Compromise and Resistance in Postcolonial Writing

Reading Breath in Literature

“…37 Like Bright, who warns against vehement sighs in the Renaissance, writing that, "if they be vehement, then shake they the hart and midriffe too much, and cause a sorenesse about those partes," 38 these studies find that "although the respiratory system may benefit from sighing, when randomness becomes too high, excessive sighing may disregulate the system." 39 In their introduction to The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods assert the importance of bringing the past to bear upon current debates in the health sciences. According to the authors, historical perspectives "offer alternative vantage points from which to view, reflect on and critique the biomedical," "enable us to attend to different forms of qualitative critical thinking -and different ways to sensing our world -that were important in the past and that may remain with us today" and "help us to understand the extended, continual and shifting process of negotiation through which certain objects and practices come to our attention and others fade from view."…”

“…[A]ll the substance of which it is made sucks and breathes the brilliancy of the atmosphere; and, as it breathes, softening from its merciless hardness, it falls into fruitful and beneficent dust; gathering itself again into the earths from which we feed, and the stones with which we build;into the rocks that frame the mountains, and the sands that bind the sea. 39 Originally a lecture performed to the people of Tunbridge Wells in 1858, "The Work of Iron" still quavers with the affects of live address. Here, its confounding seriousness is part of a tactic of challenging conventional formations of value: aesthetic, economic and environmental.…”

“…38 Even the sophisticated intertextual accounts that make passing reference to the breathless body, like Alberto Fernandez Carbajal's Compromise and Resistance, fall short of examining the body as anything more than a symptom of something else. 39 Breath does not need to be "diagnosed" as a subjective phenomenological formulation of a more objective reality, be it political (Laoyene), economic (Henry) or literary (Carbajal). If anything, it is breathlessness that forms a more objective reality for the novel, since the hallucinatory variations of the political, the economic and the artistic will depend, at some point, on the deformations of people's breathing.…”

“…So, it begins: "Verse now, 1950, if it is to go ahead, if it is to be of essential use, must, I take it, catch up and put into itself certain laws and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings." 39 This vitalism, however, is muted by the typewriter: "It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends." 40 To be sure, Olson's "intentions" do maintain the pneumatological primacy of speech, criticised by Derrida.…”

Hipsters End: Queer Time, and Imitation versus Authenticity, in Matthew Lopez’s the Inheritance

“…The various manifest and spectral legacies of other texts, to echo my formulation of Forster's legacies elsewhere (Fernández Carbajal, 2014), lead me to ascertain whether these compromise the play's artistic authenticity. In light of the characters' traits and the script's numerous esthetic references to the Western gay canon, the play is explored in terms of hipsterism, specifically the tension between imitation and authenticity, which lies at the heart of hipster esthetics.…”