In his later years, the famed French philosopher Michel Foucault began to develop a

previously untouched system of thought, namely the history of the care of the self,
particularly in a series of lectures titled Subject and Truth, if not in his works on other
subjects. For Foucault, to understand the modern subject (and its notion of truth), one must
not only examine the Cartesian idea of know yourself heavily highlighted in Enlightenment
age, which is perceived to be the core of Western morality. Instead, he argues for a turn to the
underlying notion of care of self, which he believes many Greek philosophers, including
Socrates, took as central value. According to what Foucault quoted from Apology, Socrates
allegedly spent endless effort trying to persuade him (Athenians) to care less about his
property than about himself (7). Indeed, care of self is never a merely self-interested
code of conduct that may be associated with material pleasure and modern entertainment.
Deemed as the moment of the first awakening, it is described to be a principle of
restlessness and movement, of continuous concern throughout life (8). To be more precise,
this movement include an attitude towards the self, others, and the world, and thus a
social morality, an act of looking from the outside towards oneself, and a process that
changes, purifies, transforms, and transfigures oneself (10-11). Apparently, this philosophy
is fundamentally different from the idea of gaining truth through a simple act of knowledge,
an outward gesture if you will, but more in line with the focus of inner spirituality (15).
Speaking in a more pessimistic note, Foucault warns that the institutional accumulation of
bodies of knowledge may not be able to save the subject (19), as the subjects being is not
put in question (18) and thus untransformed.
Similarly, in a recent article published on The Atlantic, Choose Your Own
Enlightenment, a critique against modern Enlightenment is also raised. Described as only
personal, never political, the Enlightenment is claimed to be never automatically
democratic in the modern sense, but Intellectually always an elite business. As
knowledge and education becomes a valuable product (somehow fetishistic) in higher
education market nowadays, especially in the U.S. where elite colleges raise an impossible
threshold and pass their private knowledge (which they describe as universal value) to their
own class in order to further control the hierarchical system, both Foucaults warning (the
lack of education that questions the subjects being) as well as the article seem to ring true. In
fact, Foucaults use of the word accumulation does not sound that much different from the
logic of neo-liberalistic capitalism. The question, then, seems necessary to be phrased as such:
Can we begin to care less about the worldly knowledge and more about ourselves? Can we
choose, or even create, our own Enlightenment? How should we overthrow our inner bias
(and maybe later the structural social flaws) through self-education? And eventually, how
does that transformation in turn affects the world? Truth (and its necessary facilitating factor:
democracy) has yet to come.

Kun Xian Shen

R03122026
An Ethics for the Future: Care of Self and Social Movements
As he develops his theory of the care of self more in his series of lectures, the
French philosopher Michele Foucault begins to propose several principles of the
movement (a word that perhaps pertains to both social and physical meaning), in
order to elucidate this rule coextensive with life (247). To begin with, Foucault
makes it clear that it is a real movement of the subject which includes shift,
trajectory, effortandreturn (248) that formulates this philosophy. Compared to
Odyssey, the care of self apparently involves a sense of navigation and objective,
which will also requires knowledge to overcome the danger on the journey (248-249).
At the end of the journey, the self basically appeared as the aim (250), and this
self-finalization of the relationship to self and conversion to self (258) becomes the

site for the formation of a morality (258). Using Senecas letters and forewords of his
books as examples, Foucault demonstrates that the real focus of this journey is to
triumph over the vices (265). Not only has Seneca promoted people to hasten to
complete our lives and achieved its fullness, taking care of the estate close by
(262-263), he also differentiates necessary knowledge of what we should do from
the vanity of investigating what has been done like historians (264). Such kind of
practical knowledge (316) is indeed a preparation of the individual for the events
of life, and thus, for the future (320-321).
Reading Foucaults interpretation of the philosophical ideas of the ancient
Greeks, one cannot help but try to develop the principles into a more general and
universal application. Just as Foucault points out somewhat unnecessarily in the
middle of his lecture, this Greek art of self is of course associated with the direction
and government of oneself, and therefore the activity of government (249-250)
(note that the strict sense of government does not appear until the modern time),
which in turn involve a strategic field of power relations in their mobility,
transformability, and reversibility (252), very much in line with his previous works
on power.
This question of politics and the question of ethics (252) is not incomparable
to our contemporary issues. Take, for instance, the history of Japanese social
movements, as narrated by Takemasa Ando in his book Japan's New Left Movements:
Legacies for Civil Society. In his research, Ando roughly separates student movements
in the sixties into two modes: mode of self-liberation, and mode of self-reflection,
with the latter persisting after the movement and surviving as the self-revolution in
everydayness. Not that much different from Foucaults government of oneself,
young people in nowadays Japanese society tend to reflect more on their own mental
and physical well-being when they protest against the state, thus resulting in a more
relaxed and care-free atmosphere. In fact, if my observation serves right, this trend of
care of self has been prevalent throughout different social movements around the
world recently, including the Occupy Movement that sees American hipsters utilizing
their gadgets, the A little happiness () phenomenon in Taiwans Sun Flower
Movement, or even the blooming creativity of logo and product designs in Hong
Kongs Umbrella Movement. Apparently, there are negative sides to this
development, as old-fashioned socialists would view this as the vice of capitalism and
individualism. There is, however, also a democratic side as well. In the past, social
movements from the left wing politics focused more on the confrontation between the
unions (or, an even more broad term: civil society) and the capitalists (or the state),
generalizing both sides of the group as unified forces. Following Andos observations,
however, it is interesting to see how the old-school Marxist mode sort of failed, and a
new generation begins to take over and voice their opinions in their own unique ways.
Suppose this self-reflexive mode does share similarities with Foucaults idea of the
care of self, social movements would then be required to embrace countless goals,
since the goal of the care of self is self-finalization. As we all have different
views on morality (what we should do), the movements can become more
diversified and democratic. And maybe this is the only common goal we should be
working on.

Kun Xian Shen, R03122026

Mar 24th, 2015
Ashcroft, Bill; Griffiths, Gareth; Tiffin, Helen.
"Introduction," The Empire Writes Back.
The Scope of Post-colonial Studies:
---"Day-to day realities experienced by colonized people" "encoded" in writings and other arts. (1)
---"We use the term 'post-colonial', however, to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process
from the moment of colonization to the present day" (2), thus including oppressions of different class,
race, and sex, but not just defiance based on nationalism.
---"cross-cultural criticism" (2), not limited to traditional Western criticism like traditional Marxist
philosophy.
---"during and after the period of European imperial domination" (2). This is dubious as to the limit of
time of study. What about study on slave narratives before 19th Century? c.f. Transatlantic Studies
"The literature of the USA" (2) ---> Urban post-colonial (e.g. Zadie Smith's White Teeth)
"Postcolonial literature is often thought to present a conflict between tradition and modernity... As
it turns out, urban landscapes are key staging grounds for the terms, claims, and experiences of
postcoloniality." (Nadia Ellis)
A Short History of Post-colonial Literatures:
---"...beyond...regional characteristics is that they emerged in their present form out of the experience
of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by
emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre." (2)
---"peripheral" and "marginal" (3) ---> "incorporated" by mainstream, "mimicry of the centre"
How is this different from Homi Bhabha's "mimicry"?
---"Post-colonial literatures developed through several stages which can be seen to correspond to stages
both of national or regional consciousness and of the project of asserting difference from the imperial
centre." (4)
A tension between different stages: 1977

c.f. Noli me Tangere by Jos Rizal: class issue within the construct of nationalism
---"this distinction between English and english has been between the claims of a powerful 'centre' and
a multitude of intersecting usages designated as 'peripheries'" (8)
0. English Studies as Colonial Legacies:
---"language and literature have both been called into the service of a profound and embracing
nationalism" (2)
---"emergence of 'English'...also produced... colonial form of imperialism" (3) c.f. Terry Eagleton. "The
Rise of English," Literary Theory: An Introduction; From feminine to masculine
---"the study of English" and "growth of Empire" (3)

---"...the canonical nature and unquestioned status of the works of the English literary tradition and the
values they incorporated remained potent in the cultural formation and the ideological institutions of
education and literature." (4)
Ngugi's "On the abolition of the English department," "The Quest for Relevance"
c.f.

......
...

1. The Colonial Power

---"literate elite whose primary identification is with the colonizing power" (5)
"'representatives' of the imperial power" (5)
---"Such texts can never form the basis for an indigenous culture" (5)
2. The Colonized Natives
---"the literature produced under imperial license by 'natives' or 'outcasts'" (5)
"Language of the dominant culture" c.f. Child of All Nations by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
---"The development of independent literatures depended upon the abrogation of this constraining
power and the appropriation of language and writing for new and distinctive usages." (6)
3. Colonial Language: A Contested Site
---the need to "write back to a centre" (6)
---"Standard English" "dominate cultural production in much of the post-colonial world" (7) "cultural
hegemony"
---post-colonial literatures become "isolated national off-shoots of English literature" (7)
consider the position of Taiwanese or Asian American literature within the trans-Pacific structure, or
why Taiwanese should even study Asian American at all?
---"One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over language" (7)
"Language becomes the medium through which a hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated"
Shih Shu-Mei believes the medium in our time is visuality
4. Features and Strategies of Post-colonial Literatures
---"concern with place and displacement" (8) <---> space (in its modern sense)
"post-colonial crisis of identity," "self and place," "authenticity" (9), diaspora
"dialectic of place and displacement" (9)
Is there danger of essentialism? Also consider again.
"crisis in self-image" e.g. Fanon, W.E.B. Dubois' double consciousness
---"transform the language" (10) e.g. ; the alliance between postmodern fiction and post-colonial
fiction?
---"European theories themselves emerge from particular cultural traditions which are hidden by false
notions of 'the universal'" (11)
Problems of universalism and particularism within post-colonial theories. e.g. Gayatri Spivak's
critique of metropolitan post-colonial theorists; "Can the Subaltern Speak?"; Naoki Sakai, "Modernity
and Its Critique: The Problem of Universalism and Particularism"
---"imperial expansion has had a radically destabilizing effect on its own preoccupations and power,"
"turned upon itself" (11)
---"uncentred, pluralistic, and multifarious" (11)
"Marginality thus became an unprecedented source of creative energy" (11)
Tensions Unmentioned:
---Is there different possibilities of the historical mapping of "post-colonial literatures"? (e.g. Consider
again the already existing slave narratives)
---The post-colonial nation and the different intersectionalities within it: the failure of the state, the
legacy of colonialism, and global neo-liberalism.

"How can we explain the rise of the radical educated native who plays a pioneering role in opposing
the colonial regime despite the fact that the educated native derives many benefits under colonialism?"
(Pheng Cheah)
---Pros and cons of "mimicry"?
---The differences between "place" (regional) and "transnational" (diaspora)?
---Why are most of the "post-colonial fictions" in English published in American or British book
market?
India, if it is to speak to itself, will always need a lingua franca. But English, which re-enacts the
colonial relationship, placing certain Indians in a position the British once occupied, does more than
that. It has created a linguistic line as unbreachable as the color line once was in the United States.
(Aatish Taseer, How English Ruined Indian Literature, The New York Times)
In the Introduction chapter of the seminal work on post-colonial theories, The Empire Writes
Back, the authors briefly define the scope of post-colonial studies in the literary world, as well as give a
short account of the history and features of this somewhat ambiguous term. Most importantly, it offers
a possible strategy for both artists and theorists to deploy against the ever-growing imperial powers,
shedding light on the gloomy day-to day realities experienced by colonized people (1) perhaps even
today.
Characterized as all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of
colonization to the present day (2), the object of study for post-colonial studies apparently has both a
diachronic and synchronic scope concerning all kinds of experiences of being subjugated to power, not
excluding oppressions of different class, race, and sex. Despite the large scale, the authors point out
that one of the common features for post-colonial experiences is that they emerged in their present
form out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with
the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre
(2). Indeed, the central issue of post-colonial studies seems to be that of the rift between peripheral
(3) and center, and how this rift should be dealt with, politically or culturally.
Locating one of the sites where the rift most often takes place in language, the authors point
out that the emergence of English...also produced... colonial form of imperialism, while the study
of English goes hand in hand with the growth of Empire (3). In the beginning of most history of
colonies, the ideology (4) of English produced literate elite whose primary identification is with the
colonizing power, or at best, the literature produced under imperial license by natives or outcasts
(5). Apparently, under the rule of the language of the dominant culture, such texts can never form
the basis for an indigenous culture (5).
There is, however, always the need to write back to a centre (6), even if standard English
already dominate cultural production in much of the post-colonial world (7). In order to break
through this cultural hegemony, the variants of colonial language (7), or, the englishes without
capital E are utilized as weapons to assert the differences of the colonized people. Whats more, these
post-colonial works are highly concerned with place and displacement (8), as language is not the
only rift, but the relationship between the native people and their homeland is also one in crisis, as is
identity. Eventually, however, the effort to transform the language (10) may result in uncentred,
pluralistic, and multifarious (11) bloom of literary works that eventually seeks to overthrow the
hegemony and redefine the peripheral as a place that matters.
In spite of the vivid and comprehensive mapping of the development of post-colonial culture,
there are, of course, still tensions, if not ambivalences, within the paradigm unmentioned by the
authors. One of the most obvious problems here may lie in the extent to which this kind of assertion of
difference can bring. On one hand, the authors have great confidence in the proliferation of different
englishes, since it is the most efficient way to write back to the centre. On the other hand, however,
the authors also notice the danger of such mimicry of the centre (3), as it may well be incorporated
back into the hegemony and cast off as some minor cult sub-culture.
Indeed, even though the post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha once wrote candidly on the
deconstructing power of mimicry, the mockingly distorted mirror-images of the colonizers
themselves that seek to break the illusion of a unifying culture, it is still undeniable that such caricature
may strike back at the colonized people. In fact, in a recent editorial published by The New York Times,
entitled How English Ruined Indian Literature, the author Aatish Taseer mournfully recounts the loss
of a tradition of Indian literature (as great poet like Tagore used to write in Urdu), while reflecting on
his own privileged position as an English-using Indian writer in India. He writes, India, if it is to speak

to itself, will always need a lingua franca. But English, which re-enacts the colonial relationship,
placing certain Indians in a position the British once occupied, does more than that. It has created a
linguistic line as unbreachable as the color line once was in the United States.
We may pursue this even further and ask: why have not the proliferation and success of Indian
post-colonial fictions, with writers such as Samuel Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, created a similar
richness in literary world in the post-colonial India? Why are most of the post-colonial authors we
cherish today mostly publishing in American and British book market in English, instead of writing in
their own native languages (if there is any left) and communicate with their own people? Some may be
political refugees, of course, who are prosecuted by a neo-colonial government that continues the
authoritarian regimes of their colonial masters. Others, however, may only be exploiting a privileged
position.
The line between a powerful defiance and an (un)conscious conformity is hard to grasp, since
colonial power nowadays hides itself in much murkier ground, such as transnational capitalism, virtual
space like the Internet, or even in mediums other than languages. After 25 years since its publication,
the book The Empire Writes Back will now need an even more delicate structure to strike back.
Kun Xian Shen, R03122026
Apr 7th, 2015
Butler, Judith.
Subject of Sex/Gender/Desire, Gender Trouble
Women as the Subject of Feminism
---existing identity, understood through the category of women vs. The very subject of women is no
longer understood in stable or abiding terms (1)
---the duality of representation: operative term and normative function (1)
Foucaults juridical systems of power and the law, both represent and produce (2)
---the feminist subject turns out to be discursively constituted by the very political system that is
supposed to facilitate its emancipation, thus self-defeating (2).
Exclusionary, fictive (imagined as natural, nonhistorical, and universal), foundationalist
---women, even in the plural, has become a troublesome term, a site of contest (3) gender is not
always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender
intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted
identities (3)
---My suggestion is that the presumed universality and unity of the subject of feminism is effectively
undermined by the constraints of the representational discourse in which it functions, limits of
identity politics (4)
---critique of the categories of identity contest the very reifications of gender and identity (5)
representation will be shown to make sense for feminism only when the subject of women is
nowhere presumed (6)
The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire
---splitbetween sex and gender (6)
---gender is neither the causal result of sex nor as seemingly fixed as sex; culturally constructed
gendersbecomes a free-floating artifice (6)
---sex is as culturally constructed as gender; sex itself is a gendered category (7)
Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate
---Construction of gender: social (cultural) determinism vs. agency (7)
---Beauvoir: gender is constructed, there is agency, free will to choose, take on some other
gender (8). Critique of humanist feminist: pregendered substance called the person (10),
existential subject (11)
---The body: mere instrument vs. construction (8); Beauvoir maintains the mind/body dualism
(12) (Cartesian)
---The locus of intractability, whether in sex or gender or in the very meaning of construction,
provides a clue to what cultural possibilities can and cannot become mobilized through any further
analysis; The limits of the discursive analysis of gender are always set within the terms of a
hegemonic cultural discourse predicated on binary structures (9)

---Irigaray: Women are the sex which is not one, but multiple, unrepresentable (9), linguistic
absence, an entirely different economy of signification (10); On Irigarays reading, Beauvoirs
claim that woman is sex is reversed to mean that she is not the sex she is designated to be, but,
rather, the masculine sex encore (12)
---1. gender is a secondary characteristic of persons; 2. the very notion of the person is a
masculinist construction (11)
Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary, and Beyond
---Both are epistemological imperialism (11) with global reach and totalizing gestures vs. listing the
varieties of oppression
---variously positioned women articulate separate identities within the framework of an emergent
coalition (14); The very notion of dialogue is culturally specific and historically bound;
acknowledged fragmentation, provisional unities and a number of women,
antifoundationalist (15); an open coalition (16)
Kun Xian Shen, R03122026
Apr 28th, 2015
On Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
Nowlin, Michael. Edith Wharton's Higher Provincialism: French Ways for Americans and the Ends of
The Age of Innocence. Journal of American Studies Volume 38.Issue 01 (2004): 89-108. Print.
Higher Provincialism for a Rising Empire
---French Ways and Their Meaning and The Age of Innocence are in fact complementary cultural
nationalist texts. (90)1
Americas need for culture at the moment of Americas ascendency to a position of global power
and influence. (90)2
---Culture is the equivocal keyword linking both texts, affiliating Wharton with both the apologists
for an older America and with American modernists, and dividing her sympathies between the
provincial Newland Archer and such deracinated citizens of the world as Ellen Olenska, Ned Winsett,
and Monsieur de Riviere. (93-94)
---A kind of higher provincialism by which she (Wharton) also took the measure of a hazy
cosmopolitanism divorced from cultural tradition and social power. That higher provincialism, finally,
was in her view thoroughly compatible with embracing Americas imperial prospects, the necessary
attitude cultivated Americans must assume if they hoped to see their nation rank alongside the great
European empires of the past. (91)
American Traditional Provincialism + French Cosmopolitan Culture (also a national culture)
= Higher Provincialism
American Traditions and its Discontents
---Defenses of culturally vital provincial center coupled with denunciations of the vulgarizing,
standardizing tendencies in American life, were by the 1910s a familiar theme in American letters.
(98)
The fundamental problem shaping the discourse of American cultural nationalism, in its dominant
strands, was how to ensure the continuity of a Eurocentric civilization in the hands of a new people
whose cultural uniqueness might lie precisely in its contact with primitive tribes on native grounds, its
multi-ethnic urban cacophony, and its vulgar popular culture (98)
Whartons Ned Winsett speaks nationalistically and yet as one spiritually homeless within a nation
witnessing the decay of the Anglo-Saxon elite (95)

1
2

All bold and italics mine.

Wharton more boldly acknowledged the imperialist underpinnings of Americas need for cultural distinction:
We are a new people, a pioneer people, a people destined by fate to break up new continents and experiment in
new social conditions, she announces near the outset of French Ways and Their Meaning. America is now ripe
to take her share in the long inheritance of the races she descends from, she elaborates later, and it is a pity that
at this time the inclination of the immense majority of Americans is setting away from all real education and real
culture. (96)

---The Age of Innocence certainly spoke to modernist sensibilities (92): Attack traditions, institutions,
and provincialism in an ethnographic analysis.
Like the more radical advocates of a spiritually unifying American culture, Wharton speaks from the
post-provincial, cosmopolitan standpoint increasingly accessible to Americans as an effect of both the
centralizing tendencies in the nation since the end of the Civil War and, more recently, of the United
Statess emergence as an aggressive global power. (98)
---Winsett is himself starving for culture, and looking ultimately not to the denizens of Bohemia but to
a more established minority, represented by Newland Archer, to supply or create it. (99-100)
Class and ethnic strife (95): Is the cosmopolitan white elitists in New York seeking European
modernist aesthetics suitable for representing a new nation?
French Culture as both an Ethnographic and Cosmopolitan Surrogate
---For someone like Wharton, America had an imperial duty to enter it on the side of France and
England: at stake from both perspectives was Eurocentric civilization itself. (99)
suggesting the inextricability of higher notions of culture from evolutionary-ethnographic
conceptions of what we might call embedded or enculturated bodies, individual and collective. (95)
---Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy (1869) the shared body of humanistic ideals, institutions,
art objects, and critical and aesthetic practices that make for humankinds growth, through education,
toward spiritual perfection. (94)
A cultural relativist paradigm (94)
French Ways and their Meaning (1919): the old European tradition (89); a belief in the superiority
of European cultural institutions (90)
---Try as they would to disavow it, Americas young cultural nationalists and modernist rebels were
fundamentally dependent on notions of culture and criticism derived from Victorian England and most
fully realized, to Whartons mind, by the deeply traditionalist French. (94-95)
---The Old European tradition, in effect, is Ned Winsetts term for that spiritually elevating resource
that Arnold called culture, by which entitled Americans, tied to distinct local patches, may
imagine themselves citizens of someplace else, because they may imagine themselves as universal
people. Culture facilitates what Royce called the Higher Provincialism the capacity to be servants
and lovers of your own community and its ways, as well as citizens of the world, and not incidentally
an attitude conducive to assimilating to our own social order the strangers that are within our gates.
(100)
---Whartons French ways are an exemplary synthesis of the conservative virtues of reverence,
standards of taste, and continuity, on the one hand, and the progressive virtues of intellectual
honesty the capacity to see ones cultural condition as it really is and thus improve it and sexual
egalitarianism, on the other French ways, finally, are an exemplary synthesis of old New York
traditionalism and the more general American tendency toward irreverence and idol-breaking. (104)
---Whartons French make an ideal imperial race. For their claim on the universalist ideals of
aesthetic and intellectual culture culture in the sense that Arnold, with his eye on France, had in
mind has long proven compatible with the experience of longstanding racial customs and provincial
practices that have given the French a unique, national culture over time and made them model
caretakers of exotic, indigenous cultures worldwide. (105)
Leaping Forward to a New Century
---Ned Winsetts declamation has an anachronistic dimension to it, and brings to the scene of mid1870s New York a discourse about the nature of and prospects for a distinct American culture that
flourished in the 1910s, the formative decade of American modernism. (90)
Rip Van Wrinkle vs. the time leap: Anachronism
Newland is like a latter-day Rip in feeling like a relic from the past (92)
---The ending of the novel, I repeat, reveals this encounter to have borne fruit, which suggests the
cross-fertilisation that helps transform old New York into the emerging metropolitan center of the
Western world owes as much to the impact uprooted Anglo-Saxons have had on the self-reflexive
but rooted Anglo-Saxon subject as to the new blood and new money wrung from outsiders. (100)

---In The Age of Innocence, the transplanted harbingers of the modern Ellen Olenska, Ned Winsett,
and Monsieur Riviere provoke in Newland a self-consciousness about his provinciality that leaves
him forever discontented. At the same time, deliberately or otherwise, they awaken him to the
liberating imperatives of the old European tradition, which at once undergirds the cohesion and
homogeneity of the tribe, justifies its perpetuation, and, most importantly, sanctions the
transgressions against itself essential to social evolution. (100)
Newlands growth from tribal speciman to modern citizen initially comes at the diminution of his
culture. (100)
And yet it is precisely the presence of such a self-conscious cultural subject capable of regarding his
culture as archaic, arbitrary, or strange as historical and relational, in effect that signals his
provinces capacity to shape and even lead a responsible, enlightened, imperial nation. (101)
Newlandembodying in the process of remembering an evolutionary bridge between past and
present, or, in the figurative terms of both the novel and the memoirs, between pre-historic old New
York and modern America. (106)
He has been instrumental in shaping the new nation. (106)
There was good in the old ways and [t]here was good in the new order too. (107)
Having had his dreams of erotic bliss and cosmopolitan freedom thwarted, but not extinguished, by a
powerful but dying tribe, Newland finds consolation in philosophy, as well as in a higher provincialism
that promotes both a more liberal bearing toward his children and the future, and a dedication to
turning the rapidly changing province he remains so embedded in into a new cosmopolitan center of
the civilized world. (106)

Kun Xian Shen, R03122026

Apr 28th, 2015
On Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
MacMaster, Anne. "Wharton, Race, and The Age of Innocence: Three Historical Contexts." A Forward
Glance: New Essays on Edith Wharton. Ed. Clare Colquitt, Susan Goodman, and Candace Waid.
Newark: U of Delaware, 1999. Print.
The Minority Races in The Age of Innocence and their Functions
---The central crux of American identity (188)
---Exposing American dilemmas: the history of slavery in the land of the free, the fear of the foreign
in a nation of immigrants, the drive toward conformity behind the creed of individualism (188)
racial difference
---Toni Morrisons Playing in the Dark: Africanist presence: rather than presenting the views of
African-Americans, such characters enable white writers to think about themselves (188)
Both reveal and make use of the ethnic problems in United States at the turn of the Century
Three Historical Moments
---The other New Yorks beyond Whartons narrow strip: Waves of immigrants from abroad and
Blacks from the South in 1870s. (189)
---Increase of immigration from Southern Europe who are imagined as yellow but not white, and a
growing anti-immigrant sentiment among white native-born Americans in 1890s. (189)
The Age of Innocence both condemns and mourns the loss of a vanished social order (190)
---WWI and the aftermath of race riots: Wharton must have known ethnic problems when she was
writing The Age of Innocence.
c.f. Native Son by Richard Wright
Whartons novel captures the inseparability for Americans of the social changes brought about by the
Great War which led to the stirrings of a civil rights movement (191) by addressing her (Wharton)
classs anxieties about race
Skin Color as Racial Marker
---Ellen Olenskas status as the novels dark heroine (191) vs. May Welland the fair heroine
May remains the fair heroine and Ellen the dark, each according to her respective devotion to or
defiance of convention, and Wharton emphasizes this polarity through the heroines contrasting
colorings. (191-192)
---In this connection between Ellen and Catherine, that the Africanist presence enters the novel (192)
Ellen and Catherine, the only two unconventional women in this society, are the only New Yorkers
who eagerly employ dark-skinned servants. (192)
Aligns darkness (or color) with resistance to conformity, with passion, courage, and vitality (192)
Morrison: the strategic use of black characters to define the goals and enhance the qualities of white
characters

---Darkness also reveals the desires and fears of the major male characters. (192)
Ellen is more desirable, while May symbolizes only legitimate marriage
Ellens darkness aligns her with Nastasia and a series of dark-skinned and colorfully dressed
women who seem to constitute, from the perspective of masculine New York, a fantasy of
extramarital sex. (193)
the mystique of the Orient of Ellens drawing room (194)
Newland endows Ellen with the exotic qualities of a Westerners fantasy of Oriental woman (194)
---the Africanist character as surrogate (194)
Again and again in scenes of subtle replacement, Newland encounters a dark servant at times and in
places where he expects to find Ellen (194)
---The Africanist presence in The Age of Innocence, by serving as a marker of both white male
privilege and white female defiance, seems to express two meanings that might cancel each other out.
(196)
Morrison: Images of blackness can be evil and protective, rebellious and forgiving, fearful and
desirable---all of the self-contradictory features of the self (196)
Whiteness as a Non-ethnicity that Absorbs Others
---Whiteness is drained of meanings; images of ice, snow, shrouds, and a living death. (196)
e.g. Van der Luydens, Mays sexual purity, innocence, and blindness
---Mrs. Strutherss entry into New York society represents the beginning of a real but relatively small
demographic change (198)
Wharton figures Mrs. Strutherss enter into Society as the conversion of a darker element into a lighter
one
In Whartons trope for the move from the age of innocence to the definition of whiteness,
revitalizes an aged and dying race by being absorbed into it and thereby disappearing itself (198)
Similar to how Michael Nowlin describes the Americans adoption of Frances cosmopolitan but
ethnographic culture: A higher provincialism
---an assimilationist analysis of what would and should happen to people of color in the United States.
Whartons image of something dark transmuted into something light stands thus poised at an
ideological shift that would ultimately lead to assimilationist racism (199)
Everything objectionable to Society in the Jew Beaufort and his mistress Fanny Ring is dissociated
from their daughter who, like a second-generation immigrant, assimilates into the tribe by leaving
her parents identities behind. (199)
A Multi-cultural America?
---Much in the novel works against both essentialist and assimilationist concepts of race (200)
Wharton repeatedly subverts the international theme to question American claims to freedom,
individualism, and originality
Their (whiteness) sameness, given the novels color coding, takes on ethnic/racial significance (200)
the paradox that everyone looks alike in a land of immigrants (200)
e.g. In Boston: M. Rivieres face vs. American faces

Kun Xian Shen, R03122026

Apr 28th, 2015
Edith Whartons Nationalism and its Discontent: The Age of Innocence as an American National Novel
As the characteristics of modern nationalism centers on masculinity and ethnocentrism, it seems
unlikely to picture the American female novelist Edith Wharton alongside with the idea of Empire,
colonialism, or cultural essentialist; indeed, most of the scholars choose to focus on her feminist
position and her social realist critique of a non-modern society. There is, however, apparent nationalist
spirits within her writings, as some research (which I will show below) have begun to point out, as well
as a strong desire to borrow foreign ideas and aesthetics to further improves her native country, which
can be easily disguised as cosmopolitanism. Through novels that emphasizes on the struggles of
national elites and their encounter with modern world, Wharton successfully represent the rising
American empire as a young and promising force that is ready to inherit legacies that were not
previously considered American.
Not surprisingly, Wharton has already shown her tendency of American nationalism not only in
her novels, but also in her social engagement and reputation. As The New Yorker uncovers a not so
well-known and indirect literary feud between Virginia Woolf and Wharton herself, it seems that
Wharton, a self-proclaimed cosmopolitan, is highly unpleasant about Woolfs accusation that their
praises were qualified because they were not Americans.3 Apparently referring to Whartons
fascination with European aesthetics and culture, Woolf retorts that They do not give us anything we
have not got already, expecting the Americans to write more about their own national culture, much
like Walt Whitmen. The critic Gerald Bullett even upgrades this nationalistic comparison to that of an
aesthetic one, calling Woolf a brilliant experimentalist, while Wharton was content to practice the
craft of fiction without attempting to enlarge its technical scope.4 Of course, Wharton will not be
happy to be criticized as an American who imitates European modernism and fails; she deals with this,
however, not by exclaiming that modernism is an universal aesthetics, nor proving herself as a
cosmopolitan with hybrid cultural background. Instead, she prides herself on educating young
American writers, improving American aesthetics, and, of course, winning the Pulitzer prize. In fact,
the judges of the Pulitzer prize in 1921 actually praises The Age of Innocence for revealing the
wholesome atmosphere of American life and the highest standard of American manners and
manhood.5 This apparent cultural dilemma between the need to build up a national culture and the
fascination of a European one is clearly the symptom of a rising American empire.
Further defining this complex as Whartons quest for a higher provincialism for United States,
scholar Michael Nowlin points out that Whartons French Ways and Their Meaning and The Age of
Innocence are in fact complementary cultural nationalist texts (90).6 For Nowlin, Whartons
dividing her sympathies between the provincial Newland Archer and such deracinated citizens of the
world as Ellen Olenska, Ned Winsett, and Monsieur de Riviere (93-94) seems to be the symptom of
her embracing Americas imperial prospects (91). Although The Age of Innocence certainly spoke to

3 Colapinto, John. "Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and a Case of Anxiety of Influence." The New Yorker. The
New Yorker, 19 Sept. 2014. Web. 27 Apr. 2015.
4 Ibid.

5 McCrum, Robert. "The 100 Best Novels: No 45 - The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920)." The
Guardian. Guardian News and Media Limited, 28 July 2014. Web. 27 Apr. 2015.
6 Nowlin, Michael. Edith Wharton's Higher Provincialism: French Ways for Americans and the Ends of The Age
of Innocence. Journal of American Studies Volume 38.Issue 01 (2004): 89-108. Print.

modernist sensibilities (92) with its attack on old New Yorks traditions, institutions, and
provincialism in an ethnographic analysis, as seen through the character Ned Winsett, who is himself
starving for culture(99), Americas young cultural nationalists and modernist rebels were
fundamentally dependent on notions of culture and criticism derived from Victorian England and most
fully realized, to Whartons mind, by the deeply traditionalist French (94-95). That is to say,
Whartons French ways are an exemplary synthesis of the conservative virtues of reverence,
standards of taste, and continuity, on the one hand, and the progressive virtues of intellectual
honesty the capacity to see ones cultural condition as it really is and thus improve it (104) on the
other. The modern French culture for Wharton can be both radical and conservative at the same time. In
fact, Whartons French make an ideal imperial race (105). In the end, the once provincial Newland
becomes a bridge between old and new Americans, who are awakened to the liberating imperatives
of the old European tradition, which at once undergirds the cohesion and homogeneity of the tribe,
justifies its perpetuation, and, most importantly, sanctions the transgressions against itself essential to
social evolution (100). This leap from traditions to modernity is not only based on temporal
dimension, but also on a structural reformation of national culture which borrows greatly from the
simultaneously ethnographic and universal French culture.
Looking back at this latent nationalist spirit within a seemingly cosmopolitan work, one might begin to
question the adequacy of any universal culturist claim, if not an unifying nationalist agenda that seeks
to represent different ethnic cultures within a diverse nation. To begin with, we can start by asking: Is
the cosmopolitan white elitists in New York seeking European modernist aesthetics suitable for
representing a new nation? Indeed, judging from the current cultural capital status of New York, and
the influences United States have achieved through globalization, one can safely defend Whartons
pursuit of the seemingly better or more advanced aesthetic and taste of France at the time of
Americans cultural infancy. Through post-colonial studies and similar disciplines, however, we can
also criticize Whartons neglect of minority cultures at the time, which is by no means inferior in
taste or complexity than European culture. The cosmopolitanism necessary for Whartons nationalism
does not seem to include lower class and ethnic minorities, despite the inclusion of females. Whats
more, along with this thinking, it is also worth tracing the REAL beneficiaries of such kind of
nationalism: can a black man living in suburban area, who might not have a decent education and is
therefore illiterate, really understand Whartons use of intricate European arts and their introduction to
American lifestyles? Or is that legacy only a small fraction of United States, which is, ironically, what
Wharton is trying to ironize in The Age of Innocence? Last but not least, despite some scholars effort
to tackle this apparent paradox, including Nancy Bentley and the aforementioned Michael Nowlin,
there is still a lack in a truly transnational criticism, if not theory, that can be used to amend the flaws
of this novel. Originally speaking, the so-called transnational aspect in the novel is limited to the
interaction between white Europe and America; however, is it possible to locate a more valid
transnationalism within any of the character in the book? Is Ellen Olenska a revolutionary figure who
eventually chooses to travel around the world, perhaps out of Europe, without any man on her side, but
is not given enough details by Wharton? And, eventually, after given so much credit as being a national
literary canon, should we still value the book as it is, or should we begin to take on a wholly different
view toward it? Will the nationalist spirit in the book keeps on passing on a white privileged
perspective to future generations, or will we be able to learn from it the facts that are not included as
well? These are the questions we should always bear in mind, both as a cosmopolitan, and a global
citizen who is always already under the influence of American nationalism.