ABSTRACTS

Distorted and Selectrive Constructions of the

Charles Sugnet
(University of Minnesota)

A certain very peculiar notion of Anglophone writing and the Anglophone literary tradition is prominent in Michel Le Bris' manifesto, and underlies many of the essays in the volume. This Anglophone tradition includes Stevenson, Conrad, Faulkner, Bruce Chatwin, Colin Thubron, Zadie Smith, and perhaps even Rider Haggard. Salman Rushdie is its quintessential representative. It does not, however, seem to include Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, or Stuart Hall. In using the evils of structuralist theory as a straw man against which to pitch the argument, Le Bris' manifesto leaves out of existence other kinds of Anglophone theory and fiction that manages in their best moments to be both post-structuralist and postcolonial, and that could have provided a powerful support for his project if he had heeded them, instead of ending the manifesto with a turn toward romantic nature writing from an earlier period.



My paper will first attempt to describe and delimit the contours of the 'Anglophone' that has such a powerful attraction for Le Bris, showing what it includes and what it leaves out. This will also involve a critique of English travel writing as a genre (a subject I have previously written about for Transition magazine). I will then briefly survey the other 'Anglophonies' that appear in the Gallimard volume, showing how they shape and limit the arguments being put forth.



The last part of the paper will make a larger argument, attempting to show the relationship between the selective, distorted, and outdated version of Anglophone writing put forward in the volume, and the larger failings of the overall manifesto, which claims to be opening literature up to the world and to contemporary reality, while in fact banishing the considerations of power, ethics, economics, and contemporary debates about historical narrative that are so important to the Anglophone postcolonial.