SILENCE OF THE OTHER IN MODERN BRITISH FICTION
SILENCE OF THE OTHER IN MODERN BRITISH FICTION

Summary/Abstract: This paper assumes that fictional treatment of the Other in modern British literature mirrors the particular moment of British social and political history when the decline of its colonial powers relativized its imperialistic values. Facing specific realities of the foreign places, the great British travellers and writers under consideration, Joseph Conrad, Edward Morgan Forster, and David Herbert Lawrence, explicitly questioned the paternalistic discourse of their compatriots. Besides, their works share an acute modernist awareness of the precarious nature of interpretation. To trace their hermeneutic hesitations, we will focus on depiction of geographical as amoral phenomena. In all the three cases descriptions are obscure, characterised by semantic and aesthetic underdevelopment, i.e. with the repetition of instances where the choice of modifiers needs subsume negation. However, if these narratives are obscure, considering that the most frequent modifiers they use, and/or are powerless to avoid, belong to the semantic scope of "unknown," "dark," "formless" or "empty," it is not to deny meaning to the entity observed but to denounce the inherited means of expression.

• Details
• Contents