Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: nostalgia, ethics, and contemporary Anglophone literature
- 1 Narratives of return: locating ethics in the age of globalization
- 2 Nostalgia and narrative ethics in Caribbean literature
- 3 “Loss was in the order of things”: recalling loss, reclaiming place in Native American fiction
- 4 Refiguring national character: the remains of the British estate novel
- 5 Appeasing an embittered history: trauma and nationhood in the writings of Achebe and Soyinka
- Conclusion: nostalgia and its futures
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - “Loss was in the order of things”: recalling loss, reclaiming place in Native American fiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: nostalgia, ethics, and contemporary Anglophone literature
- 1 Narratives of return: locating ethics in the age of globalization
- 2 Nostalgia and narrative ethics in Caribbean literature
- 3 “Loss was in the order of things”: recalling loss, reclaiming place in Native American fiction
- 4 Refiguring national character: the remains of the British estate novel
- 5 Appeasing an embittered history: trauma and nationhood in the writings of Achebe and Soyinka
- Conclusion: nostalgia and its futures
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I followed their ancient way to my grandmother's grave. Though she lived out her long life in the shadow of Rainy Mountain, the immense landscape of the continental interior – all of its seasons and its sounds – lay like memory in her blood. She could tell of the Crows, whom she had never seen, and of the Black Hills, where she had never been. I wanted to see in reality what she had seen more perfectly in the mind's eye.
– N. Scott Momaday, House Made of DawnIs it possible to shape a community of shared experience in the wake of the cataclysm? What role does the heterological historian play in refiguring social existence always already disfigured by the cataclysm?
– Edith Wyschogrod, An Ethics of RememberingReading the last lines of Wide Sargasso Sea highlights one of the most intriguing claims made by the novels in this study: a nostalgic attitude toward the past can enable characters and readers alike to acquire, in certain instances, a kind of historical knowledge that recasts past events in the light of unfulfilled possibilities. Although Antoinette's nostalgia leads her to fantasize about events that never occurred, it nonetheless provides the basis for her new awareness at the end of the novel. Antoinette has gained knowledge about her internalization of colonial narratives and how it prohibited her from forming a more genuine relationship with Tia.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel , pp. 89 - 118Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005