Eating Their Words

Yanulada

Description

Linking cannibalism to issues of difference crucial to contemporary literary criticism and theory, the essays included here cover material from a variety of contexts and historical periods and approach their subjects from a range of critical perspectives. Along with such canonical works as The Odyssey, The Faerie Queene, and Robinson Crusoe, the contributors also discuss lesser known works, including a version of the Victorian melodrama Sweeny Todd, as well as contemporary postcolonial and postmodern novels by Margaret Atwood and Ian Wedde. Taken together, these essays re-theorize the relationship between cannibalism and cultural identity, making cannibalism meaningful within new critical and cultural horizons.

Contributors include Mark Buchan, Santiago Colas, Marlene Goldman, Brian Greenspan, Kristen Guest, Minaz Jooma, Robert Viking O'Brien, Geoffrey Sanborn, and Julia M. Wright.

Foreword
Maggie Kilgour

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Identity
Kristen Guest

2. Food for Thought: Achilles and the Cyclops
Mark Buchan

3. Cannibalism in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, Ireland, and the Americas
Robert Viking O'Brien

4. Robinson Crusoe Inc(orporates): Domestic Economy, Incest, and the Trope of Cannibalism
Minaz Jooma

5. Devouring the Disinherited: Familial Cannibalism in Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer
Julia M. Wright

6. Are You Being Served? Cannibalism, Class, and Victorian Melodrama
Kristen Guest

7. From Caliban to Cronus: A Critique of Cannibalism as Metaphor for Cuban Revolutionary Culture
Santiago Colás

8. Cannibals at the Core: Juicy Rumors and the Hollow Earth Chronotope in Ian Wedde's Symmes Hole
Brian Greenspan

9. Margaret Atwood's Wilderness Tips: Apocalyptic Cannibal Fiction
Marlene Goldman

10. The Missed Encounter: Cannibalism and the Literary Critic
Geoffrey Sanborn

List of Contributors

Index

Sujets

• Literary theory

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 06 septembre 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780791490013
• Langue: English

Extrait

E ATING T HEIR W ORDS

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E ATING T HEIR W ORDS

Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Cultural Identity

Edited by Kristen Guest

Foreword by Maggie Kilgour

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2001 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207

Production by Marilyn P. Semerad Marketing by Fran Keneston

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Eating their words : cannibalism and the boundaries of cultural identity / edited by Kristen Guest ; foreword by Maggie Kilgour. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN–7914–5089–9 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0–7914–5090–2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Cannibalism in literature. I. Guest, Kristen, 1967–

PN56.C34 E19 2001 809’.93355—dc21

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

00–053152

Foreword Maggie Kilgour

Acknowledgments

Contents

1. Introduction: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Identity Kristen Guest

2. Food for Thought: Achilles and the Cyclops Mark Buchan

3. Cannibalism in Edmund Spenser’sFaerie Queene,Ireland, and the Americas Robert Viking O’Brien

4. Robinson Crusoe Inc(orporates): Domestic Economy, Incest, and the Trope of Cannibalism Minaz Jooma

5. Devouring the Disinherited: Familial Cannibalism in Maturin’sMelmoth the Wanderer Julia M. Wright

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CONTENTS

6. Are You Being Served? Cannibalism, Class, and Victorian Melodrama Kristen Guest

7. From Caliban to Cronus: A Critique of Cannibalism as Metaphor for Cuban Revolutionary Culture Santiago Colás

8. Cannibals at the Core: Juicy Rumors and the Hollow Earth Chronotope in Ian Wedde’sSymmes Hole Brian Greenspan

9. Margaret Atwood’sWilderness Tips: Apocalyptic Cannibal Fiction Marlene Goldman

10. The Missed Encounter: Cannibalism and the Literary Critic Geoffrey Sanborn

List of Contributors

Index

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Foreword

Maggie Kilgour

Go to the meatmarket of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrapeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw? Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal?

—Hermann Melville,Moby Dick

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Ishmael’s rant seems uncan- nily prophetic. Eating people isin, or at least “interesting,” as cannibalism has emerged as one of the most important topics in criticism today, one which pierces to the very heart of current discussions of difference and identity. At the same time, however, the question might need to be inverted, to read: Who “is” a cannibal? Since the publication of William Arens’s controversial 1979 study,The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy, we have become aware that too often the myth of the can- nibal has been precisely that: a myth constructed about others that cul- tures have used to justify hatred and aggression. Cannibalism is the ultimate charge: call a group “cannibals,” and you not onlyprovethat they are savages but authorize their extermination. It is easy to conclude then that cannibalism is “only” a fiction. Since Arens, many critics have assumed just this and deny the reality of cannibalism as a practice. Postcolonial studies especially have suggested that the figure of the canni- bal was created to support the cultural cannibalism of colonialism, through the projection of western imperialist appetites onto the cultures they then subsumed. Arens himself, however, never denied absolutely that cannibalism occurred; what concerned him more was understanding why his discipline

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(anthropology), had so much invested in proving that cannibalism had occurred, despite often inadequate evidence. As his subtitle suggested, anthropology seemed to need the idea of anthropophagy in order to create itself as a discipline. Following Arens’s lead, other critics have shown how the figure of the cannibal plays a central role in defining western ideals. If in the past the cannibal was used to construct differences, today it is invoked in order to deconstruct them. The chapters in this volume sub- sume a wide range of sources, from Homer, the great oral poet of what Fielding called “the eating poem,”The Odyssey, to here. Close analyses of the individual works enables the contributors to follow some of the differ- ent and ambiguous desires that cannibalism has been used to embody, of which imperialism is just one manifestation. The most extreme image of the subhuman is intensely revealing of a culture’s vision of what it means to be human and of its appetites both spiritual and material. The focus on cannibalism today seems to reflect our current desire to renegotiate differ- ences and relations with others in a multicultural world in which the idea of the “savage” and, indeed, even “nature” is questioned. The cannibal pre- sents a disturbing fiction of otherness because it both constructs and con- sumes the very possibility of radical difference. As these chapters note, the boundary between the “cannibal” and “civilized man” traditionally has been the marker of absolute opposition. But since Montaigne, we have known that that difference is illusory: the cannibal is us. For a post-holo- caust culture especially, the question of whether one can distinguish civi- lization from barbarism seems especially urgent, yet difficult. The figure of the cannibal dramatizes the danger of drawing boundaries too absolutely. But perhaps it equally reveals the peril of not drawing them at all, as the act of cannibalism is the place where self and other, love and aggression meet, where the body becomes symbolic, and at the same time, the human is reduced to mere matter. If it is not adequate to cry with Ishmael that we areallcannibals, it seems important still to look carefully at what our cur- rent fascination with this unsavory subject is able to tell us about our needs and desires.

Acknowledgments

It is a pleasure to be able to acknowledge the personal debts accrued while completing this project. Linda Hutcheon and Raymond L. Williams both provided crucial advice in the early stages. Through several stages of review, Maggie Kilgour’s thorough and conscientious input was enor- mously helpful as was that of the unnamed readers for SUNY Press. Rebecca Leaver, John Leaver, Bonnie Harrison, and Kevin Alcock pro- vided tremendous personal support at a crucial stage in the editing process, and Grace Kehler has—as always—been a great sounding board as well as a most wonderful friend. Throughout it all, Dale Guest has been my best friend and biggest supporter. Finally, putting together an edited volume is a lengthy and some- times frustrating process. I would like to thank the contributors to this volume for their unfaltering patience, diligence, and remarkable profes- sionalism. Two of the chapters that appear in this volume have been revised from previous publications. Minaz Jooma’s “Robinson Crusoe Inc(orpo- rates): Domestic Economy, Incest, and the Trope of Cannibalism” origi- nally appeared inLiterature, Interpretation, Theory. Marlene Goldman’s essay onWilderness Tipsappeared inEtudes canadiennes/Canadian Studies 46(1999):93–100.

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