Modernity at the Margins
Paul Bowles’ Let It Come Down, The Spider’s House , and Moroccan Collaborations
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9002651 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lindsey Moore (0000-0003-2182-823X, Lancaster University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2012 |
| Volume | 47 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 91-108 |
| Publication date | 2012-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-9894 • E-ISSN: 1741-6442 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0021989411432664 |
| OpenAlex | W2073150578 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 15 |
Literary representations of Morocco sometimes challenge specific colonial, national, and nationalist epistemologies. The work of Paul Bowles, in particular, problematizes conventional categories, not only through the extra-national yearnings of protagonists of his fiction, but also due to the hybrid products of collaborations with Moroccan artists. This article grapples with the contested status of an author profoundly engaged with non-Western epistemology and experience, yet susceptible to Orientalist desire. I focus on Bowles’ novels Let It Come Down and The Spider’s House and then on ways in which the author participated in the emergence of a postcolonial Moroccan body of “texts”. Edward Said’s contrapuntal methodology (2004) and the notion of teleological retrospect (Currie 2007) provide an analytical framework, and Said’s emphasis on labyrinthine and occluded literary relations a rationale for analyzing contexts beyond those directly affected by British colonialism. I argue that Bowles increasingly deprivileges expatriate sensibility and anticipates a critical rereading of colonial history; it is also underpinned by an ambivalent view of writing. While his Moroccan corpus repeatedly enacts the difficulty of “telling the other”, it is nevertheless thematically, structurally, and philosophically invested in the challenges of transcoding, translation, and transvaluation. As such, it illuminates interfaces between colonial discourse, late modernist expatriate/travel writing, and early postcolonial production
Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Art · Colonialism · Epistemology · Expatriate · Hybridity · Literature · Modernity · Nationalism · Orientalism · Political science · Politics · Postcolonial literature · Postcolonialism (international relations · Sensibility · Sociology · Gender Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · Media, Communication, and Education · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
About TimeNarrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time
Telling the Other
Orality and Literacy
Archive Fever
Two Moroccan Storytellers in Paul Bowles's Five Eyes
A World Outside
Paul Bowles
Morocco Bound
Morocco Bound
Rewriting Political Commitment for an International Canon
Desert Songs
Culture and Imperialism
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |