The paper explores the relationship between a language and its environment. It focuses on Chinua Achebe’s experimentation with English as a suitable language for depicting the African landscape in Anthills of the Savannah. Since landscape was an imperial fascination, it was inevitable that with the expansion of the British Empire the English pictorial rhetoric would be exported to the colonies. This export brought out visual and psychological disparities between the changeable African landscape and the invariably picturesque English language. The conventions of picturesque description encoded in the language were imposed on the landscape, implicitly affirming and naturalizing the values of the colonialist, but failing to do justice to a genuinely African world-view. Achebe believes that despite its colonial bias English can still be a useful tool for African writers to capture and promote their ancestral heritage; nonetheless he questions whether it can lose enough of its own cultural past to be made suitable for an African discourse.

In Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness and Masque of Beauty an early modern argument against colonization is presented by an African character, Niger.  The themes of assimilation and self-determination remain in tension throughout the plays, a quite early recognition of the struggle between cultural identity, race, and global agendas.

The historical caesura of the Holocaust bisects the twentieth century, its horror effecting a kind of temporal doubling or fold in the psyches of survivors as well as a permanent damage on Enlightenment conceptions of the progressive march of time. The traumatic experience of a continual turning back inflects the twentieth-century novel and our readings of it, calling into question modernist tropes of redemption. This essay examines changes in the way that both the passage of time and the ghostly return of the dead are portrayed, first in a modern text, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which deals with World War I, and then in two postmodern works both of which inscribe a vain dream of the rectification of Holocaust trauma: Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow and W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants. My emphasis is on trajectories of plot and memory, trajectories that trauma distorts and the artistic impulse inclines to even out (as in Amis’s trope of the story told backwards, with genocide undone). While modernist experimentalism cannot help indulging in redemptive fantasies, it also incorporates its own critique of this conservative longing.

Alexander Blok’s unfinished poem Retribution (1910–1921), regarded by the contemporaries as his spiritual testament, depicts the destinies of Russia as part of the total struggle between cosmic forces which was reflected in the historical catastrophes of the late 19th – early 20th centuries. The essay uses the notion of the chronotope to analyze the structure of the poem. The time-space of the poem is the vast expanse of the Russian empire during the wars between East and West (the wars between Russian and Turkey, Russian and Japan, World War I). The chronotope of the poem reflect tensions between Westernizers and Slavophiles, as well as mythological historiosophical positions of such diverse thinkers as Vladimir Soloviev and Helena Blavatsky. Its mythical, epic, historical, and lyrical constituents seem to predict cosmic clashes; instead, however, the lyrical chronotope of the poem gains predominance and translates cosmic conflicts into the emotional turmoil and death of the lyrical hero.

In recent years, focus on issue of the spatial has increased exponentially. Briefly charting this rise in its various theoretical forms, we may locate a common theme within many of the positions taken up in response to the spatial: a concern with turmoil and oppression, and with a shifting of both physical and political boundaries. Nowhere is this concern more explicit than in the post-colonial response to what may be seen as the most violent violation of space: the colonial appropriation of land and territory as part of the various imperial projects of previous centuries. In post-colonial writing the colonial space is acknowledged, rejected for its inauthenticity and then re-made. A detailed reading of a particular text – Ben Okri’s Infinite Riches – and of a particular space within this text – the city – allows us to exemplify some of the narrative strategies by which such a powerful reclaiming of space may be asserted by the post-colonial author.

This reading of Othello offers an explanation of Othello's own reasons for withdrawing from love through the distinctly murderous route he chooses. I read Othello as cooperating with, and perhaps even using, Iago in order to work himself out of love. In this he is responding to a multi-dimensional attack, which is how he experiences Desdemona's "too deep" love. The play is thus gradually building up a spectacle of Liebestod: once in Desdemona's annihilating love, twice in Othello murdering her--dying "upon a kiss." More generally, this essay considers the competing claims of the ideology of erotic merging on the one hand and the ideal of developing a clearly bounded self on the other. I argue that a “moral negotiation” with a work of literature (Othello) can create a fruitful confrontation with this familiar tension. The rewards for such criticism are both moral and literary: moral, since literature facilitates modes of moral reflection that cannot be activated by employing non-literary moral reflection; literary, because a moral dialogue with literary texts is not only possible but also aesthetically enriching. On the theoretical front, this essay thus continues what has been called “the literary turn” in moral philosophy, which supplements the work of other philosophers of literature by highlighting the capacity of the literary work to form a critique of an embedded ideology (in my reading, a prevalent erotic ideology). Finally, I relate ethical criticism to the current debate over cultural studies and the anxieties associated with the disappearance of the literary. I argue that taking an “ethical turn” enables literary criticism to claim an important distinctiveness in contrast to other modalities of cultural critique.

June 2004: Kay Young is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is author of Ordinary Pleasures: Couples, Conversation, and Comedy, a study of narrative intimacy and happiness. Currently, she is writing a book called Coming to Consciousness: Mind, Body, Emotion and the 19th-Century English Novel.