Papers by Margaret Scanlan
Literary Geographies, Dec 23, 2020
Studies in the Novel, 2004
... speaking government officials, and depicts a suicide bomber's assassination of a fic... more ... speaking government officials, and depicts a suicide bomber's assassination of a fictional Sri Lankan president, recalling President Ranasinghe Premedasa's death ... When the visitor leaves, as Sarath's brother, Gamini, puts it, "the camera leaves with him"; for the West, the "war ...
European Journal of English Studies, 2018
Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil (2008) and The Blind Man's Garden (2013) tell the story of 9/11 a... more Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil (2008) and The Blind Man's Garden (2013) tell the story of 9/11 and the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan from the perspective of people living in Afghanistan and the nearby border regions of Pakistan. Aslam, a British writer born in Pakistan, constructs a vital critical perspective reflecting his position as a human being living between two cultures. Like his audience, he is already familiar with the dominant Anglo-American narrative of 9/11, which includes the celebrated novels of Don DeLillo, Claire Messud and Jay McInerney as well as the often-rehearsed arguments of George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Aslam rewrites that familiar account, transforming a transparent, ahistorical and even cinematic narrative into an episode in a complex religious, cultural and political history whose opacity he constantly evokes. He evokes the difficulties of interpretation, areas of mutual ignorance and distortions of propaganda and massproduced popular culture that fill up the empty space where Samuel P. Huntington sees two civilisations clashing. Where Huntington sees two, however, Aslam sees many which, throughout a long history, have not only battled, but also nurtured, each other; as Édouard Glissant put it, people and cultures 'can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics'. Opacity and the 9/11 novel Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil (2008) and The Blind Man's Garden (2013) tell the story of 9/11 and the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan from the perspective of people living along the Afghan-Pakistani border. Aslam, a British writer born in Pakistan, constructs a vital critical perspective reflecting his position as a human being living between two cultures. Like his audience, he knows the dominant Anglo-American narrative of 9/11, which includes the celebrated novels of Don DeLillo, Claire Messud and Jay McInerney as well as the often-rehearsed arguments of George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Aslam rewrites that familiar account, transforming a transparent, ahistorical and even cinematic narrative into an episode in a complex religious, cultural and political history whose opacity he constantly evokes. He evokes the difficulties of interpretation, areas of mutual ignorance and distortions of propaganda and mass-produced popular culture that fill up the empty space where Samuel P. Huntington sees civilisations clashing. Where Huntington sees two, however, Aslam sees
Études irlandaises, 1985
Les problemes que posent les evenements actuels au roman sont signales par Lion Feuchtwanger, qui... more Les problemes que posent les evenements actuels au roman sont signales par Lion Feuchtwanger, qui dit que le present — «brutal actuality» — resiste a nos efforts pour distinguer ses contours ou en definir une perspective. Cette resistance n'en est que plus grande quand — comme c'est le cas pour l'Irlande du Nord — les changements ont ete radicaux et que la brutalite du present n'est pas seulement metaphorique. Le roman anglais ne tient aucun compte de la nouvelle forme des «Troubles» tandis que les romans irlandais dont les «Troubles» forment la matiere n'illustrent que trop bien la force de la remarque de Feuchtwanger. Silver's City de Maurice Leitch a bien des avantages du roman urbain proletaire, comme par exemple des descriptions tres precises, mais il ne pose pas de questions plus larges sur les motivations de son heros ou sur le contexte politique et social dans lequel les membres de la guerilla protestante agissent. Proxopera de Benedict Kiely se situe dans un contexte plus large mais n'aborde pas les dures realites de tous les jours comme la discrimination dont sont victimes les ouvriers catholiques, pour mettre en valeur la sombre vision du besoin humain de violence et la description d'une Irlande empetree dans les mythes tragiques de sa propre histoire. Cal, de Bernard MacLaverty, offre un contexte social plus large encore et analyse le role joue par le chomage dans le terrorisme. Neanmoins comme Kiely et Leitch, MacLaverty constate la destruction de la vie privee par la vie publique, suggerant que le present est insupportable et que le roman realiste ne peut pas imaginer de solutions. The Big Chapel, de Thomas Kilroy, situe en Irlande du Sud pendant les annees 1870, fait d'un conflit, ne d'une querelle a propos d'un probleme d'education locale dans une petite ville, le verre grossissant a travers lequel on regarde les «Troubles» d'aujourd'hui. Son roman thematise les difficultes de toute connaissance de l'histoire et suggere que ses consequences terribles ne sont pas fixees dans l'ordre des choses.
International Fiction Review, 1979
In Le temps retrouvé, Proust's narrator discovers his vocation and sets forth the theory of art t... more In Le temps retrouvé, Proust's narrator discovers his vocation and sets forth the theory of art that will shape his novel. Rejecting realism ("une littérature de notations"), 1 the narrator declares that the value of a work is not determined by the significance of the events that inspired it: ".. . un chant d'oiseau dans le parc de Montboissier, ou une brise chargée de l'odeur de réséda, sont évidemment des événements de moindre consequence que les plus grandes dates de la Révolution et l'Empire. Ils ont cependant inspiré à Chateaubriand. .. des pages d'une valeur infiniment plus grande" (III, 728). Coming near the end of a novel that sprang from a cup of tea, this explication of the relative insignificance of public history to the artist is by no means astonishing. What is more remarkable, given Proust's aesthetics, is that he does not propose that the novel neglect history. One has only to compare A la recherche du temps perdu with Hermann Hesse's Siddharta (1922), André Gide's Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1925), or Virginia Woolf s To the Lighthouse (1927), to sense the difference between Proust and those contemporaries of his whose novels portray a world isolated from wars and politics. In A la recherche, both the Dreyfus Affair and World War I have an important place. Well aware of what these events have cost his society, the narrator argues that two sorts of people reject public affairs: "Tout en bas, les purs sots. .. ne s'occupaient pas qu'il y eût la guerre. Mais tout en haut, ceux qui se sont fait une vie intérieure ambiante ont peu égard à l'importance des événements" (III, 728). One of the great themes of A la recherche is the narrator's creation of an "ambient interior life" in the midst of social change and political disaster. Radier than ignoring "les plus grandes dates," the novel subverts them: to trace the course of the Dreyfus Affair in A la recherche is to see the process that transforms a major political catastrophe into a phase in artistic development, that assimilates a public event to a consciousness that ends by rejecting such events. 2 I would like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for the "Fellowship in Residence for College Teachers" that supported my research for this article.
International Fiction Review, Jun 6, 1981
In Le Rouge et le noir, when the July Revolution begins to affect his characters, Stendhal compla... more In Le Rouge et le noir, when the July Revolution begins to affect his characters, Stendhal complains that "La politique au milieu des intérêts d'imagination, c'est un coup de pistolet au milieu d'un concert." 1 Writing L'Education sentimentale, Flaubert faces the same problem of assimilating real political events to a fiction, attributing to 'Readers interested in tracing the development of Kenner's approach to Ulysses should consult three of his articles and the relevant sections of five of his books:
A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945–2000
History and Politics in Postwar British Fiction, 1990
Traces of Another Time, 1990
NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 1990
... One way of approaching this question is to examine Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist, a... more ... One way of approaching this question is to examine Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist, an excellent and ... precisely that its political message is far more conser-vative, both about women and about ... talks, as an individual to individuals"-and predicted that in an age of "committee ...
Modern Language Quarterly, 1991
MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 1999
MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 1990
MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 2011
the novelist louis Begley recently noted that the War on terror, though seemingly "limitless," ha... more the novelist louis Begley recently noted that the War on terror, though seemingly "limitless," has "not been the theme of any great literature" (204). Begley's scrupulous word choice suggests that novels such as Frédéric Beigbeder's Windows on the World or don delillo's Falling Man, which prompt us to imagine what it was like to be in the World trade center when the planes struck or how that experience might transform a survivor's life, open up reflection on what the September 11 attacks did to america. But such novels, however accomplished, cannot offer a historical perspective on what Begley sees as an even more compelling topic, "the nature of the damage done. .. to american society by the crimes and abuses of the Bush administration." It is too soon to know if these abuses will be remembered or even judged criminal: "the great plays and novels that will open our eyes to the work accomplished by time and its great partner oblivion remain to be written" (204). two novels of alternative history, however, Philip Roth's The Plot Against America and Michael chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union, move in the direction he suggests. Indeed, alternative history, which always plays with the way we remember, forget, and reinvent the past, proves an apt medium for interrogating america after 9/11, a time when renewed calls for old-fashioned patriotism and pride in the military clash with calls to remember that the nation was founded on the separation of church and state and on liberal views of the right to free speech and privacy.
MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 2003
American Ethnologist - AMER ETHNOLOGIST, 2007
... 1968 Civil Rights marches; in October, marchers who defy a ban in Derry, Northern Ireland, at... more ... 1968 Civil Rights marches; in October, marchers who defy a ban in Derry, Northern Ireland, attacked by police. 1969 Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Terence O'Neill, resigns; August 14, British troops sent to Derry to protect Catholics. ...
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2010
... friends around these kind and cultured people includes Ustath Rashid, the university professo... more ... friends around these kind and cultured people includes Ustath Rashid, the university professor next door, and Moosa, the youthful idealist who sparks Suleiman's love of language with his own. And Suleiman, too, has his own best friend, the professor's son Kareem, three years ...
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Papers by Margaret Scanlan