Late Imperial Romance

Rating:
Summary: A significant and very readable redirection of po-co studies
Review: McClure's "Late Imperial Romance" treats a crisis in western fiction that begins at the end of the nineteenth century. In the wake of decades of non-stop empire-building and the attendant mapping of the world, all the unknown and uncharted nooks and crannies of the earth--the very zones of mystery that had, for years, powered the efforts of English novelists--have ultimately disappeared, victims of a secularizing process that Max Weber refers to as "rationalization." Late imperial romance, McClure argues, attempts to cope with this crisis in two ways, by either "engineering a re-enchantment" or an unmapping of the known world, or unearthing newer sites of the unknown (as in the borderless geopolitical networks of espionage).

McClure first covers writers like Kipling and Conrad, who articulate the pivotal transitional moment in this crisis, before he moves on to revealing and convincing readings of Kennedy's speeches and the fiction of Didion, Pynchon, and DeLillo. All the way, the author's prose has a casual elegance and almost conversational readability, yet without sacrificing a bit of scholarly rigor. McClure's treatments of the writers he examines are provocative and incisive, but the overall approach is perhaps even more significant.

Against the sort of ardently secularized criticism of imperialism and the post-imperial practiced by luminaries like Edward Said (and perhaps even Gayatri Spivak), McClure demonstrates that a re-evaluation of spiritual matters and their place in the discourse of late colonial post-colonial fiction can be strikingly revelatory, perhaps even more progressive. Secular critics like Said (and, as McClure also mentions, Fredric Jameson) betray the causes of inclusiveness that they purport to support when they single-mindedly dismiss all things non-secular from their recommended vision of the world. McClure clears space, in "Late Imperial Romance," for a real inclusiveness, one capacious enough to defend "the value of texts . . . that refuse to rehearse the funeral of the spirit."

Rating:
Summary: A significant and very readable redirection of po-co studies
Review: McClure's "Late Imperial Romance" treats a crisis in western fiction that begins at the end of the nineteenth century. In the wake of decades of non-stop empire-building and the attendant mapping of the world, all the unknown and uncharted nooks and crannies of the earth--the very zones of mystery that had, for years, powered the efforts of English novelists--have ultimately disappeared, victims of a secularizing process that Max Weber refers to as "rationalization." Late imperial romance, McClure argues, attempts to cope with this crisis in two ways, by either "engineering a re-enchantment" or an unmapping of the known world, or unearthing newer sites of the unknown (as in the borderless geopolitical networks of espionage).

McClure first covers writers like Kipling and Conrad, who articulate the pivotal transitional moment in this crisis, before he moves on to revealing and convincing readings of Kennedy's speeches and the fiction of Didion, Pynchon, and DeLillo. All the way, the author's prose has a casual elegance and almost conversational readability, yet without sacrificing a bit of scholarly rigor. McClure's treatments of the writers he examines are provocative and incisive, but the overall approach is perhaps even more significant.

Against the sort of ardently secularized criticism of imperialism and the post-imperial practiced by luminaries like Edward Said (and perhaps even Gayatri Spivak), McClure demonstrates that a re-evaluation of spiritual matters and their place in the discourse of late colonial post-colonial fiction can be strikingly revelatory, perhaps even more progressive. Secular critics like Said (and, as McClure also mentions, Fredric Jameson) betray the causes of inclusiveness that they purport to support when they single-mindedly dismiss all things non-secular from their recommended vision of the world. McClure clears space, in "Late Imperial Romance," for a real inclusiveness, one capacious enough to defend "the value of texts . . . that refuse to rehearse the funeral of the spirit."