“Tupperware and Flowerville: Consumerism, Identity Politics, and Intertextuality in David’s Story and Ulysses” (published in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2021)
Starting from a character’s strange assertion that, as mixed-race people classified as “coloured” by apartheid legislation, she and her husband are “Tupperware people,” I investigate representations of consumerism as a means of identity politics in two linked novels. Is self-identification as Tupperware people empowering? How or why? How might answers to this question relate to another linking of eating and identity, when the novel’s narrator is derisively called a “European culture vulture” for her tendency to quote novels like Ulysses (1922)? I argue that this later text, David’s Story (2000), rewrites Ulysses via its depiction of empowering, critically informed consumerism. Furthermore, by using Wicomb as a means of reading Joyce, this analysis challenges the at-times colonizing gaze of global modernist studies, especially when applied to formally experimental writers like Wicomb.
Abstract:
Consumerism, as represented in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story (2000) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), provides a useful theoretical model for rethinking the relationships between earlier texts and the later texts that allude to them, particularly across such comparative contexts as Ireland and South Africa. In both novels, food and kitchenware make possible and render visible characters’ communal relationships. Both novels represent consumerism in detail, from shopping trips to the attribution of meaning to consumer goods, and refer to the other people essential to one’s seemingly individualist consumerism, such as milkmen and Tupperware party hosts. Wicomb’s Sally Dirkse pursues this relationship-making capacity of consumer goods to the point of asserting that her and her husband, both classified as “coloured” in South Africa, are “Tupperware people.” In this essay, I trace how both David’s Story and Ulysses frame consumerism as a politically productive means of theorizing and asserting one’s communal identity. Furthermore, I argue that these two novels’ shared interest in diet, consumerism, and identity points to a useful reframing of intertextuality as a productive form of consumption that transforms both the consumer and the consumed—both the allusive text and the text it references. Such a critical model of intertextuality challenges Eurocentric accounts of modernism’s influence on later, similarly formally experimental texts.
“Will a Pharaoh’s Daughter Help?: Rethinking the Question of Language Through Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s ‘Ceist na Teangan’” (published in Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 2020)
I started this research project after noticing two things: a surprising choice of article made by Paul Muldoon in his translation of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s “Ceist na Teangan” and critics’ tendency to cite Muldoon’s words as Ní Dhomhnaill’s. I decided to translate the poem myself and investigate how the significance of the most famous contemporary poem in Irish might change if it were read, as per Ní Dhomhnaill’s word choice, as a poem about the vulnerability of using words—not specifically the Irish language. I use this starting point to challenge common ways of framing scholarly readings of minor-language literature.
Abstract:
In The World Republic of Letters (2006), Pascale Casanova proposes that scholars read texts in relation to the value of their language of composition in the world literary marketplace. Critics already commonly apply such a methodology to Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry, particularly the poem “Ceist na Teangan.” Paul Muldoon’s translation, “The Language Issue,” encourages its readers to do so by introducing in the poem’s third line a definite article not present in the original Irish, reframing a reflection on language as a reflection on the language—Irish. In contrast, if read in terms of indefinite language, “Ceist na Teangan” laments not the unique marginalization of the Irish-language poet but instead the loss of agency all language users experience, regardless of their language choice. Generalizing the apparent risks a translated minor-language poet faces to all language users, Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem challenges Casanova’s methodology and calls for a more flexible method of reading minor-language texts.
“Ithaca—Reading as the Police” (published in The Book About Everything, 2022)
This invited book chapter is an excerpt of my book manuscript chapter on Ulysses, reframed for a popular audience. In it, I argue that the style of the “Ithaca” episode makes the novel’s readers resemble police. The episode is set up as a question-and-answer, and scholars have compared it to a catechism or the transcript of a police interview. I highlight its inventories of Bloom’s possessions—the contents of his kitchen cabinets, the locked drawers of his front room sideboard, and his bookshelves (down to the position of bookmarks)—and argue that the episode occasionally resembles an inventory created by a police search. By reading the episode and interpreting these inventories, readers of Ulysses come to resemble the police Bloom fears.