Agatha Christie and F.R. Leavis: an unlikely pair?

In the Fall of 2007 I took Dr. Kristen Bluemel’s Intermodernism course. Because I am insane and very interested in cultural studies as well as the study of “middlebrow” literature. I read Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot as a signpost of Leavis’ minority culture. My prompt to do this was, first, recognizing the correlation; and second, when I considered that it seemed a strange thing to explore, the conclusion that I inevitably reached was that it really only seemed strange due to how embedded distinctions like middlebrow/highbrow and mass/minority really are. From there, I further considered how these categories affect the ways in which we portend to study, literature, culture, history, etc. are effected by these distinctions through time.

It is not something that I would ordinarily undertake, and for that reason (and the fact that it provided a good excuse to revisit a lot of Raymond Williams), it was a worthwhile undertaking. I also think I gained a better understanding about the theorization and possibilities of Intermodernism than I would have if I had taken a more “traditional” approach and wrote about people like George Orwell or Mulk Raj Anand.

So, another paper: “The ‘Minority’ Figure in ‘Mass’ Fiction: An Intermodern Reading of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot.” massminority.doc

Anthropology and the Modern World…?

I am revisiting Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World, over the next couple of days while reading Robinson Crusoe for Dr. Kristin Bluemel’s class on The Novel in English.

In particular, I plan to consider Trouillot’s first chapter, “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness.” In this chapter Troillot himself creates a pretty convincing narrative regarding the construction of the savage slot within “Western” Imperialism, how that slot was imagined and portrayed in literature (ahem… Robinson Crusoe), and finally how the discipline of anthropology later emerged as a “A Discipline for the Savage” and was institutionalized, along with many social sciences, as part of a nationalist project.

Of course, the basics of this argument seem old hat by now. And certainly there are striking parallels with the narrative of the “The Rise of English” that Terry Eagleton provides, but I hope that pairing Trouillot with Crusoe will illuminate my understanding of the development of the novel form specifically. Trouillot discusses literary content, but not form, while making essentially the same comparisons between literature and philosophy that Ian Watt does in The Rise of the Novel, but perhaps I can go in a slightly different direction by considering the “cultural” aspects of imperialism that Watt largely neglects and the form of the novel, which Trouillot is, of course, not addressing.