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Essays on Literature and Culture

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This page contains essays on literary criticism, culture, and travel. I also have an extensive reviews section on this website.

Please note that if you do use any of the ideas from these essays in your own work, you should cite this website correctly - remember, plagiarism is theft!

General Essays

The Value of an English PhD

This essay discusses the economic and social value of having a PhD in English Literature (but also in the Arts and Humanities generally). It proposes that questions about the value of an English PhD can be deflected by making PhD research more publically accessible.

The Cartoon Controversy: Free Speech at a Moral Price

The idea that freedom of speech is always an absolute right in Western democracies is wrong. Whilst people in most cases in Western democracies have a legal right to speak their minds, the legal protection afforded to freedom of speech is sometimes merely coincidental to the morality of speech acts.

The Language Barrier

How a trip across Eastern Europe revealed the remarkable robustness of language.

The Political Art of Criticism and Quarks

In order to justify its exercise, literary criticism has had to "get political," as well as maintaining a vaguer, aesthetic objective. Increasingly, cutting-edge science seems to have a hazy ambition to discover the complete nature of the universe. The lack of immediate, real-world, practical developments from this process means that science also must now have political objectives to justify the continued investment placed in it.

Signatures of Faith

The shape of a signature, its style and form, does not matter when it is applied to a legally binding document such as a CV. Why, then, are we so concerned with the identity and style of other confirmatory signatures: religious visions, statements of faith, the names of authors of fiction and drama?

Auschwitz: The Ultimate Ambiguity

The myths of history are encapsulated in iconic images or events, as is evidenced in our continual repetition of the Holocaust as the moral paradigm for human evil. But Auschwitz, the iconic concentration camp of the Holocaust, prevents any simple images from being formed. It raises questions about our modes of memorialising, rather than providing ultimate meanings for immoral human actions.

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Travel Writing

Scotland Trip 2009

This is an account of a road trip from Northumberland to Scotland, taking in the Farne Islands, Loch Lomond and the Isle of Mull.

East of Europe

For two months in 2004, I travelled by train through Eastern Europe, through countries which were about to accede to the European Union. Sadly, I never completed the entire journal, but a few chapters or sections are coherent enough to reproduce online now.

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Literary Criticism

As Ishmael admits in Moby Dick, "If I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world...if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious manuscript in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling; for a whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard." So in the literary criticism below I have to acknowledge the universities - those whale ships carrying the young writer through his most turbulent years - at which I have been educated, and their English courses and teachers from which most of these essays emerged.

Science as Writing, Writing as Science: Addressing the Boundaries of Literary Criticism and Fiction

This essay considers the values and limitations of reading scientific texts as literary narratives, and the importance of fictional writing in relation to real-world science. By using literary theory to interpret both varities of text, it evidences that literary criticism's powerful flexibility derives precisely from its not being bound to operate within the rigorous methodologies of scientific practice. Thus it reinforces Sokal's argument against scientistic, post-modern forms of theory. (First Published Online: December 10, 2006)

"What difference does difference make?" (Nancy Miller): The Creative Deconstructions of Jean Rhys and Aimé Césaire

In a linguistic dualism paralleling those of ideological structures it often seeks to expose, critical language can seem rational and authoritative and understandable only by those trained in its idioms (even as it denies the possibility of definitive interpretations), whilst creative writing remains emotional, subjective but accessible to the intellectually-impoverished general reader. The poststructuralist critical work risks othering the creative text the binary oppositions within which it studies and complicates. A critical approach which makes a more humane kind of analysis is that adopted by creative works like Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Aimé Césaire's A Tempest which, somewhat like deconstructive critics, carry out "a careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within the texts" but assert their findings using similar creative styles as the canonical works - respectively Jane Eyre and The Tempest - they criticise. (First Published Online: March 26, 2005)

Discerning Eyes: Modernism, Morality and Blindess: Some Readings

Through readings of short stories by Hardy, Wells, Woolf and Lawrence, this essay briefly considers the way in which some modernist writers have explored the ideologies of culture and language through presenting alternative ways of seeing (sometimes paradoxically enabled by blindness). (First Published Online: November 15, 2006)

Online Text Databases and the Literary Canon

Although academic text archives make a wide range of texts readily available to scholars, and they can an disguise the categorical markers found in their physical counterparts, eliminating many of the paratextual features which position a work within a particular tradition of authorship and readership and enabling the new reader to approach with fewer preconceptions. However, because of the audience for whom the databases are compiled, electronic texts are still also anteriorly positioned within canonical traditions and, broadly, they reflect rather than affect existing literary-critical prejudices. (First Published Online: March 9, 2005)

Relativity and the Social Good: Jekyll and Hyde, The Voyage Out and Memoirs of a Survivor

The influence of scientific concepts of relativity on three novels is explored. In their own ways, these Victorian, modernist and postmodernist texts assert the value of entering into the literary experience as a way of temporarily escaping the ethical problems caused by the juxtaposition of relative, subjective perspectives of different individuals in the "real" world. (First Published Online: March 9, 2005)

The Language of Time in The Secret Agent

In The Secret Agent, Conrad shows how language has a necessary capacity to manipulate time as an empirical force, making the events of several months seem to take place in a few hours reading or performance time. Conrad combines this experience of the temporal performance of fiction with the events of 1884 and the Greenwich bomb plot of February 1894, showing that language is charged in connection with time as a conceptual entity, one which, as a concept rather than an empirical property, is subject to symbolic manipulation for political effect. (First Published Online: January 14, 2005)

Heart of Darkness and Victorian Anthropology

Well known for the way in which it has many layers of narration, Heart of Darkness recreates the detached ways in which the Victorian anthropologist gathered data on, and represented, native culture. In the scene with the 'African Queen,' Conrad creates a dramatic drawing together of objective, rational, Europeanism with abstract, magical Africanism, a crossing of the "shadow lines" which exposes the falsehood of making a scientific distinction between observer and patron, and observed and patronised. (First Published Online: December 15, 2005)

The Significance of the Narrator in Moby-Dick

The narrator of Moby-Dick performs a crucial democratising function, linking Ahab, the text and the natural environment together as equal participants in a system of consumption and counter-consumption. (First Published Online: 2003)

What Lies Within: Parentheses and Ambiguity in Poetry of the Twentieth Century

Parentheses in poetry are rarely commented upon in their own right. However, they can be crucial syntactical indicators of a hyperactive mental state in their author, who is unable to maintain his or her expression along a single argumentative train. As a kind of sotto voce private space, they express doubt about the validity of those thoughts expressed outside the brackets, and contribute to a poem's general ambiguity. This is especially true because making a vocal performance of specifically a curved bracket is impossible. The curved bracket, when performed, becomes identical to other forms of parenthetical expression such as the comma or the line break. It loses its emphasis of being a different space and may alter the meaning of the poem as a whole. (First Published Online: 2003)

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This page was published on June 15, 2008 | Keywords: essays, literary criticism, writing, book reviews | Save this Print this RSS Feed

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