Englishness Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Englishness - Essay Example Lamming continues that Englishness is often defined in its colonizing and expanding terms, as an instrument to demonstrate superiority and class division. Laclau (1985) sees the social differentiation also as geographical one - England and the colonized territories -West Indies, Africa, Australia. The geographical places also create ambiguity in the religious sphere, because if you are different on the bases on religious beliefs, historical background, social class, than one can not be included in the "Englishness" shared by the natives. . Lamming (1984) remarks that there is a linguistic barrier too - well-spoken English versus the broken English. Englishness appeared as an ideology as early as 18th, transforming itself into a modern phenomenon separating colonized people from the industrialized society and well-taught Christians from elite class. The distinguished English attitude establishes boundaries between the white race and the others described as savages and primitive (James 1984). Consequently, the very skin color empowers the people to incorporate certain English attitudes towards the different ones, adding more features into the differentiation. In this way the white people disempower the colonized subject, disparaging both his culture and his human status. Lamming (1984) gives an example of the English writer embodying the Englishness and the West Indian writer which can not be grasped as intelligent and thoughtful as the English one. In this sense otherness is seen "part of his historic contract, the English critic accepts-for what else can he do-the privilege so natural and so free of being the child and product and voice of a colonizing civilization (Lamming 30)." The Englishness doctrine leads to hegemony and postcolonial supremacy (James 1984). Englishness lay paternity claims over the different cultures and renders invisibility so as to minimize their influential contribution to the variety of cultures that Englishness must include. Eagleton (1976) in his chapter 'Ideology and literary form" includes a definition of "ideology" and how the literary form of it has brought it to disarray. "In English literary culture of the past century, the ideological basis of organic form is peculiarly visible, as a progressively impoverished bourgeois liberalism attempts to integrate more ambitious and affective ideological modes (Eagleton 161)."Macherey (2006) in his most pivotal literary theory focuses his attention both on the reader and on the writer. Macherey's (2006) statement is that the very act of reading produces numerous interpretations and meanings in the different readers, which are beyond the control of the writer. Generating a new branch of post-structuralist theory Macherey (2006) argues that contemporary literature announces the death of the author, because it evokes all kinds of interpretations into its reader. Macherey (2006) compares the critical viewpoint of the reader with psychological analyses which aim to discover the hidden meaning behind the text. The text plays on the unconscious of the readers. In his short story "A Sahib's War" Kipling uses the device of the "imperfectly-informed narrator". The story is set during the Second Boer War and is told through Sikh soldier's point of view. Although he reports everything that is happening around