139005684 A Post Colonial Criticsm Of O
A Post-Colonial Critique of Othello
A Mismanagement of Mirroring
Gregory Schneider, Yahoo! Contributor Network
Nov 26, 2005 "Share your voice on Yahoo! websites. Start Here."
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Othello
Mirroring
Venetian Masks
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Time passes, class texts are read, dissected, deconstructed. Suddenly in the epochs of literary criticism, a new theory emerges. Schools of thought form and take shape and eventually find themselves in the subconscious of the reader, who now has the option of understanding his literature with a new interpretive strategy. One of the new schools of though, one that is slowly developing in the academic ichor, is post-colonial theory. The post-colonial method does not wade in the shallow-end. It is a discourse of marginalization; an examination of point-zero between the colonizer-colonized relationship; an upheaval of the delimited; a discovery, or unearthing, of the displaced. Time enough has passed: Shakespeare 's Othello must face the possibly now of drowning in the deep end of this method, the possibility of post-colonial death above western eyes. This paper will explore the ways in which Othello represents the displaced Other - what Spivak calls the "subaltern" - the gyroscopic nature of his character, and the machinations of Venice that eventually destroy him.
The tragic in Othello echoes the Aristotelian caveat: "An imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself." Yet, for the subaltern Othello, Anouilh 's Chorus in Antigone is more appropriate: "The machine is in perfect order; it has been oiled ever since time began, and it runs without friction." Othello 's fall from grace goes unpurged, it is uncathartic, despite the dramatic finale:
Soft you; a word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know 't
No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Not set down aught in malice.
A Mismanagement of Mirroring
Gregory Schneider, Yahoo! Contributor Network
Nov 26, 2005 "Share your voice on Yahoo! websites. Start Here."
More:
Othello
Mirroring
Venetian Masks
FlagPost a comment
Time passes, class texts are read, dissected, deconstructed. Suddenly in the epochs of literary criticism, a new theory emerges. Schools of thought form and take shape and eventually find themselves in the subconscious of the reader, who now has the option of understanding his literature with a new interpretive strategy. One of the new schools of though, one that is slowly developing in the academic ichor, is post-colonial theory. The post-colonial method does not wade in the shallow-end. It is a discourse of marginalization; an examination of point-zero between the colonizer-colonized relationship; an upheaval of the delimited; a discovery, or unearthing, of the displaced. Time enough has passed: Shakespeare 's Othello must face the possibly now of drowning in the deep end of this method, the possibility of post-colonial death above western eyes. This paper will explore the ways in which Othello represents the displaced Other - what Spivak calls the "subaltern" - the gyroscopic nature of his character, and the machinations of Venice that eventually destroy him.
The tragic in Othello echoes the Aristotelian caveat: "An imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself." Yet, for the subaltern Othello, Anouilh 's Chorus in Antigone is more appropriate: "The machine is in perfect order; it has been oiled ever since time began, and it runs without friction." Othello 's fall from grace goes unpurged, it is uncathartic, despite the dramatic finale:
Soft you; a word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know 't
No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Not set down aught in malice.
Cited: Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination. Texas: University of Texas Press, 1981. Bradely, A.C. "The Noble Othello." A Casebook on Othello. Ed. Leonard F. Dean. New York: University of Connecticut, 1961. Early, Gerald. The Culture of Bruising. Hopewell: The Ecco Press, 1994. Eno, Brian Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove, 1982. Habib, Imtiaz. Shakespeare and Race: Postcolonial Praxis in the Early Modern Period. New York: University Press of America, 2000. McLendon, J.Y. " 'A Round Unvarnished Tale: ' (Mis)Reading Othello or African Strategies of Dissent." Othello: New Essays by Black Writers. Ed., Mythili Kaul. Washington D.C. Howard University Press, 1997. Phillips, Caryl. The European Tribe. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1987. Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. Gen. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Spivak, Gayatri. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. London: Macmillan, 1988. Thiong 'o, Ngugi Wa. Decolonizing the Mind. Portsmouth: Heinemann Educational Books, 1986.