Kate McLoughlin
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748647316
- eISBN:
- 9780748684380
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748647316.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
In ‘Prufrock, Party-Goer: Tongue-Tied at Tea’, Kate McLoughlin investigates social performance in the context of JÜ;rgen Habermas’s theories of communicative action. The putative tea-party in T. S. ...
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In ‘Prufrock, Party-Goer: Tongue-Tied at Tea’, Kate McLoughlin investigates social performance in the context of JÜ;rgen Habermas’s theories of communicative action. The putative tea-party in T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (written 1910-11) is, in Habermasian terms, a less than ideal public sphere; Prufrock and his interlocutors lack the necessary ‘communicative competence’ with which to reach common understanding. Disclosing the affinities between Habermas’s ideas and the philosophies of Josiah Royce and F. H. Bradley (studied by Eliot at Harvard), the chapter explores why Eliot chose to locate communicative failure in an occasion so apparently benign as a tea-party. The party becomes ‘an alien ritual, possible formally to describe but not to enter into […] unsusceptible both to external explanation and to internal communication’.Less
In ‘Prufrock, Party-Goer: Tongue-Tied at Tea’, Kate McLoughlin investigates social performance in the context of JÜ;rgen Habermas’s theories of communicative action. The putative tea-party in T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (written 1910-11) is, in Habermasian terms, a less than ideal public sphere; Prufrock and his interlocutors lack the necessary ‘communicative competence’ with which to reach common understanding. Disclosing the affinities between Habermas’s ideas and the philosophies of Josiah Royce and F. H. Bradley (studied by Eliot at Harvard), the chapter explores why Eliot chose to locate communicative failure in an occasion so apparently benign as a tea-party. The party becomes ‘an alien ritual, possible formally to describe but not to enter into […] unsusceptible both to external explanation and to internal communication’.
Susan Jones
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748647316
- eISBN:
- 9780748684380
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748647316.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
In ‘“The dinner was indeed quiet”: Domestic Parties in the Work of Joseph Conrad’, Susan Jones offers a reading which relates the gender and post-colonial politics of parties in three texts written ...
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In ‘“The dinner was indeed quiet”: Domestic Parties in the Work of Joseph Conrad’, Susan Jones offers a reading which relates the gender and post-colonial politics of parties in three texts written in Conrad’s mid to late career – Under Western Eyes (1911), Chance (1913) and ‘The Planter of Malata’ (1914) – to the formal and thematic implications of their serial publication. In these works, tea-parties and dinner-parties explore the potentialities and limitations of women’s roles, and their stereotypical representations, in early twentieth-century societies (revolutionary Russia, Suffragist Britain and colonial Australasia) and act as narrative devices ironising the context of the texts’ first appearance as serialised romances. As Jones illustrates, in Under Western Eyes and Chance Conrad suggests that ‘a woman’s limited power might most successfully lie in the role of party convenor’ but this image of the hostess is overlaid with ‘considerable scepticism’. In ‘The Planter of Malata’, Conrad exploits the dinner-party as a means to ‘aestheticise the very disintegration of individual and social identities that prefigures the collapse of the colonial project itself’.Less
In ‘“The dinner was indeed quiet”: Domestic Parties in the Work of Joseph Conrad’, Susan Jones offers a reading which relates the gender and post-colonial politics of parties in three texts written in Conrad’s mid to late career – Under Western Eyes (1911), Chance (1913) and ‘The Planter of Malata’ (1914) – to the formal and thematic implications of their serial publication. In these works, tea-parties and dinner-parties explore the potentialities and limitations of women’s roles, and their stereotypical representations, in early twentieth-century societies (revolutionary Russia, Suffragist Britain and colonial Australasia) and act as narrative devices ironising the context of the texts’ first appearance as serialised romances. As Jones illustrates, in Under Western Eyes and Chance Conrad suggests that ‘a woman’s limited power might most successfully lie in the role of party convenor’ but this image of the hostess is overlaid with ‘considerable scepticism’. In ‘The Planter of Malata’, Conrad exploits the dinner-party as a means to ‘aestheticise the very disintegration of individual and social identities that prefigures the collapse of the colonial project itself’.
