Playing the Un-naming Act against the Desire for Totalization in The Tempest
0
조회
0
다운로드
0
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
Recent scholarship on The Tempest has drawn connections between the nascent colonialism and the figure of otherness constructed in European thought. As an Ur-text for fictional colonialist discourse in English, this play addresses the relationship of the European interlopers and the native of the island, whereby it displays and fosters the rhetoric of colonialism built on self-rationalization and self-justification. On the other hand, as much as the colonial discursive strategies are ambiguous and contradictory, The Tempest is itself even more undecidable and complex. It can be noticed, for example, that the complexities of the central figures, Prospero and Caliban, remain profoundly unresolved. Wary of the problematics of the colonialist rhetoric at work in The Tempest, this essay is devoted to demonstrating, first of all, how Caliban’s body materializes a force field in which the colonizer’s desire for totalization and the colonized’s resistance to colonial usurpation are bound up with each other in a naming process. It is also interesting to follow the signification of Prospero’s magic book as a metonymy of colonial controls. The magic book, which conditions and limits Prospero’s power, represents the authority of the colonist-magician’s repressive mechanism. Finally, it is significant to note that Prospero’s self-serving rhetoric reveals, especially in the latter part of this play, a strange hesitation about his legitimacy as a purveyor of colonial hegemony; on the other hand, Caliban plays a double dealer more cunningly and remains a potential reveler even after he is thought to be brought back under Prospero’s control.
Abstract
Recent scholarship on The Tempest has drawn connections between the nascent colonialism and the figure of otherness constructed in European thought. As an Ur-text for fictional colonialist discourse in English, this play addresses the relationship of the European interlopers and the native of the island, whereby it displays and fosters the rhetoric of colonialism built on self-rationalization and self-justification. On the other hand, as much as the colonial discursive strategies are ambiguous and contradictory, The Tempest is itself even more undecidable and complex. It can be noticed, for example, that the complexities of the central figures, Prospero and Caliban, remain profoundly unresolved. Wary of the problematics of the colonialist rhetoric at work in The Tempest, this essay is devoted to demonstrating, first of all, how Caliban’s body materializes a force field in which the colonizer’s desire for totalization and the colonized’s resistance to colonial usurpation are bound up with each other in a naming process. It is also interesting to follow the signification of Prospero’s magic book as a metonymy of colonial controls. The magic book, which conditions and limits Prospero’s power, represents the authority of the colonist-magician’s repressive mechanism. Finally, it is significant to note that Prospero’s self-serving rhetoric reveals, especially in the latter part of this play, a strange hesitation about his legitimacy as a purveyor of colonial hegemony; on the other hand, Caliban plays a double dealer more cunningly and remains a potential reveler even after he is thought to be brought back under Prospero’s control.
참고문헌 (21)
- Althusser, Louis, "Lenin And Philosophy And Other Essays" (1971), Monthly Review P
- Brown, Paul, "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine: The Tempest and the discourse of colonialism.” Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism", pp.48~71 (1985), Cornell UP
- Cartelli, Thomas, "Prospero in Africa: The Tempest as colonialist text and pretext.Shakespeare Reproduced" (1987), Methuen
- Deleuze, Gilles, "Nietzche and Philosophy" (1962), Columbia UP
- Derrida,Jacques, "Writing and Difference" (1978), U of Chicago P
- Fanon,Frantz, "The Wretched of the Earth" (2005), Grove Press
- Foucault, Michel, "Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison", pp.1979, Vintage
- Knowledge, "Power", pp.1972, Foucault, Michel
- Frey, Charles, "The Tempest and the New World", Shakespeare Quarterly, 30(1), pp.29~41 (1979)
- Greenblatt, Stephen, "Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century. First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old. 2 Vols", pp.561~80 (1976), U of California P
- Jameson,Fredric, "The Political Unconscious:Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act" (1981), Cornell UP
- Kojeve, Alexander, "Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Ed. Allan Bloom" (1980), Cornell UP
- Leininger, Lorie, "Cracking the Code of The Tempest", Bucknell Review, 25, pp.121~31 (1980)
- Lupton, Julia Reinhard, "Creature Caliban", Shakespeare Quarterly, (1), pp.1~23 (2000)
- Mannoni, O, "Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization" (1964), Praeger
- Orgel, Stephen, "ntroduction", pp.1~87 (1987), Oxford UP
- Retamar, Roberto Fernandez, "Caliban: Notes toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America. Caliban and Other Essays", pp.3~46 (1989), U of Minnesota P
- Said,Edward, "Culture and Imperialism" (1994), Vintage Books
- Shakespeare, William, "The Tempest" (1987), Oxford UP
- Skura, Meredith Anne, "Discourse and the Individual: The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest", Shakespeare Quarterly, 40(1), pp.42~69 (1989)
- Willis Deborah, "Shakespeare’s Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism", Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 29(2), pp.277~89 (1989)