Despite all its merits, the vast majority of critical attention devoted to colonialist literature restricts itself by severely bracketing the political context of culture and history. This typical facet of humanistic closure requires the critic systematically to avoid an analysis of the domination, manipulation, exploitation, and disfranchisement that are inevitably involved in the construction of any cultural artifact or relationship. I can best illustrate such closures in the field of colonialist discourse with two brief examples. In her book The Colonial Encounter, which contrasts the colonial representations of three European and three non-European writers, M. M. Mahood skirts the political issue quite explicitly by arguing that she chose those authors precisely because they are "innocent of emotional exploitation of the colonial scene" and are "distanced" from the politics of domination.' We find a more interesting example of this closure in Homi Bhabha's criticism. While otherwise provocative and illuminating, his work rests on two assumptions-the unity of the "colonial subject" and the "ambivalence" of colonial discourse-that are inadequately problematized and, I feel, finally unwarranted and unacceptable. In rejecting Edward Said's "suggestion that colonial power and discourse is possessed entirely by the coloniser," Bhabha asserts, without providing any explanation, the unity of the "colonial subject (both coloniser and colonised)."2 I do not wish to rule out, a priori, the possibility that at some rarefied theoretical level the varied material and discursive antagonisms between conquerors and natives can be reduced to the workings of a single "subject"; but

The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature

"Experience is the best teacher." In U. S. education, there is a common belief in the educative value of firsthand experience. Teachers, for example, claim to have learned from classroom experience most of what they know about teaching. Children, too, are seen as learning best when firsthand experience is the basis for what they are taught. This essay questions the presuppositions that favor firsthand experience. First, we look at what is entailed when education and firsthand experience are described as if equivalent. Beliefs in such an equivalence presuppose a commonsense theory of knowledge and mind that philosophers of science have found to be inadequate. Second, we use research on the social psychology of judgment to identify faulty inferences that frequently result from learning by firsthand experience. These pitfalls are illustrated in a discussion of learning to teach. Third, we consider how firsthand experience can close avenues to conceptual and social change. For example, to learn from firsthand...

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Education: The Overcoming of Experience

Presenting a concise treatment of the various contemporary ways of interpreting myths and rituals, this book is organized in terms of the most important schools of interpretation and discusses many of the recent approaches that have had widespread influence as well as older approaches that are still viable. While the primary focus is reflective and critical - how the various mythographic approaches have come about, and how they may be characterized and used - the framework of the book also provides a series of questions for contemporary study of particular myths and rituals. Myths and rituals remain important conveyors of cultural values, and the book argues that they form storehouses of significance that must not be omitted as our scientific establishments tend toward more abstract analysis of supposedly objective data. This work represents a wide synoptic view of research not usually considered within a single perspective, or treated as having on-going influences. The book has a unified critical perspective upon a mass of materials and approaches and is designed to function both as a reference work for the historical developments of mythography and as a stimulus to individual studies of specific myths and rituals.

Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals

I N THE EMERGENCE of the study of American literature and the formation of a separate discipline called American Studies, the "invention" of the concept of an "American romance" has played a crucial role. The 1940s and 50s were the period in which the search for a national, specifically "American" literary tradition took on a new urgency. This search was fueled by post-World War II visions of a new world power and the arrival of what Henry Luce called "the American century." F. O. Matthiessen's study American Renaissance (1941) had identified a literary tradition of great intellectual power and artistic originality and had provided it with a name that stuck.1 Perry Miller had transformed the perception of American culture-still widely considered provincial and without a strong cultural tradition of its own-by recovering an imposing "Puritan tradition."2 However, his redefinition tied the interpretation of American culture to this Puritan legacy in a way that seemed too restrictive on regional and historical grounds. Similarly, Matthiessen's book limited America's unique cultural achievement to a particular period and to a small group of writers. It was the concept of the American romance which solved this impasse in matters of cultural self-definition. Ironically enough, the solution was suggested by an essay which developed the claim of a different tradition in American literature in order to describe this literature's shortcomings, Lionel Trilling's essay "Morals, Manners and the Novel."3 Trilling's essay summarizes what was more or less the standard view of American literature in English departments on both sides of the Atlantic: While the European novel traditionally focuses on society and its manners (in the wide sense of the whole array of social relations and its determinants) , American writers shy away from this social reality, and, thus, from the complexity and fullness of social life. Trilling's argument was developed in the context and service of his own liberal critique of political radicalism and its narrow views of the purpose of literature. However, his argument that reality, in contrast to the epistemologically

https://www.jfki.fu-berlin.de/en/v/publications_fluck/1990/fluck_american_romance/03_Fluck_American_Romance.pdf

"The American Romance" and the Changing Functions of the Imaginary

Bible; Edmund Spenser; Faerie Queene; Old Testament; Hebrew Bible; Canonical Criticism; Biblical Poetics; Reception History

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Sanctifying a Darke Conceit: Seeing the Bible in the Faerie Queene

1. The Word and World of Man 2. The Context of Romance 3. Our Lady of Pain: Heroes and Heroines of Romance 4. The Bottomless Dream: Themes of Descent 5. Quis Hic Locus? Themes of Ascent 6. The Recovery of Myth Notes Index

A. Owen Aldridge

Papers

The secular scripture : a study of the structure of romance

Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition