Modernity in translation: Figures of empire in the works of Mary Shelley, Samuel Beckett, and Assia Djebar

This dissertation examines how the novels of Mary Shelley, Samuel Beckett, and Assia Djebar explore the complicity of Enlightenment humanism and imperialism in different models of modernity. The paradox of Enlightenment humanism was that, in positing a universal, human subject as the agent of history, it provided an alibi for imperial expansion as an engine of modernization, progress, and civilization. Yet, as Michel Foucault and others have argued, to challenge the racial, cultural, and sexual assumptions that underlie the exemplary humanistic subject is to inherit the Enlightenment philosophical legacy of an unrelenting critique of its own presuppositions. In embracing this legacy of critique, the novels examined in this dissertation open the way to the thought of ethico-political agencies that call into question the universality of the classical subject of Enlightenment humanism and monolithic notions of modernity that may subtend the most progressive universalisms. In doing so, these novels suggest an ethics and politics of translation. While imperialism is monolingual in the sense that it asserts its own idea of civilization at the expense of other cultures, an ethics of translation attends to the singularity and heterogeneity of cultural idioms. The issue of dialect in the language politics of the Irish Revival or in the African-American dialect poetry translated by Beckett for Nancy Cunard's Negro anthology, the representation of the language of the cultural Other as babble in Shelley's The Last Man and Beckett's bilingual trilogy, and Djebar's attempts to capture the multilingual texture of Algerian culture through French, the language of the former colonial power, are all instances that invite consideration of the responsibility associated with translation. This is not to lapse into cultural relativism, but to take seriously the Enlightenment injunction to welcome every situation as an opportunity to create and test new norms of ethical and political responsibility.