Tobias Döring

Performances of mourning in Shakespearean theatre and early modern culture

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements A Note on Citation Introduction PART 1: POLITICS OF MOURNING Heavens Hung with Black: Elizabethan Rituals of Mourning Remembrance of Things Past Memory Battles and Stage Laments Facing the Dead: Theatricality and Historiography PART 2: PATHOLOGIES OF MOURNING Well-made Partings and the Problem of Revenge Translating Tradition: The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus Foreign Funerals and Colonial Mimesis: Historical Exchanges Hamlet and the Virtue of Assumed Custom PART 3: PHYSIOLOGIES OF MOURNING Secrets and Secretions Tears and the Uncertain Signs of Inwardness Rhetoric and the Techniques of Emotional Engineering Women, Widows and Mimetic Weeping PART 4: PARODIES OF MOURNING Mock Laments: The Play and Peal of Death Round about her Tomb they go: Much Ado About Nothing Ralph Roister Doister and the Anxiety of Borrowed Rites Noting and Ghosting: What Stage Paradoies Do Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

Edward Said and the Fiction of Autobiography

In Moses Ascending (1975), the second novel of his sequence about Caribbean migration to London, Sam Selvon tells the story of Moses Aloetta’s eventual success in the promised land. The immigrant has finally arrived */ or so he thinks. Moses buys a house, rents out rooms, hires a domestic servant and, as a sign of his new status, he undertakes a literary project: he decides to write an autobiography or, as he puts it more elegantly, he is ‘composing’ his ‘Memoirs’ (Selvon 42). As a social satirist and often parodic writer, Selvon is ironically ridiculing his protagonist for these literary pretensions. But the issue highlighted is certainly significant, not least in the context of Black British literature where, as Selvon’s satirical asides remind us, eminent figures like George Lamming first made their name through autobiographical writing. Parody only works when it hits the mark. Moses’s memoir here marks the crucial function of autobiography for immigrant writers / or, generally speaking, for writers in a de-centred or displaced position / to initiate their career into authorship through forms of life-writing, thus defining a cultural place for and by themselves. This suggests that arrival is a textual process: in a sense, the immigrant has not arrived in a new place before he or she writes home about it. While Selvon satirises this autobiographical move in his narrator, he is at the same time performing it himself. Although he never composed a memoir, his novels beginning with The Lonely Londoners (1956) are among the leading works that have mapped out the cultural space of immigration and black Britain, a space which their author has himself traversed. Even if his books of Moses are pure fiction, they are nevertheless grounded in historical and personal experience. What is at stake here is the relation between fiction and autobiography */which has never been an easy one. Positions in this critical debate range from deterministic views, reducing all writing to some presumed factual basis from the author’s life, to poststructuralist claims insisting on the tropological nature of autobiography that is placing an emphasis on the rhetorical figures which produce any writer’s life rather than resulting from it. The text most often cited in relation to this is Paul de Man’s argument that autobiography is ‘a figure of reading’, which occurs, to some degree, in all texts or in no texts at all (‘Autobiography’ 921). And yet it is striking that even de Man does not simply dismiss the special mode of referentiality by which autobiography proceeds: ‘Autobiography seems to depend on actual and potentially verifiable events in a less ambivalent way than fiction does’, as he puts it himself rather ambivalently, adding the intriguing question: ‘But are we so certain that autobiography depends on reference, as a photograph depends on its subject?’ (921). Well, are we? In this essay I would like to pursue this question and explore the certainty of reference in autobiographical writing in precisely the sense suggested here: in the sense that a photograph depends on its subject. The subject for my exploration, however, will not be a text by de Man (for, notoriously, he never published his autobiography), but the memoir Out of Place by the now late Edward Said, who in the field of critical theory is widely seen as one of de Man’s most powerful opponents. I do not wish to deny this critical opposition but to rethink its usefulness. As with the fact/ fiction-divide, it could perhaps be more useful to try an approach that goes beyond established differences without overriding them. We could, for example, approach autobiography in the same way that John Austin went beyond the true/false-dichotomy in semantic analysis and so introduced the notion of the performative in language. Autobiographies, in this perspective, are primarily performative texts: they are not just descriptive, but productive; in other words, they do things with words. What they are doing can be characterised as self-formation by self-formulation (cf. Haselstein). Through telling his or her own life, the autobiographer therefore turns into the author of his or her own self. This is the reason why autobiographical projects, as just noted, have been so prominent in immigrant writing, just as in women’s writing, in slave narratives or, more generally, in the entire field of minority literatures. Here, in Julia Swindells’s terms, autobiography has always offered people a means of Tobias Döring

Of Maps and Moles: Cultural Negotiations with the London Tube

Abstract In the twentieth century, cultural encounters with the metropolis have often met with difficulties when trying to map or visualize the complexity and vastness of the modern city. Drawing on a range of textual and some pictorial examples, from mid-Victorian times to the threshold of the new millennium, this paper argues that the underground system of the London tube may offer ways to address this problem. Because of the widely different and often ambivalent attitudes towards the experience of underground transport, the London tube emerges as a central space for cultural and critical engagements with the project of modernity.

Fictions of Translation: The Celts, the Canon and the Question of World Literature

Debates on postcolonial writing, canon formation and Goethes notion of world literature can profit from reconsidering the well-known case of James Macphersons Works of Ossian. The fictions of translation which it offered to the eighteenthcentury reading public questioned ruling norms while working towards cultural change, thus helping to suggest new views on the positioning of literature in the modern world.