文章基本信息

标题：From Alignment to Commitment: The Early Work of James Kelman
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作者：Terence Patrick Murphy
期刊名称：Cultural Logic : an Electronic Journal of Marxist Theory and Practice
电子版ISSN：1097-3087
出版年度：2007
出版社：Department of English and Foreign Languages
摘要：In Marxism and Literature (1977), Raymond Williams argues that writing is in an important sense always aligned. This sense of alignment, however, may be distinguished from a sense of chosen commitment,which is “conscious, active, and open.” Through a close analysis of the early work of the Scottish working-class writer James Kelman, this essay examines how an ideologically committed writer learned to refashion the dominant forms of novelistic discourse for his own political purposes. For Kelman, commitment in writing involves the recognition of the “distinction between dialogue and narrative as a summation of the political system.” This distinction was “simply another method of exclusion, of marginalizing and disenfranchising different peoples, cultures and communities,” Political commitment thus required Kelman to break successfully with the tradition of “‘working class authors’ who allowed ‘the voice’ of higher authority to control narrative, the place where the psychological drama occurred.”