2 New Literatures and English

Prof. Ipshita Chanda

This chapter has four aims :

1. to introduce the student to the rationale of this course, ie, to help her understand the many ways in which the idea of ‘new literatures’ may be conceptualised. The modules of this course have been grouped according to this rationale, and each aspect of ‘newness’ has been discussed in separate theoretical modules .
2. To show how literature responds to different variables.
3. To discuss the impact of various historical and political contingencies which led to the dissemination of English across the world, and the different reception of the language.
4. To understand the effect of these factors upon the role of English as a ‘world’ or ‘global’ language especially in the age of new technology.

New Literature

It may be argued that literature is nothing if not new; that it is the role of ‘literature’ to be forever unexpected and hence forever new.

“Literature, by exploiting the linguisticality of our representational structures, dismantles the given frameworks to describe, interpret explain or evaluate something and creates the space of forging new frameworks….. so that the scope of perception is enlarged and contact with reality Is renewed through a fresh event of understanding, which enriches our experience “ (S.A.Sayeed, “The Cognitive Function of Literature”, JJCL 44 2006)

We can think of literature as an event presented by a complex, many-layered linguistic sign, which is non-thetic, ie it is not the object of our knowledge but the content of our experience. It is the result of “integrative relations that attempts to restore and enhance the integrity of experience and the awareness of its significance” (Sayeed 2006). It presents to us a singular way of apprehending the world, and this singularity means that a literary sign is non-iterable, ie it cannot be repeated. Hence we may say that it is the characteristic of the literary sign to be new and fresh, to defamiliarise the familiar. The process of defamilairisation has been discussed by the Formalist theorists, especially Viktor Shklovsky. This is identified as a mark of literariness. Hence, Literature does not give us knowledge if by knowledge we mean true beliefs or correct information about the world. What it offers is the delight of experiencing the freshness of new understanding.

Literary Classification

Literature and Genre

Literary categories are an attempt to grasp the play of language and pin it down in a generalisation. Yet it is because an idea of the general exists that we can see the uniqueness of the particular. Genre may be thought of as produced by a collection of available elements in particular configuration, aimed at achieving a particular tone. The tone often names the genre, and the ways of achieving the tone are designated as generic markers. So Instead of a finite set of possibilities, an emotive horizon may be named after the tone intended by the text.

Types of ‘Poetic Utterance’

Aristotle, after defining poetry as the imitation of men in action, leading to pleasure, says that the ways of distinguishing on type of poetic utterance from another are through mode of address, object of address and medium of address. Since most of our ideas about literary classification are derived from Aristotle, it is worth quoting him in full regarding the generic rules that we presume are laid down by him regarding verbal art, ie Poetry whose medium is language alone there is no common term we could apply to the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and the Socratic dialogues on the one hand; and, on the other, to poetic imitations in iambic, elegiac, or any similar meter. People do, indeed, add the word ‘maker’ or ‘poet’ to the name of the meter, and speak of elegiac poets, or epic (that is, hexameter) poets, as if it were not the imitation that makes the poet, but the verse that entitles them all to the name. Even when a treatise on medicine or natural science is brought out in verse, the name of poet is by custom given to the author; and yet Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common but the meter, so that it would be right to call the one poet, the other physicist rather than poet….So much for all these distinctions.

Apart from this, literary types can be identified by their tone, as Aristotle shows by giving a relational definition of epic, comic and tragic poetry. Aristotle thinks that since writer’s disposition towards the world constitutes the linguistic sign as a particular type of Poetry (in this case tragic and comic are distinguished by temperament of the writer), the writer’s temperament is the shaping force of genre:

Poetry now diverged in two directions, according to the individual character of the writers. The graver spirits imitated noble actions, and the actions of good men. The more trivial sort imitated the actions of meaner persons, at first composing satires, as the former did hymns to the gods and the praises of famous men.

Thus it is necessary to understand that just as genres are context and language dependent, so also, like all literary categories, the name “new” literatures is not fixed , neither is it natural.  It is category constructed to accommodate different frames for reading literature, which we will consider at length .

Literature as Genre

Derrida in a 1980 essay “The Law of Genre”(Derrida 1991) says that genre is the mark of art “especially a work of discursive art”; without it, the work cannot be identified as art. Thus a genre clause identifies literature and differentiates it from what is nto literature; at he same time, when literature is fixed by genre, it ceases to ahev its freedom , ie according to Derrida , to defy all rules including laws of genre (This Strange Institution called Literature” in Derrida 1991)

MODES OF CLASSIFICATION

As we have indicated above, one of the aims of this module in particular, and this course in general, is to understand the categorization of literary works on the basis of extra- literary or non-literary considerations. WEllek and Warren (1949) classify the factors influencing literature as “extrinsic” and “intrinsic”; but it is difficult to understand the basis of this classification. If genre is ‘intrinsic’ to literature, and ‘migration’ is an external factor influencing the writers and readers of literature, can we keep the content (theme) of the work separate from the ‘form’ it takes ? Critics have pointed out that ‘first person narratives’ are common to some genres, eg testimonios. But the first person narrative is taken also as the hallmark of verisimiltude (Ian Watt 1959, Catherine Belsey 1980) : it is a device to establish the credibility of the narrator of fiction, drawing upon the presence of the speaker as proof of what he is relating , ie a “true story”. Thus there is nothing intrinsic in language which differentiates its use in the ‘realist’ novel from its use in the testimonio’. It is not a difference in language use, but the difference in purpose that distinguishes the nature of the utterance. It is the claim of the author that fixes a genre.

We must also appreciate that literary classification is more of a publisher’s tool than a writer or reader’s device.

Bitzer (1968) says that a genre is a rhetorical answer to a situation – the situation calls forth the genre, as a performance. This makes genre relational, but not stable. As Cohen (1986) points out :

Genre concepts in theory and in practice arise, change, and decline for historical reasons. And since each genre is composed of texts that accrue, the grouping is a process, not a determinate category. Genres are open categories. Each member alters the genre by adding, contradicting, or changing constituents, especially those of members most closely related to it. The process by which genres are established always involves the human need for distinction and interrelation. Since the purposes of critics who establish genres vary, it is self-evident that the same texts can belong to different groupings of genres and serve different generic purposes.

This is the stable base of the literary horizon from which the rules of the language game of literature are derived. These rules outline the horizons that designate various literary types, but they are, as we have been claiming from the outset, not fixed. They are by no means internal to any single language literary system either, but expand and contract through contact between cultures,whether f the same or different langauges across geographical and social space. Hence we have replaced genre as a stable set of rules defined by specific linguistic and literary characteristics by genre as an emotive horizon.

The classifications in this course are by ‘external’ factors that become intrinsic to the integrative principles that create the literary sign. It is from our understanding of the process of creative integration that the delight of literature emerges. The external factors are grouped as follows :

Social Location : Identity

Movements : Contact, exchange

Transmission : Media and technology

English in the world

English and colonization

By 1724, according to Viswanathan(2012), king’s scholarships were established in the universities to “promote the study of the many languages required for service in foreign courts” (xvii) and “humanistic education was inseparable from the demands of a bureaucratized state”(ibid). Classical training to equip students for rulership expanded to include the ruling of the colonies, and also left its mark in the education and writing of the colonies.

The ‘canon’ of English literature, the great works, were disseminated through the education system because it was felt that they would immerse the native student in the ideals of English culture. The development of English as a privileged academic subject in nineteenth-century Britain – finally confirmed by its inclusion in the syllabuses of Oxford and Cambridge, and re-affirmed in the 1921 Newbolt Report – came about as part of an attempt to replace the Classics at the heart of the intellectual enterprise of nineteenth-century humanistic studies. From the beginning, proponents of English as a discipline linked its methodology to that of the Classics, with its emphasis on scholarship, philology, and historical study – the fixing of texts in historical time and the perpetual search for the determinants of a single, unified, and agreed meaning.The historical moment which saw the emergence of ‘English’ as an academic discipline also produced the nineteenth-century colonial form of imperialism (Batsleer et al.1985: 14, 19–25). Teaching English in the colonies stemmed from the idea of Matthew Arnold who expected that the teaching of English Literature would instill in the colonial subject the love of “culture” rather than the “anarchy” that prevailed beyond the pale of western civilization, by referring to the effects of English and the colony upon each other.

Thus the influence of English as a system of education as well as the tool to access a world of an alien culture differed according to the local conditions.

CANON FORMATION

As literary models to be emulated, parodied or rejected totally, the canon provided vast resources for the future writers of the English language of colonial origin, regardless of  where they were located when they published their work. WE provide a sample list for suggested reading at the end of this module.

Isabel Hofmeyr (2004) has shown that John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress became a classic in England long after it was used by Christian missionaries, first to preach Christianity and then as a model for African writers in English to emulate in writing allegories about the condition of their colonized societies. Thus English literature did not remain the literature of the British Isles (where also the hegemony of English was contested by Welsh and Irish) but , as  Achebe has pointed out, writers from the Anglophone colonies formed a unique group – their work, by being in a common language, could make available a world of different and unique experiences of similar historical episodes – colonization, anti-colonial resistance, nationalism and postcolonial reality .

English in India

The English Education Act 1835 : This was a legislative Act of the Council of India giving effect to a decision in 1835 by Governor General of India Lord William Bentinck, to reallocate funds the East India Company was directed by the British Parliament to spend on education and literature in India. Formerly, they had supported traditional Muslim and Hindu education and the publication of literature in the so-called native learned tongues ie., Sanskrit and Persian. But the Act directed them to support establishments teaching a Western curriculum with English as the language of instruction. Together with other measures promoting English as the language of administration and of the higher law courts (replacing Persian), this led eventually to English becoming one of the languages of India, rather than simply the native tongue of its foreign rulers.

Macaulay’s Minute on Education

Thomas Babington Macaulay produced his famous Memorandum on (Indian) Education where he argued that Western learning was superior, and currently could only be taught through the medium of English. There was therefore a need to produce ” a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” who could in their turn develop the tools to transmit Western learning in the vernacular languages of India. Among Macaulay’s recommendations were the immediate stopping of the printing by the East India Company of Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit books; that the Company should not continue to support traditional education beyond “the Sanscrit College at Benares and the Mahometan College at Delhi” to maintain traditional learning.

“Indian” English

The idea of India itself resists homogenization and a comparative method is needed to understand not only the differential impact of English across Anglophone colonies, but also its differential impact across Indian society itself. The relation of English to the modern Indian depends upon her class and caste position, which decides the access to education in the “English’ medium. This also places English within the aspirational threshold of the student – it is a way of securing power and prestige. Resistance to English is another response opposite to aspiration. But neither of these extremes encapsulates entirely the ambiguous position of English in India. This is because unlike in Anglophone colonies of Africa, Anglophone colonies of South Asia had existing script cultures and traditions of written literature older than English.

Rajeswari Sundar Rajan in Lie of the Land (1992 based on seminar held in 1988) coined the term “ Alienated insiders” for the English educated elite. The Indian state adopted at independence a Language policy wherein the student would eb taught an official language,a link language and the local language after the linguistic reorganization of states. This was known as the Three-language formula.

Meenakshi Mukherji (1992) facilitated the introduction of translation of vernacular texts  into English, thus producing an Indian literature corpus in English.

Post colonial English

In the 25th anniversary edition of Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest, the writer refers to the change in the nature and scope of English Studies in the last 25 years since the book was published “English can no longer be studied innocently or inattentively to the deeper contexts of imperialism, transnationalism and globalization in which the discipline first articulated its mission. It is no small matter that Caliban competes de rigueur with his creator Shakespeare as the canonical expression of present day English Studies “The spread of English through colonial educational policy as well as for economic purposes, is reflected in the various “new” literatures written in English.

Global English

Visvanathan points to the “de-nationalisation” of English and American Studies and asks the question : where is English literature produced ?Her answer is to describe English Studies as possessing “twin genealogies” produced in the colony and in the metropole. The literatures of the United States of America and Canada, both written in English, are cited by Visvanathan as examples of how the migration of different groups of people seeking independence from England, led to separate histories of ‘English writing’ in Canada and across the border in the United States. We have considered the case of India in some detail, since this course deals mostly with English writing and translation in India.

English as World language

Another change in the situation of English as a language is its status as ‘world’ language, which Achebe refers to in the quotation below. In 2009, English was adopted as the official language of ASEAN, while, as O’Sullivan, Huddert and Lee point out, the European Union of which England is a member, has three working and twenty four official languages. The position of English in this part of the world has come in for study and investigation by scholars like Kirkpatrick who studied the change from the pro-Malay policy to what has been called “linguistic surgery” in the context of Vietnam (O’Sullivan et al 2015) ie the introduction of English from the primary level of education. The counter movement to protect the local languages is also visible in countries like Hong Kong, where, as it is in India, the private school system is identified with the English language while local languages, in India called “vernaculars” are taught. India’s introduction to English is by colonial design, in order to form a class in between the colonial ruler and the ruled while English was introduced into the ASEAN countires as a necessary skill required by the economy. The language has a different history and hence a different place in the society vis a vis other languages and language-cultures across South and South-East Asia. Scholars like Phillipson (1992) describe the spread of English in these regions as “linguistic imperialism” and this position has been further elucidated by writers like Pennycook (1998) who explains that the attitude towards languages is marked by an Orientalist attitude, ie the belief that there exists a hierarchy between the coloniser’s language and culture, which is seen as modern, and the colonized culture and language, seen as backward and barbarian. The power dynamics that surround the teaching, learning and use of English accompanies its spread as a world language.

O’Sullivan et al introduce a note of caution when they argue that as India and China become more powerful economically, the ‘soft power’ of their languages and cultures is likely to challenge the global power of English (2015, xviii). Institutes that project the language and culture of English in the world, like the British Council, will, they feel, be used as a model for spreading the languages and cultures of these emergent Asian nations. The Confucius Institutes of China and the Japan Foundation are cited as examples.

English Languages : Hierarchy and Indigenisation

The anxiety of writing and speaking “correct English” pervades the lives of those who wish, through the language, to declare themselves modern, and articulate their lives and aspirations to the culture represented by the English language globally. But languages are different from other tools and instruments of life : they are adaptable to other languages, borrowing and lending, changing and assimilating according to need in order to facilitate communication. Hence, as Schneider points out, “postcolonial English has “indigenized and grown local roots”. The idea of the “native speaker” has been problematized thus :

if there is a consistent, rule-governed structure, it must be treated as a system, and error should be defined only in terms of deviation from the rules that constitute that structure. It makes no sense to treat that structure itself as a deviant, abnormal form of another, more primary structure and treat its rules as distortions of the rules of the ‘original’, ‘normal’ structure. And if, for some taxonomical purposes we choose to so designate the second structure in terms of deviation from the ‘original’ structure, we must avoid drawing normative consequences from it. That is to say, we must not interpret compliance with the rules of the ‘deviant’ system as imperfect or incomplete obedience of the rules of the ‘original’ system.

AS Ngugi points out, our view of languages as existing in a hierarchy is to be questioned and deconstructed if we are to proceed reading ‘globalectically’. He explains the language hierarchy as “linguistic feudalism” (2012 60), with “aristocratic languages at the top and menial barbaric languages at the bottom”

Achebe proposed that English must be “tamed, nativized and actively manipulated to admit its foreign surroundings”. Thus, English must be compelled to blend with the environment (of its users), thereby producing artistic works that will be aesthetically pleasing. It is by so doing that Africans can hope to have the best African literary works in English and to achieve “an extra-ordinary novelty of expression and yet all of them blossoming on the native root”.

Thus the encounter of the English language with the world , has yielded a variety of what may be called dialects, but are actually different languages one of whose ingredients is English – the others are other languages with which English may be in a relationship of power, but which , as the common and literary language of communities , has equal value as instruments of communication. Some of these language-types are Creole and pidgin. This is reflected in the work of Louise Bennett who puts Jamaican English in a global Anglophone framework, comparing it to other dialects legitimized by “de Oxford Book / A English Verse”:

Dat dem start fi try tun language

From de fourteen century

Five hundred years gawn an dem got

More dialec dan we!

Thus indigenization of English has yielded a creative fusion of the ‘local’ and the ‘global’, which sometimes has been criticized as exoticisation, and at other times been lauded as original. This serves to remind us, as we have discussed earlier, that language by itself is not inherently ‘colonial’ or ‘resistant’ or ‘personal’ or ‘public’ – it is the use of language that renders it adequate to the situation. As the medium of our intersubjectivity, we use the language for our purposes and in the way that allows us to communicate. The hierarchy of languages in the colonies leads to a special privilege for those who ‘know’ English. On the other hand, as Achebe writes, English too has to undergo a change :

The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.

English and the Internet

The development of the internet by English speaking countries have by default led to the dominance of that language on the world wide web. Studies have found that over two-thirds of the users of the internet do not speak English as their first language (Danet and Herring 2007). But until 2010 (Lee 2016) technology had not developed enough to display or input non-alphabetic symbols, which forced the internet users to depend upon English. Phillipson’s phrase “linguistic imperialism” was coined to describe this situation, where users of the internet were forced by circumstances to learn the language. But by 2012, the percentage of English use on the internet dropped to 55% from 80% in 1998. So the agenda of hyperglobalisation, ie the homogenization of the world through globalization, seems not to be working , at least in the context of language use. Besides the rise in use of other languages on the internet, the change in English itself, wrought by the different users across the world, belies the fear of linguistic imperialism without resistance.

Network vs Hierarchy

The power of English and the struggles of those within that power to acquire it or escape its tentacles is played out in the policies towards the language in the Anglophone areas. But what Achebe calls “universal’ in the quote above, is also being inflected with change. AS Ngugi explains, The lines between the written and the orally transmitted are being blurred in the age of internet and cyberspace….Through technology people can speak in real time, face to face. The language of texting and emailing and access to everything including pictures and music in real time is producing a phenomenon that is neither pure speech or pure writing. The language of cyberspace may borrow the language of orality, twitter and chat-rooms……but  it is orality mediated by writing. It’s neither one nor the other. It’s both. It’s cyborality” (2012, 84).

Ngugi coins the term cyborature, but his interest is mainly in the conditions that cyborature forces us to take cognizance of

“…writing and orality are realizing anew the natural alliance they have always had in reality despite attempts to make the alliance invisible or antagonistic…..The problem has not been the fact of the oral or the written, but their placement in a hierarchy. Network, not hierarchy, will free the richness of the aesthetic, oral or literary.