Suchergebnisse

Edward W. Said's Orientalism has long been celebrated for its ground-breaking analysis of the encounters between Western Orientalists and the Orient as a form of 'othering' representation. The success, undeniably, owes much to the use of Foucauldian discourse as a core methodology in Said's theorisation of Orientalism which allows Said to refer to the massive corpus of Orientalist writings as a form of Orientalist discourse and a representation of the East. However, the roles of Orientalist authors tend to be reduced to mere textual labels in a greater Orientalist discourse, in spite of the fact that Said attempts to give more attention to the Orientalists' biographical backgrounds. In this article, I argue that there is a need to review the question of agency that comes with Foucauldian discourse. By probing Said's methodology, I investigate the problems raised by concepts such as "strategic formation," "strategic location," and the writers' imprint. Borrowing Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, I critique Said's notion of 'author' by applying the question of objectivity/subjectivity raised by Bourdieu's concepts such as "habitus" and "strategy," and assess the possibility of shifting the emphasis on "texts" suggested by the use of Foucauldian discourse, to "actions" which are the main unit of study in Bourdieu's sociology.

Trauma and the repressed memory of Jewish Holocaust survivors and African- American slaves are issues that require the notion of 'authenticity' in fictional representation. The Zionist discourse demands that Holocaust fictions be written by true witnesses of the genocide and with respectful seriousness, for the Holocaust is a sacred, incomparable phenomenon in Jewish history. In the same manner, the Black American narrative needs authenticity to articulate the Black's own voice, which has been predominately constructed by White Americans since the early history of America. David Grossman's See Under: Love (1999) nevertheless deals with the problem of 'authenticity' in describing the Holocaust, despite the fact that the writer never experienced the Holocaust directly and even wrote it in a postmodern, humorous, and fantastic manner. Likewise, Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) introduces a new way to write an authentic African- American narrative, i.e. magical realism. This essay explores the problem of authenticity by applying Homi K. Bhabha's cultural theory to analyse it in four parts. The first part investigates the causes and the culturally specific backgrounds of the Zionist and the American Africanist's views towards 'authenticity' in literary representation. The second part clarifies the argument by situating 'authenticity' in Bhabha's framework of the pedagogical. The third part furthers the argument by detailing the performative use of the fantastic and magical realism to render the effect of liminality. The last part concludes the notion of 'authenticity' by pointing out the supplementary aspect of Bhabha's theory when applied to the two novels.