“Daffodil Gap”: Reading Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy as Intertextual Interrogation of the Postcolonial Condition

Sungran Cho

doi:10.21049/ccs.2010.21..289

In Jamaica Kincaid's novel Lucy, the narrator grows up with the burden of colonial legacies embedded with Englands' imperial disciplinary projects, its language, educational institutions, discourses. Colonial education interpellates the narrator into a colonial subject through its multiple ideological discourses and systems. Teaching the literature of England is the most insidious form of the Empire's disciplinary colonial projects, more powerful than military enforcement: Its mode of operation is creating phantasy and instigating and planting desire for such phantasy. As Homi Bhabha aptly theorizes as colonial mimicry and ambivalence, the narrator as colonial subject grows up split and confused as an ambivalent subject, simultaneously mimicking and desiring for the phantasized England as real, while resisting and criticizing such up-bringing and mimetic desire. This paper explores Kincaid's rhetorical strategy of employing Wordsworth's poem, "I Wandered as a Lonely Cloud," especially her use of the flower "daffodil." Employing the concept of "daffodil gap" suggested by postcolonial critics, this paper closely examines two episodes involving the flower daffodil in the novel, one in a colonial classroom and the other in a garden in a new world and suggests that Kincaid accomplishes intertextual critique of colonial education and imperial projects.

Citation status

KCI Citation Counts (1)
열림/닫힘 버튼
REFERENCES (13)
열림/닫힘 버튼
* 2021년 이후 발행 논문의 참고문헌은 현재 구축 중입니다.

[book] Ashcroft, Bill / 1989 / The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures / Routledge

[journal] Bonetti, Kay / 1992 / An Interview With Jamaica Kincaid / The Missouri Review 15(2) : 125~142

[journal] Donnell, Alison / 1992 / Dreaming of Daffodils: Cultural Resistance in the Narratives of Theory / Kunapipi 14(2) : 45~52

[book] Eagleton, Terry / 1976 / Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory / NLB

[book] Goodison, Lorna / 1990 / How I Became a Writer, in : Caribbean Women Writers / Calaloux Publications

[book] Kincaid, Jamaica / 1990 / Lucy / Farrar,Strous,Giroux

[journal] Kincaid, Jamaica / On Seeing England for the First Time / Transition 51 : 32~40

[book] Lacan, Jacques / 1955 / The Seminar. Book III / The Psychoses

[book] Mangan, J. A. / 1993 / The Imperial Curriculum: Racial Images and Education in the British Colonial Experience / Routledge

[book] Seidel, Michael / 1986 / Exile and Narrative Imagination / Yale UP

[journal] Smith, Ian / 2002 / Misusing Canonical Intertexts / Callaloo 25(3) : 801~820

[journal] Tiffin, Helen / 1993 / Cold Hearts and (Foreign) Tongues: Recitation and the Reclamation of the Female Body in the Works of Erna Brodber and Jamaica Kincaid / Callaloo 16(3) : 909~921

[book] Wordsworth, William / 1991 / The Poems. Vol 1 / Yale UP

KJC Korea
Journal Central

Statistics

Tools

Sharing

Issue List

Citation status