Jack Maggs

1. Jack Maggs Rewriting and Writing Back paradigms

2. �Great Expectations is not only a great work of English Literature, it is (to an Australian) also a way in which the English have colonized our ways of seeing ourselves. It is a great novel, but it is also, in another way, a prison. Jack Maggs is an attempt to break open the prison and to imaginatively reconcile with the gaoler.� (Peter Carey)

3. �Dickens encourages us to think of Magwitch as the �other�, but this was my ancestor, he was not other. I wanted to reinvent him, to possess him, to act as his advocate. I did not want to diminish his �darkness� or his danger, but I wanted to give him all the love and sympathy that Dickens� first person narrative provides his English hero Pip. That�s where I started.� (Peter Carey)

4. Jack Maggs addresses two main relevant issues:

6. Rewriting and Intertextuality As Barthes reminds us, the word �text� means �a tissue, a woven fabric�. From Latin texere, textum, �to weave�, �woven. �Any text is a tissue of quotations�

8. Any literary work is built from systems, codes, conventions established by previous literary works. To read a text is to shed light on its intertextual nature, on the network of textual relations, on the web, the weave woven form the threads of previously written and previously read texts. Such an approach to textuality foregrounds notions of relationality, interconnectedness and interdependence.

9. Julia Kristeva coined the term intertextuality. In The Bounded Text she examined the way in which a text is constructed out of already existent texts, at text is �a permutation of texts, an intertextuality in the space of a given text, in which several utterances, taken from other texts intersect and neutralize one another� ( Kristeva 1980:36)

12. Representation Representation is the process by which members of a culture produce meaning Language is a representational system (the words of a language stand for, represent people�s ideas, feelings, thoughts..) There are other representational systems (music, painting, fashion, television�)

13. Any representational system can be thought of as working according to the principles of representation through language

14. Language uses sounds and words to stand for or represent what we want to say (an idea, a feeling, a thought�) The other systems of representation work similarly Spoken language uses sounds Written language uses words Music uses notes on a scale The fashion industry uses items of clothing Television uses digitally produced dots on a screen�

15. All these elements (sounds, words, notes, digitally produced dots,�) are part of our material world they are not important for what they are but for what they do They are signs, they stand for and represent our ideas, feelings, concepts�

16. How does language work as a representational system?

18. Foucault He focuses on the production of knowledge through what he called DISCOURSE, a group of statements which provide a language for talking about a particular topic at a particular historical moment.

19. According to Foucault, the world is not simply there to be �talked about�, rather it is discourse itself within which the world comes into being Obviously, he does not deny that things can have a real, material existence in the world. What he argues is that no meaning exists outside discourse.

20. a discourse is a system of statements within which and by which the world can be known. Discourse rules in certain ways of talking about a topic, defining an intelligible and acceptable way to talk, write about it Discourse rules out, limts and restrits other ways of talking, writing about it

21. Disocurse is historicized Unlike Semiotics, Foucault argued that in each period discourses produce forms of knowledge, objects, subjects and practices of knowledge which are radically different from period to period Ex. The notion of �mental illness� apperead as an intelligible construct only within a specific discoursive formation.

22. Discourse is related to power Foucault focused on the relationship between knowledge and power

23. Representation and power

24. E. Said, Orientalism (1978 ) The core of Said�s work lies in the deep connection between knowledge and power. Orientalism is a discourse in Foucauldian terms. Said argues that the Orient exists for the West, and is constructed by and in relation to the West. It is a mirror image of what is �inferior�, �alien�, �other� in terms of comparison to the West. The representation of Europe�s �others� is inherently tied up to the notion of its cultural and political dominance

25. �I have begun with the assumption that the Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there either. We must take seriously Vico�s great observation that men make their own history, that what they can know is that they have made, and extent it to geography: as both geographical and cultural entities � to say nothing of historical entities � such as locales, regions, geographical sectors as �Orient� and �Occident� are man-made�.

26. Therefore as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West. The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other� (E. Said, Orientalism 1978)

27. E. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993) Imperialism is vigorously and authoritatively supported by culture, by the notions of a civilizing mission. Said analyzes Western novels such as Heart of Darkness to uncover the (often unrecognized) impact of imperialism on Western culture, and reveal the ways these novel propagate Western notions of our role in `uncivilized` lands.

28. Said�s notion of resistance: contrapuntal reading Contrapuntal reading is a form of reading back from the perspective of the colonized. A counterpoint is established between the imperial narrative of and the counter-narrative of the colonies. The aim is a polyphonic approach, which reveals the perspective of imperialism and the anti-imperial resistance to it, thus shedding light upon �the dense interrelationship of imperial and colonial societies�.

29. Unlike univocal readings in which the stories told by dominant powers become naturalized and acquire the status of �common sense�, a contrapuntal reading thus demonstrates �a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts. B. Ashcroft-P. Ahluwalia, Edward Said. The paradox of Identity, 1999

30. Hellen Tiffin �Processes of artistic and literary decolonization have involved a radical dis/mantling of European codes and post-colonial subversion and appropriation of th edominant European disocurses�

31. Homi Bhabha Cultural difference is an epistemological object (culture as an object of empirical knowledge) Cultural diversity A process of the enunciation of culture as knowageble

33. Jack Maggs