Ben Etherington

Literary Primitivism

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Ben Etherington is a lecturer in Literary Studies at Western Sydney University.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 240
• Erscheinungstermin: 26. Dezember 2017
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 236mm x 154mm x 25mm
• Gewicht: 493g
• ISBN-13: 9781503602366
• ISBN-10: 1503602362
• Artikelnr.: 47774549

Autorenporträt

Ben Etherington is a lecturer in Literary Studies at Western Sydney University.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Preface: Preface
chapter abstract
The preface introduces the book's central thesis, that literary primitivism
was an aesthetic project whose emergence coincided with the climax of
European imperialist expansion, and explains that its purpose accordingly
is to change the object to which primitivism refers. The preface details
the historical and critical methodology of the book, with reference to the
concept of totality in particular, and conducts a short reading of Aimé
Césaire's short poem "Barbare." It suggests that the current phase of
globalization and the critical concern with "world literature" have opened
up the possibility for reconceiving of primitivism as a utopian project,
albeit a vexed and problematic one.
1Primitivism after Its Poststructural Eclipse
chapter abstract
Chapter 1 focuses on the conceptual and theoretical problems that pertain
to literary primitivism. It surveys the breadth of previous scholarship and
points out that a comprehensive study that proceeded according to received
usage would be hopelessly vast owing to the ahistorical presuppositions
that have tended to inform its use. It sets out the terms by which the book
redefines the term-especially, that primitivism was an aesthetic project
specific to the historical moment when the possibility of primitive
experience was perceived to be at the point of obsolescence. Transformed
thus into an inherently speculative notion, it fell to the capacities of
art to revive and reanimate the remnants of "primitive" (i.e.,
noncapitalist) social realities. The chapter reviews the previous
postmodern generation of scholarship on primitivism, arguing that the
historical nature of primitivism was obscured when scholars, employing the
methods of poststructuralism, restricted their inquiries to questions of
representation.
2Primitivism and Philo-primitivism
chapter abstract
Chapter 2 advances the historical side of the argument by drawing a
distinction between "philo-primitivism" and "emphatic primitivism." It
finds that the philo-primitivist ideal of the "noble savage" was the
product of earlier periods of European colonial expansion when there yet
existed social worlds beyond the perimeter of the capitalist world-system.
As the "primitive accumulation" of noncapitalist societies accelerated, so
the ideal of the primitive became entirely speculative and utopian.
Emphatic primitivism's emergence coincides with the period that political
economists at the time labeled "Imperialism," a concept explored with
reference to the work of Rosa Luxemburg in particular. The chapter ends
with a discussion of the notion prevalent at this time that the "primitive"
was in fact the product of "civilized" sublimation. Other writers and
artists discussed include John Dryden, George Catlin, Charles Darwin,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robert Louis Stevenson, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud,
and Friedrich Nietzsche.
3Primitivism and Negritude
chapter abstract
Chapter 3 considers a range of manifestoes and essays that articulate the
primitivist project. Anchoring the discussion with Ernst Bloch's conception
of objective and subjective "nonsynchronicity," it goes on to look at the
ways in which artists appealed to the remnants of "primitive" societies
when forming anticapitalist aesthetic programs that aimed to revive the
possibility of primitive experience. It is argued that this program
appealed above all to the colonized "conscripts" of capitalist modernity,
something clearly in evidence in the early manifestoes and theorizations of
"négritude." Across the board, it is found that the primitivist project was
conceptualized in terms of an idealized immediacy that could be reached
only by breaking through the mediations of a totalized capitalism. Artists
and writers discussed include Carl Einstein, T. E. Lawrence, Aimé Césaire,
Suzanne Césaire, René Ménil, and Alain Locke.
4The Question of Representation
chapter abstract
Chapter 4 reconsiders the question of primitivist representation in light
of the theoretical and historical arguments presented in Chapters 1 through
3. Discussing works by Emil Nolde, D. H. Lawrence, Langston Hughes, and
Jacques Roumain, it argues that primitivism has an inherent tendency to
transcend any fixed notion or representation of the primitive, and that it
is the work itself that must produce the sought-for primitive experience.
Thus we find a vacillation between concrete representations of "primitive"
remnants and an abstracted, nonspecific ideal of the primitive to come.
5Césaire, Fanon, and Immediacy as a Project
chapter abstract
Chapter 5 is the book's central literary study. It "slow reads" Frantz
Fanon's epochal essay "The Lived Experience of the Black" as a critical
dramatization of Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook
of a Return to the Native Land). Reconstructing the full literary and
philosophical context of the essay, the chapter argues that Fanon's riposte
to Jean-Paul Sartre's misreading of the primitivism of the negritude poets
consists of himself enacting Césaire's primitivism. In Fanon reading
Césaire, we observe literary primitivism achieving consciousness of itself
as a historical phenomenon. The chapter argues for the centrality of
Césaire's achievement to literary primitivism, at the heart of which lies a
poetics of passionate sarcasm.
6D. H. Lawrence's Narrative Primitivism
chapter abstract
Chapter 6 presents a detailed consideration of the style and narrative
structure of D. H. Lawrence's major primitivist work, Women in Love. It
begins with Wyndham Lewis's attack on Lawrence's primitivism in Paleface, a
book that undertakes an ironic defense of white supremacism, before
considering how Women in Love pursues its own kind of "blancitude." Finding
that Lawrence's prose "techniques of immediacy" are not sufficient in
themselves to bring about primitivism's end, it traces the narrative logic
that pushes Lawrence's characters to seek spaces beyond the perimeter of
imperial civilization. The chapter closes with a discussion of Lawrence's
attempt to narrate a primitivist insurrection in his late work The Plumed
Serpent.
7Claude McKay's Primitivist Narration
chapter abstract
This chapter considers Claude McKay's novels Home to Harlem and Banjo as
attempts to undertake literary primitivism's project of immediacy by means
of a musical aesthetics. Exploring his relationship both to the negritude
poets and to Lawrence, especially the latter's Aaron's Rod, it argues that
of all the writers discussed in this book, McKay's work most strenuously
attempts to enter the immediate mode. In McKay's novels the hope for a
reconciliation of reflexivity and immediacy, the primitive and the
civilized is enacted simultaneously at the level of prose style and
narrative structure. This allows us to identify a number of fissures and
contradictions that beset the aesthetics of primitivism, especially the
pitfalls of a utopian racialism.
Conclusion: Primitivism, Decolonization, and World Literature
chapter abstract
The conclusion recapitulates the central claims of the study, especially
with regard to the phenomenological notion that primitivism was a
"project," and points to areas for further research. It also discusses in
greater depth the politics of primitivism, especially the notion that it
had a "decolonial horizon." This is undertaken through a brief comparative
discussion of two accounts of the Haitian revolution written in the 1930s,
Guy Endore's Babouk and C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins. It finishes by
considering in what respects literary primitivism might be considered an
event of "world literature."