Anglo-American Modernism and the Representations of the Pacific

在最近的英国现代主义文学和文化研究中，重新思考现代主义和帝国主义的问题已经重新引起了人们的兴趣。除了对中心/大都市和外围/殖民地的批判性考察之外，人们还在探索帝国的非中心组织及其文化的新方法，至少部分原因在于（后）殖民理论，部分原因在于当前的新帝国全球化进程。例如，正如我在《t·s·艾略特评论》上的评论文章所显示的，杰德·埃斯蒂在《缩小的岛屿：英国的现代主义与民族文化》一书中，将高度现代主义文学置于英国民族文化更大的历史形成中，其中现代主义美学与英国扩张主义权力的共同衰落，可以追溯到20世纪30年代通过20世纪50年代文化研究的出现对国家孤立完整性的新关注。尤其关注弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫的《在A…More ts之间》和t·s·艾略特的《四个四重奏》的晚期现代主义文本，埃斯蒂微妙而精明的阅读揭示了，尽管帝国衰落对现代主义形式的影响似乎是致命的，但现代主义作家的幸存者参与了从帝国到福利国家，从大都会艺术到民族文化的转变。虽然我同意埃斯蒂的观点，即英国现代主义的帝国文化幸存下来，并在自由主义英国看似死亡之后继续定义英国的文化和政治意义，但我发现他在大英帝国（及其文化）的萎缩与作为参考中心的欧洲的衰落之间的轻率甚至过于草率的隐喻存在问题。我曾在《帝国文化与英格兰性》（The Culture of Empire and englishlish）一书中指出，尽管埃斯蒂认为，萎缩的英格兰岛成为“欧洲文明胜利的典型英国终点的统治人物”，但两次世界大战期间收缩的英格兰的表现不能简单地等同于欧洲霸权进步的空间封闭和新帝国美国的崛起。我的下一篇文章《帝国与劳伦斯的重构》也提出了英国帝国主义的全球性在d·h·劳伦斯的现代主义文学文本中的重要作用，认为《恋爱中的女人》和《袋鼠》的结构意义应该被解释为大英帝国与新美国帝国的跨国重组和改革，因此，亚洲移民的文化差异性在文字表面之下被揭示出来。最后，从撒切尔主义政治文化的不同观点出发，在《大英帝国的“衰落”与美国化》一书中重新审视了英美“特殊关系”的各种矛盾本质。因此，本研究项目关注英美现代主义文本中英美之间的各种关系。我一直认为两次世界大战期间英美文学的结构决定了太平洋作为文化他者的缺席。少

There has been renewed interest in rethinking the problematics of modernism and imperialism within recent literary and cultural studies of English modernism. Besides critical examinations of the center/metropolis and the periphery/colony, fresh approaches to the decentered organization of the empire and its culture are being explored, at least in part owing to (post)colonial theory, and in part owing to the present process of new imperial globalization. For example, as my review article in T. S. Eliot Review shows, Jed Esty in A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England locates high-modernist literature in the larger historical formation of national culture in England, in which the joint eclipse of modernist aesthetics and British expansionist power is traced from the new concern of the 1930s with the insular integrity of the nation through the emergence of cultural studies in the 1950s. Especially focusing on the late modernist texts of Virginia Woolf's Between the A … More cts and T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, Esty's subtle and shrewd readings reveal that, despite the seemingly fatal effects of declining empire on modernist form, the survivors of the modernist writers participate in the transition from empire to welfare state, from metropolitan art to national culture. While I agree with Esty's contention that the imperial culture of English modernism survives and continues to define the cultural and political meaning of Englishness after the seeming death of liberal England, I find problematic his facile and even overhasty metaphorization between the shrinking of the British Empire (and its culture) and the decline of Europe as the center of reference.I have argued in "The Culture of Empire and Englishness" that, while the shrinking island of England, Esty presumes, becomes "the governing figure for a paradigmatically English end to the triumph of European civilization," the representation of contracted England in the inter-war period cannot simply be identified with the spatial closure of Europe's hegemonic advancement and the rise of new empire, America. My next article "The (Re)formations of Empire and Lawrence" has also suggested the important role of the global nature of English imperialism within the literary modernist texts of D. H. Lawrence, arguing that the structural meaning of Women in Love and Kangaroo should be interpreted the transnational rearticulations and reformations of the British Empire in connection with the new empire of America, thereby the cultural Otherness of the Asian immigrants being disclosed beneath the textual surfaces. Finally, from the somewhat different viewpoint of the political culture of Thatcherism, the variously contradictory nature of the "special relationships" between Britain and America has been reexamined in "The 'Decline' of the British Empire and Americanization."Thus, this research project is concerned with various relationships between Britain and America in Anglo-American modernist texts. I have been arguing that the structure of Angro-American literature within the inter-war period determines and is overdetermined by the absent presence of the Pacific as the cultural Other. Less