[Download] "Structuring Empire in the Opening Chapter of La Regenta." by Romance Notes # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Structuring Empire in the Opening Chapter of La Regenta.
- Author : Romance Notes
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 188 KB
Description
IMPERIALISM entails thinking about, settling on, and controlling land that one does not possess: terrain that is distant, occupied, and owned by others. The endeavor enriches some and engenders untold misery for others. But imperialism is not merely an act of accumulation and acquisition. It is sustained and even driven by impressive ideologies that include notions that certain territories and people require and beseech domination, as well as attitudes affiliated with domination reflected in words and concepts such as "inferior" or "subject races," "subordinate peoples," "dependency," "expansion," and "authority" (Said 9). In the imperial culture, there is a commitment--an "ideologeme" as Frederic Jameson characterizes it--in constant circulation wherein men and women accept the notion that distant territories and their native peoples should be subjugated, perceiving an almost metaphysical obligation to rule and subordinate 'inferior' or less advanced peoples. Although the era of classical high imperialism has ended, the experience and aftermath of the imperial past has entered into the reality of millions of people, where its existence as a shared memory and a very problematical confluence of ideology, culture, and policy still exercises tremendous force. Its imprint remains in a general cultural sphere with recognizable manifestations in education, religion, literature, and the visual and musical arts, as well as in specific political, ideological, economic, and social practices. The task of the literary critic is to scrutinize these manifestations, while taking stock of "the anger and resentment the experience and memory provokes in those who were governed" (Fanon 101), as well as the nostalgia for empire persisting in those who ruled. The culture that nurtured the sentiment, rationale, and imagination of empire is examined, together with the discrepant voices and experiences of the subjugated, in order to grasp the hegemony of imperial ideology and discern how literature makes constant references to itself as colluding in imperial expansion by creating what Raymond Williams terms "structures of feeling" that support, elaborate, and consolidate the practice of empire (Fekete 1; Simpson 13).