International Research Seminar: "Shakespeare, Conrad, and the Global Intertext"

Program

Abstract: 

In this talk I outline the concept of the global intertext--a narrative that is rooted in at least two continents and among two or more societies and which then provokes rewritings by authors from different continents and cultures. A paradigmatic example of this kind of text is Shakespeare's The Tempest, set among Europeans on an island near the coast of Africa which strongly resembles the New World island of Bermuda, which had been discovered just before the play was written. Another such paradigmatic text is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, set in England, Belgium, and central Africa, and which as been rewritten by a number of authors using a variety of settings and groundings: Alejo Carpentier's Los Pasos perdidos (New York City and the South American jungle); Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North (London and Sudan), Uwe Timm's The Sanke Tree (Germany and South America), David Daybydeen's The Intended (Guyana and England); and Caryl Phillips' Crossing the River (USA, Africa, England); to name just a few. In my talk, I will discuss The Tempest and its transformations, focusing on its rewitings by Conrad in Victory and by several postcolonial writers. I will pay particular attention to the role of the ending in these works, contrasting the thoroughly closed and wildly open endings, noting the larger narratological and ideological issues that are involved. Throughout, we will seek to determine what qualities or relations help enable a work to become a global intertext.  

Bio:

Brian Richardson is a Professor in the English Department of the University of Maryland, where he teaches modern literature and narrative theory.  He is the author or co-author of five books, Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative (1997); Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction (2006, Perkins Prize winner); Narrative Theory: Critical Concepts and Current Debates (co-authored with David Herman, James Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, and Robyn Warhol, 2012), Unnatural Narratives: Theory, History, and Practice (2015); and A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-first Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives (2019). He is currently working on a volume on character theory. He has edited over 10 collections of essays and several special issues. His articles explored reader response theory, narrative sequence, endings, character, fictionality, realism, African American and postcolonial narratives, the poetics of drama, and the narratives of literary history; they have been translated into French, German, Russian, Portuguese, Polish, Chinese, Danish, and Serbian. In 2011 he served as President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN).   

Text in discussion:

Brian Richardson, "The Trope of the Book in the Jungle: Colonial and Postcolonial Responses." The Conradian, 36.1 (2011): 1-13.

Those interested in attending the seminar, please contact Marta Puxan Oliva (mpuxano@uoc.edu) to get the text in discussion.