Samenvatting: The Outsider in Global Anglophone Literature

THE OUTSIDER IN GLOBAL ANGLO LITERATURE
INFORMATION ABOUT THIS COURSE
EXAM
- Essay questions
- Write something about the novels you have read during the module in full
- Allowed to bring copies of novels you have read in full (no notes on them)
- Fill out questions
 Factual questions
 Names of important people (not dates) Essay questions
 One question from each book
 Three novels – can be brought to the exam
 No underlining, No post its, No pencil marks
 You can write about other books, but you will not have the material with you – our
decision
- Comparative essay questions
 Themes discussed across books
 You can choose three essay questions
 Or two and a comparative essay question

Extra material on BB

WHAT WE WILL BE STUDYING
WOMEN AS OUTSIDERS
- Scarlet letter
 Single mother in puritan New England (17 th century)
 Says “non of you business” when asked about the identity of the father
 Woman vs. the town
- Mrs. Dalloway
 Married to an English MP (1920s)
 Inside her head while she is preparing for a party
 “Did I make the right choses in my life”
 Non of the obvious outsidership qualities – feels estranged from her own live
- Their eyes were watching God
 Young black woman who is looking for the right man
 Has to fight the stereotypes of her own culture – women have to get married
 Suffers from the violence
- The God of all small things
 About twins and their mother (Indian family)
 Their ways of thinking is influenced by the colonial history
 The idea of a boy studying and a girl having married = greatest achievement
 The cast system is still used, but isn’t legally in act (you cannot exclude them)

SPLEEN – A REASON FOR OUTSIDERSHIP
Spleen = something between nostalgia, melancholy and uneasiness – you suffer from the world

- The great Gatsby


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,  Ultimate American novel
 The meaning of “great” in the title in relation to the word “great” in “make American
great again”
 Maybe about white supremacists
 Rich white man
- The catcher in the Rye
 In terms of adolescents
 The writing and the humour in this book
 Protagonist has hatred for the world of adult people (all phony (=fake))
- On the road
 People in the early 20s
 Kerouac was an outsider himself
 Self declared outsiders (just like the Beat generation)
 A new generation that takes to the road to “travel” (not knowing where they’re going) –
don’t want to settle down
 A life of non interference
- The bell jar
 Girl teenager that gets a internship in a fashion magazine
 Feels disconnected from all the other people at the internship
 Self inflicted outsidership
 (a very dark book)

RACE – A REASON FOR OUTSIDERSHIP
- Native son
 he interiorises the stereotypes that white people entertain about him
 (hard to find in a book store)
 Idea of the vail is what haunts protagonist – “this is what white people will always think
when he walks into the room
 They will always see a black person enter the room
- Beloved
 Ravages about slavery
 The damage slavery has done to people
 What does it mean to be enslaved?
 (Has been band by Trump)
- On earth we’re briefly gorgeous
 Coming of age
 A lot of information about people dying because of drugs
 What it was like to grow up as an outsider and a homosexual boy in America
- Assembly
 Story of a young black woman working in a store
 Answer to Mrs. Dalloway




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,INTRODUCTION
Going for a particular approach of literature

Outsidership portraits with the author to begin with

POWER STRUCTURES
- Power: mostly negative connotation
 Abusive power is the first thing that comes to mind but it isn’t necessarily the case
 Power can be used for good and bad ends. You can suffer from it and benefit from it

IMPORTANT CLAIM
- Every culture creates insiders and outsiders – and angle of this course
 They value some people because of the way they look – means that people are also
excluded (= outsider)
 You can understand power relations in a society by looking at the way they outsider
people
 Looking at outsiders in a society helps us understand how the power works in the
society

WHAT IS AN OUTSIDER? AND WHY ARE THEY OUTSIDERS?
 They don’t act or look the same as other people in a society
 They don’t enjoy the privileges that the dominant group enjoy
 Language, gender, religious… differences
 Different intensities and different grades
 You cannot live here
 You are not allowed to go to school

LECTURE 1 – BARTLEBY
BARTLEBY
HERMAN MELVILLE
- From New York
- Also wrote Moby Dick – nobody liked it  he got depressed
- Bartleby was kind off a reaction to his own life
 Someone who was misplaced and outsidered by the society
 Feeling of autobiographical aspect in Bartleby (stop writing)

THE CHARACTER BARTLEBY
- Very radical outsider – but not someone we would expect to be an outsider
 He doesn’t conform to the standers way of living
 Wants to contradict the idea of people complying
- Every effort to accommodate him fails
- Nuance of the subtitle: A story of Wallstreet
 The heart of American capitalism
 Shows the life in Wallstreet and not necessarily of Bartleby




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, THE STORY
- Nobody knows how to interpret this story – it resists interpretation
- We only know Bartleby through the lawyer – we have to trust him in the way he portrays
Bartleby
- The lawyer fictionalizes himself
 He thinks we have to know more about him to understand Bartleby
 Represents himself as a man in control
 Says he doesn’t loose his temper
- If you are like the lawyer you are unable to understand someone like Bartleby
 He defies all the characteristics of Bartleby by which the lawyer lives
- The narrator changes in regards to the way he thinks about Bartleby
 First the lawyer thinks Bartleby is lonely
 He has a kind of fascination for a man who does his work well but doesn’t fit in
 Then the lawyer is shocked
 “I would prefer not to”
 The lawyer develops a kind of sympathy for Bartleby – desperation and frustration
- Obsession with the number 3 – maybe a hidden meaning behind it
- Ironic revise of the power
 The lawyer is the boss – but he gets haunted by this character who is not readable and
understandable
 Leads to him saying: “I will have to fire you” – even willing to pay someone who is not
doing the work to just get out
- One way of looking at it: Bartleby is a story about crating a position outside the linguistic and
social convention of society. He is neither inside nor the outside, but inexplicable in the
society he lives in
- The faith in American of any act of rebellion – this is what happens when you disagree with
the power of society
 You may disagree with society without having fully fledged alternative
 May be an act of (quiet) rebellion against America in that period – cannot explain why
you feel an outsider
- For more information – look at the text




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