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John J. Su

2014

Articles 1 - 13 of 13

Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Imagination And The Contemporary Novel, John Su Apr 2014

Imagination And The Contemporary Novel, John Su

John J. Su

Imagination and the Contemporary Novel examines the global preoccupation with the imagination among literary authors with ties to former colonies of the British Empire since the 1960s. John Su draws on a wide range of authors including Peter Ackroyd, Monica Ali, Julian Barnes, André Brink, J. M. Coetzee, John Fowles, Amitav Ghosh, Nadine Gordimer, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith. This study rehabilitates the category of imagination in order to understand a broad range of contemporary Anglophone literature. The responses of such literature to shifts in global capitalism have often been misunderstood by the dominant categories of literary studies, …


Realist Theory, John Su Apr 2014

Realist Theory, John Su

John J. Su

No abstract provided.


Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, John Su Apr 2014

Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, John Su

John J. Su

No abstract provided.


Refiguring National Character: The Remains Of The British Estate Novel, John Su Apr 2014

Refiguring National Character: The Remains Of The British Estate Novel, John Su

John J. Su

No abstract provided.


“Once I Would Have Gone Back … But Not Any Longer”: Nostalgia And Narrative Ethics In Wide Sargasso Sea, John Su Apr 2014

“Once I Would Have Gone Back … But Not Any Longer”: Nostalgia And Narrative Ethics In Wide Sargasso Sea, John Su

John J. Su

[Bertha is] necessary to the plot, but always she shrieks, howls, laughs horribly, attacks all and sundry—offstage. For me (and for you I hope) she must be right on stage. (Jean Rhys, Letters 156) We need, therefore, a kind of parallel history of, let us say, victimisation, which would counter the history of success and victory. To memorize the victims of history—the sufferers, the humiliated, the forgotten—should be a task for all of us at the end of this century. (Paul Ricoeur, “Memory and Forgetting” 10-11)


Epic Of Failure: Disappointment As Utopian Fantasy In Midnight's Children, John Su Apr 2014

Epic Of Failure: Disappointment As Utopian Fantasy In Midnight's Children, John Su

John J. Su

No abstract provided.


Nostalgic Rapture: Interpreting Moral Commitments In David Hare's Drama, John Su Apr 2014

Nostalgic Rapture: Interpreting Moral Commitments In David Hare's Drama, John Su

John J. Su

A deep, if problematic, nostalgia for the Great Britain of World War II suffuses the work of British playwright David Hare. Susan Traherne's exuberant cry at the end of Plenty, "There will be days and days and days like this," exemplifies Hare's troubled nostalgia: the promise of social equality and national renewal with the war's end presented as the final memory of a fragmenting psyche. Hare identifies himself both personally and artistically in terms of World War II: "I was born in 1947, and it makes me sad to think that mine may be the last generation to care about …


Postcolonial Fiction Of The African Diaspora, John Su Apr 2014

Postcolonial Fiction Of The African Diaspora, John Su

John J. Su

No abstract provided.


Haunted By Place: Moral Obligation And The Postmodern Novel, John Su Apr 2014

Haunted By Place: Moral Obligation And The Postmodern Novel, John Su

John J. Su

No abstract provided.


Fantasies Of (Re)Collection: Collecting And Imagination In A.S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance, John Su Apr 2014

Fantasies Of (Re)Collection: Collecting And Imagination In A.S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance, John Su

John J. Su

No abstract provided.


Ghosts Of Essentialism: Racial Memory As Epistemological Claim, John Su Apr 2014

Ghosts Of Essentialism: Racial Memory As Epistemological Claim, John Su

John J. Su

Su calls for a reexamination of essentialism in light of a resurging interest in identity and identity politics. Since the mid-1990s, poststructuralist dismissals of identity as “pernicious and metaphysically inaccurate” have increasingly been challenged by feminist philosophers and cultural critics, race theorists, and, most recently, “postpositivist realists.” Yet academic scholarship continues to read essentialism in ontological terms, as Walter Benn Michaels does. Ontological readings focus attention on the ways in which essentialism involves positing a presocial being who is defined by an essence that predetermines an individual's identity in racial terms. Su proposes to shift the way essentialism is analyzed, …


Bruce Chatwin [Dictionary Entry], John Su Apr 2014

Bruce Chatwin [Dictionary Entry], John Su

John J. Su

No abstract provided.


Salman Rushdie (1947-) Midnight's Children, John Su Apr 2014

Salman Rushdie (1947-) Midnight's Children, John Su

John J. Su

No abstract provided.