generalizations." These offer a basis for communication and shared judgment. To analogize, a society expects that in normal times sexual relations will follow some pattern or patterns which may differ individually but will fit comprehensibly into the accepted structure of behavior. Kuhn's second component is a shared commitment to known beliefs which provide a source of "preferred or permissible analogies and metaphors. By doing so, they help to determine what will be accepted as an explanation" of the puzzles that the physical world sets the scientist. Emotional relationships are puzzling too. Privately, sexual paradigms allow an individual to explain to heror himself the attitudes and conduct of the beloved. Publicly, they lay down the gender attributes which define masculinity and femininity. Third on Kuhn's list are shared values. These assign weight and priority to the agreed-on beliefs that underlie scientific speculation and communication. We can extend this process of discrimination to ask how well sexual paradigms fit other standards of social behavior, or agree with the sort of identity structure that is reckoned to be normal in any particular context of life. Are they part of a relatively seamless web of cultural connections and directives, or do they force contradictions upon one's sense of self? Do they encourage active engagement with the world around, or are they binding and limiting?