In 1910, Eleanor Hammond remarked that the relationship in medieval culture between poetry and

the decorative arts-and especially between tapestry and poetry-awaited a full historical
examination. Nearly a century later, we're still waiting.

In the case of tapestry's ties to verse, we might expect that etymology alone would have been a
spur to investigation, given the common Latin roots (in textus and textura) for the vernacular terms
for the making of stories and the making of cloth.

Or that mythology, with its legend of Philomela, her tongue having been cut out, told her story
through the medium of weaving, would have incited inquiry, especially given the story's popularity
throughout medieval Europe. Or, more compellingly, that the empirical evidence itself would have
urged analysis.

For although medieval tapestries have not survived in great numbers, not surprisingly given the
essential fragility of textiles, enough did (and enough others are mentioned in accounts and
records) to allow us to consider their implications as a specific kind of representational medium.
Textile historians have, of course, written extensively about medieval tapestries, but not from the
angle of their links to the narrative arts.

Yet what is immediately apparent about many medieval tapestries is how often they reveal a
propensity not only for using decorated cloth to present narratives but also, and more strikingly,
for treating writing as a component of the pictorial display. Words were woven into tapestries (or
painted onto cloth) to provide a commentary on the images; words were also woven around
tapestries as oral accompaniment to the visual display, as occurred in courtly and civic ceremonies.
(Claire Sponsler – “Text and Textile: Lydgate’s Tapestry Poems” in Medieval Fabrications:
Dress, Textiles, Clothwork and Other Cultural Imaginings)

În primii ani ai veacului al XIII-lea apare deodată la celălalt capăt al Eurasiei, pornind din stepele
Mongoliei, o formidabilă putere, neprevăzută şi nemaiîntâlnită în violenţa ei, cea a călăreţilor
mongoli ai lui Genghis-Han. Trebuie să ne oprim o clipă asupra fenomenului mongol, nu numai

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fiindcă e un moment crucial din istoria universală, ci şi fiindcă a avut la noi — la mii şi mii de
kilometri depărtare — urmări de o importanţă capitală.

Uriaşa armată a lui Genghis-Han, admirabil organizată, încadrată de călăreţii tribului său mongol,
dar cuprinzând cu timpul multe alte seminţii de rasă mongolă sau turcă, se urneşte în 1206 şi
cucereşte mai întâi tot nordul Chinei. Mongolii vor porni apoi către Apus, vor nimici mai târziu
mai multe ţări asiatice, între care regatul persan, punctând de fiecare dată înaintarea lor cu măceluri
de masă de o nemaipomenită cruzime — piramide de sute de mii de capete după cucerirea fiecărui
mare centru.

Faima lor şi spaima se răspândesc ca un pârjol în lumea întreagă. Marele Han moare în 1227 şi
împărăţia se împarte între fiii lui, dintre care unul e ales „Mare Han"; dar, chiar înainte, o armada
cum nu mai cunoscuse pământul pornise prin Siberia spre Europa, sub comanda unui nepot al lui
Genghis-Han, Batu-Han. La nord de Marea de Azov, pe Kalka, o coaliţie a cumanilor albi cu ruşii
marelui cneaz de la Kiev, împăcaţi cu acest prilej, suferă, în 1223, o cumplită înfrângere.

(Neagu Djuvara – O scurtă istorie a românilor povestită celor tineri)

Alexander Hamilton claimed Nevis in the British West Indies as his birthplace, although no
surviving records substantiate this. Today, the tiny island seems little more than a colorful speck
in the Caribbean, an exotic tourist hideaway. One million years ago, the land that is now Nevis
Peak thrust up from the seafloor to form the island, and the extinct volcanic cone still intercepts
the trade winds at an altitude of 3,200 feet, its jagged peak often obscured behind a thick swirl of
clouds.

This omnipresent mountain, looming over jungles, plunging gorges, and verdant foothills that
sweep down to sandy beaches, made the island a natural fortress for the British. It abounded in
both natural wonders and horrors: in 1690, the first capital, Jamestown, was swallowed whole by
the sea during an earthquake and tidal wave.

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To modern eyes, Nevis may seem like a sleepy backwater to which Hamilton was confined before
his momentous escape to St. Croix and North America. But if we adjust our vision to eighteenth-
century realities, we see that this West Indian setting was far from marginal, the crossroads of a
bitter maritime rivalry among European powers vying for mastery of the lucrative sugar trade.

A small revolution in consumer tastes had turned the Caribbean into prized acreage for growing
sugarcane to sweeten the coffee, tea, and cocoa imbibed in fashionable European capitals. As a
result, the small, scattered islands generated more wealth for Britain than all of her North American
colonies combined. “The West Indians vastly outweigh us of the northern colonies,” Benjamin
Franklin grumbled in the 1760s.

After the French and Indian War, the British vacillated about whether to swap all of Canada for
the island of Guadeloupe; in the event the French toasted their own diplomatic cunning in retaining
the sugar island. The sudden popularity of sugar, dubbed “white gold,” engendered a brutal world
of overnight fortunes in which slavery proved indispensable. Since indigenous Caribbeans and
Europeans balked at toiling in the sweltering canebrakes, thousands of blacks were shipped from
slave-trading forts in West Africa to cultivate Nevis and the neighboring islands.
(Ron Chernow – Alexander Hamilton)

Ajungem astfel la cumpăna veacurilor XIII şi XIV, momentul crucial al apariţiei, între Carpaţi şi
Dunăre, a primului stat român organizat, Ţara Românească. Oricât ar părea de ciudat,
circumstanţele acestui mare eveniment au rămas destul de obscure pentru a stârni, până azi, aprigi
controverse între istorici: fost-a oare, cum vrea tradiţia, o „descălecătoare" a legendarului Negru
Vodă din Ţara Făgăraşului? Sau unirea voievodatelor şi cnezatelor de la sud de Carpaţi să fi fost
un fenomen exclusiv local? Şi cine a fost Basarab, Basarab întemeietorul, Mare Voievod?

Am spus, când am vorbit despre invazia mongolă, că această adevărată avalanşă care a zdruncinat
din temelii sau dărâmat aproape toate formaţiunile politice din Europa centrală şi orientală a
reprezentat, în schimb, un moment favorabil pentru cnezatele şi voievodatele apărute în regiunea
Munteniei ca să se elibereze oarecum de presiunea regatului ungar şi să realizeze o primă unitate

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politică a tuturor celor care vorbeau limba română între Carpaţi şi Dunăre. Aceasta se petrece în
jurul anului 1300.

Tradiţia, consemnată de cronici târzii (din veacurile XVI şi XVII), vorbeşte de anul 1290.
Majoritatea istoricilor contemporani au avut tendinţa de a alege o dată mai târzie, după 1300; ba o
întreagă şcoală istorică, încă majoritară chiar, pretinde că tradiţia descălecatului, cu Negru Vodă
coborând din Ţara Făgăraşului, ar fi o pură invenţie din secolul XVII, fără temei real.
(Neagu Djuvara – O scurtă istorie a românilor povestită celor tineri)

The reign of King Henry III (1216–1272) was as long as it was eventful, and remains controversial
today. With hindsight, it is possible to say that the most important date in the reign occurred well
before the king’s birth and more than a decade before his accession. This date was 24 June 1204
and it was when Rouen surrendered and with it the duchy of Normandy, to Philip II ‘Augustus’ of
France.

War with France had been provoked by the precipitate marriage of King John to Henry’s mother,
Isabella of Angoulême, on 24 August 1200, and John proved unable to recover his patrimony. The
devastating defeat of his allies at the battle of Bouvines on 27 July 1214 confirmed the loss of
Normandy and threatened the rest of the Plantagenet inheritance; upon this, everything else in the
reign of Henry III would turn.

This may not, however, have been obvious to Henry when his father unexpectedly died at Newark
during the night of 27–28 October 1216. At the time, King John was confronted by widespread
revolt among his own English subjects, as well as the presence of a French army that was solidly
entrenched on English soil.

As heir to the throne, John left a 9- year- old son. The fate of the Plantagenet dynasty hung by a
slender thread. The reign of Henry III would prove to be a watershed in the development of English
notions of kingship. For the supporters of the boy- king in 1216, however, the articulation of
idealized visions of kingship would have to wait: for the moment, survival would be enough.
(J.S. Hamilton – The Plantagenets: History of a Dynasty)

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The eighteenth century witnessed a substantial increase in the number of British men and women
travelling abroad for pleasure. Although it is difficult to ascertain exact figures, it is clear that the
number was a major increase on that of the previous century. In addition, the widespread
conviction that large numbers were travelling helped to widen the perception of the social
importance of the Grand Tour.

Britain was not alone in this development: the increase in tourism was a general European
development, and, in particular, large numbers of French and Germans travelled. However, it was
generally agreed that the Grand Tour was dominated by British tourists, and the fact of tourism by
other nationalities rarely played a part in the debate within Britain over the merits of tourism.

In 1716 Henry Nassau, Viscount Boston, noted ‘a great many English gentlemen’ in Geneva; the
following year Alexander Cunningham wrote of ‘the abundance of English gentlemen’ at Venice.
The future Bishop Berkeley provided quantification of a sort from Rome in 1718. He noted,
‘several of the nobility and gentry of Great Britain, enough to fill two coffee houses’.

In May 1725 the British envoy in Florence, Francis Colman, complained of an increase in his
expenses because of ‘the number of English gentlemen who are almost daily passing by here in
their return from the Jubilee at Rome’. The following month he provided a figure—‘I have hardly
had one hour to myself this last week by reason of the concourse of English gentlemen that are
here at present, of whom there have been above twenty.’
(Jeremy Black – The British and The Grand Tour)

English Renaissance culture perceived the human form in a rich variety of ways. Hamlet, for
example, is haunted by words, actions and presences to do with the sheer physicality of human
existence. 'We fat ourselves for maggots,' says Hamlet as the hunt goes on for Polonius' corpse.
The body's tendency to disappear under the elaborations of costume is acted out in the vain courtier
Osric.

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By the end of Act Five the stage is a landscape replete with bodies. Yet the play echoes the raptures
of many a Renaissance treatise exalting humanity - 'What a piece of work is man' - before
collapsing them into a 'quintessence of dust'. By means of the play within a play we are reminded
that the figure is always represented.

In some of the period's images of the body there is also a distinctive strangeness, deriving perhaps
from the survival of older conventions of representation alongside newer fashions. The long-
legged carapaced monsters of De Critz and Larkin, the bizarre images of Elizabeth, withhold their
meaning from us, as though the human figure were decked out for strange tribal rituals in remote
and alien societies.

Our theme requires the connotations of both 'body' and 'figure'. At one end of the spectrum of
meanings between the two words, 'figure' suggests outline and representation, connotations that
are carried by many miniatures, such as Hilliard's Young man amongst roses. It can mean number
and symbol, which seems irrelevant to a book on the human form until one remembers the many
images of the human figure inscribed within a geometrical shape.

As meanings of 'figure' move in the other direction towards 'bodily shape' and 'embodied human
form', the word still carries a note of abstraction and distance, as if the human form were viewed
by someone. At the same time 'figure' is a symbol of the life that representation itself stands for.

'Body', by contrast, suggests the solidly central unrepresented fact of existence, a materiality that
of itself is inarticulate. It is the mute substance of which 'figure' is a more nervous and expressive
shadow. Where 'figure' moves out towards the abstract and mathematical, 'body' gravitates towards
death, as with the corpse hinted at in Shakespeare's Sonnet where summer's green is 'Borne on the
bier with white and bristly beard'.

(Lucy Gent & Nigel Llewellyn – Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture)

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Agency refers to the ability to act or performan action. In contemporary theory, it hinges on the
question of whether individuals can freely and autonomously initiate action, or whether the things
they do are in some sense determined by the ways in which their identity has been constructed.
Agency is particularly important in post-colonial theory because it refers to the ability of post-
colonial subjects to initiate action in engaging or resisting imperial power. The term has become
an issue in recent times as a consequence of post-structuralist theories of subjectivity. Since human
subjectivity is constructed by ideology (Althusser), language (Lacan), or discourse (Foucault), the
corollary is that any action performed by that subject must also be to some extent a consequence
of those things.

For the colonial discourse theory of Bhabha and Spivak, which concurs with much of the post-
structuralist position on subjectivity, the question of agency has been a troublesome one. However,
many theories in which the importance of political action is paramount take agency for granted.
They suggest that although it may be difficult for subjects to escape the effects of those forces that
‘construct’ them, it is not impossible. The very fact that such forces may be recognized suggests
that they may also be countermanded.

Appropriation is a term used to describe the ways in which post-colonial societies take over those
aspects of the imperial culture – language, forms of writing, film, theatre, even modes of thought
and argument such as rationalism, logic and analysis – that may be of use to them in articulating
their own social and cultural identities. This process is sometimes used to describe the strategy by
which the dominant imperial power incorporates as its own the territory or culture that it surveys
and invades.

However, post-colonial theory focuses instead on an exploration of the ways in which the
dominated or colonized culture can use the tools of the dominant discourse to resist its political or
cultural control. Appropriation may describe acts of usurpation in various cultural domains, but
the most potent are the domains of language and textuality. In these areas, the dominant language
and its discursive forms are appropriated to express widely differing cultural experiences, and to

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interpolate these experiences into the dominant modes of representation to reach the widest
possible audience.

COLONIAL DISCOURSE: This is a term brought into currency by Edward Said who saw
Foucault’s notion of a discourse as valuable for describing that system within which that range of
practices termed ‘colonial’ come into being. Said’s Orientalism, which examined the ways in
which colonial discourse operated as an instrument of power, initiated what came to be known as
colonial discourse theory, that theory which, in the 1980s, saw colonial discourse as its field of
study. The best known colonial discourse theorist, apart from Said,is Homi Bhabha, whose analysis
posited certain disabling contradictions within colonial relationships, such as hybridity,
ambivalence and mimicry, which revealed the inherent vulnerability of colonial discourse.

Discourse, as Foucault theorizes it, is a system of statements within which the world can be known.
It is the system by which dominant groups in society constitute the field of truth by imposing
specific knowledges, disciplines and values upon dominated groups. As a social formation it works
to constitute reality not only for the objects it appears to represent but also for the subjects who
form the community on which it depends. Consequently, colonial discourse is the complex of signs
and practices that organize social existence and social reproduction within colonial relationships.
Colonial discourse is greatly implicated in ideas of the centrality of Europe, and thus in
assumptions that have become characteristic of modernity: assumptions about history, language,
literature and ‘technology’.

Colonial discourse is thus a system of statements that can be made about colonies and colonial
peoples, about colonizing powers and about the relationship between these two. It is the system of
knowledge and beliefs about the world within which acts of colonization take place. Although it
is generated within the society and cultures of the colonizers, it becomes that discourse within
which the colonized may also come to see themselves. At the very least, it creates a deep conflict
in the consciousness of the colonized because of its clash with other knowledges (and kinds of
knowledge) about the world. Rules of inclusion and exclusion operate on the assumption of the
superiority of the colonizer’s culture, history, language, art, political structures, social conventions,
and the assertion of the need for the colonized to be ‘raised up’ through colonial contact.

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In particular, colonial discourse hinges on notions of race that begin to emerge at the very advent
of European imperialism. Through such distinctions it comes to represent the colonized, whatever
the nature of their social structures and cultural histories, as ‘primitive’ and the colonizers as
‘civilized’. Colonial discourse tends to exclude, of course, statements about the exploitation of the
resources of the colonized, the political status accruing to colonizing powers, the importance to
domestic politics of the development of an empire, all of which may be compelling reasons for
maintaining colonial ties.

Rather it conceals these benefits in statements about the inferiority of the colonized, the primitive
nature of other races, the barbaric depravity of colonized societies, and therefore the duty of the
imperial power to reproduce itself in the colonial society, and to advance the civilization of the
colony through trade, administration, cultural and moral improvement. Such is the power of
colonial discourse that individual colonizing subjects are not often consciously aware of the
duplicity of their position, for colonial discourse constructs the colonizing subject as much as the
colonized. Statements that contradict the discourse cannot be made either without incurring
punishment, or without making the individuals who make those statements appear eccentric and
abnormal.

HYBRIDITY: One of the most widely employed and most disputed terms in postcolonial theory,
hybridity commonly refers to the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone
produced by colonization. As used in horticulture, the term refers to the cross-breeding of two
species by grafting or cross-pollination to form a third, ‘hybrid’ species. Hybridization takes many
forms: linguistic, cultural, political, racial, etc.

Linguistic examples include pidgin and creole languages, and these echo the foundational use of
the term by the linguist and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, who used it to suggest the disruptive
and transfiguring power of multivocal language situations and, by extension, of multivocal
narratives. The idea of a polyphony of voices in society is implied also in Bakhtin’s idea of the
carnivalesque, which emerged in the Middle Ages when ‘a boundless world of humorous forms

9
and manifestations opposed the official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal
culture’ (Holquist 1984: 4).

The term ‘hybridity’ has been most recently associated with the work of Homi K.Bhabha, whose
analysis of colonizer/colonized relations stresses their interdependence and the mutual
construction of their subjectivities (see mimicry and ambivalence). Bhabha contends that all
cultural statements and systems are constructed in a space that he calls the ‘Third Space of
enunciation’(1994:37).Cultural identity always emerges in this contradictory and ambivalent
space, which for Bhabha makes the claim to a hierarchical ‘purity’ of cultures untenable. For him,
the recognition of this ambivalent space of cultural identity may help us to overcome the exoticism
of cultural diversity in favour of the recognition of an empowering hybridity within which
cultural difference may operate.

MIMICRY is an increasingly important term in post-colonial theory, because it has come to

describe the ambivalent relationship between colonizer and colonized. When colonial discourse
encourages the colonized subject to ‘mimic’ the colonizer, by adopting the colonizer’s cultural
habits, assumptions, institutions and values, the result is never a simple reproduction of those traits.
Rather, the result is a ‘blurred copy’ of the colonizer that can be quite threatening. This is because
mimicry is never very far from mockery, since it can appear to parody whatever it
mimics. Mimicry therefore locates a crack in the certainty of colonial dominance, an uncertainty
in its control of the behaviour of the colonized.

The term mimicry has been crucial in Homi Bhabha’s view of the ambivalence of colonial
discourse. The copying of the colonizing culture, behaviour, manners and values by the colonized
contains both mockery and a certain ‘menace’, ‘so that mimicry is at once resemblance and
menace’ (86). Mimicry reveals the limitation in the authority of colonial discourse, almost as
though colonial authority inevitably embodies the seeds of its own destruction. The line of descent
of the ‘mimic man’, claims Bhabha, can be traced through the works of Kipling, Forster, Orwell
and Naipaul, and is the effect of ‘a flawed colonial mimesis in which to be Anglicized is
emphatically not to be English’ (1994: 87).

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OTHER: In general terms, the ‘other’ is anyone who is separate from one’s self. The existence of
others is crucial in defining what is ‘normal’ and in locating one’s own place in the world. The
colonized subject is characterized as ‘other’ through discourses such as primitivism and
cannibalism, as a means of establishing the binary separation of the colonizer and colonized and
asserting the naturalness and primacy of the colonizing culture and world view.

OTHERING: This term was coined by Gayatri Spivak for the process by which imperial
discourse creates its ‘others’. Whereas the Other corresponds to the focus of desire or power (the
M–Other or Father – or Empire) in relation to which the subject is produced, the other is the
excluded or ‘mastered’ subject created by the discourse of power. Othering describes the various
ways in which colonial discourse produces its subjects. In Spivak’s explanation, othering is a
dialectical process because the colonizing Other is established at the same time as its colonized
others are produced as subjects.
(Bill Ashcroft – Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts)

Beckett once asserted: 'I produce an object. What people make of it is not my concern [...] I’d be
quite incapable of writing a critical introduction to my own works.' Furthermore, whenever
directors and critics asked for explanations of Godot, he both side-stepped their questions and
revealed his distrust of any kind of exegesis.

Two examples will suffice here. To Alan Schneider's question 'Who or what does Godot mean?',
he replied, 'If I knew, 1would have said so in the play'; when Colin Duckworth suggested that the
characters existed in a modern version of Dante's Purgatory, he responded to the 'proofs' offered
to him with a dismissive, if generous 'Quite alien to me, but you're welcome.'

As is now clearly established, allusions to Dante are present throughout his novels and plays, but
Beckett's position remained resolute; he wanted no part in the process of decoding that haunts
critical work, preferring to cling to his belief that: 'The key word in my plays is "perhaps".'

So, Beckett’s own uncertainty about his 'certain' perhaps may give us grounds for more
interpretive hope than is usually admitted. What Beckett says outside the texts of his plays is
undoubtedly worth considering, but when he comments on either texts or productions, he is just
another critic, just as eligible for skeptical examination as any other interpreter.

He may well have said to Deirdre Bair that 'the best possible play is one in which there are no
actors, only the text. I'm trying to write one', but the use of the word text suggests that we should

11
focus on the text itself and not seek to make our interpretations fit with what the dramatist may
have said at any particular moment.
(The Cambridge Companion to Beckett)

Joyce’s repudiation of Catholic Ireland and his countering declaration of artistic independence are
well-known and integral features of his life-long dedication to writing. Yet he was formed by the
Ireland he repudiated and his quest for artistic freedom was itself shaped by the exemplary
instances of earlier Irish writers who had, in his view, failed to achieve that independence which
he sought for himself, an independence which was at once the precondition and the goal of writing.

When we survey his achievement in retrospect, it seems surprising that the uncertain and
fragmented accomplishment of nineteenth-century Irish literature should have reached a
culmination in his fiction and in the poetry of Yeats. It seems quite inexplicable that an oppressed
and turbulent country, which had lost half its population and its native language only thirty-five
years before Joyce was born, could have begun to produce literature of world importance as he
reached his early teens.

But some explanations are forthcoming when we look more closely at Irish literary culture in the
nineteenth century. Most importantly, an understanding of some of the stresses and strains of that
literature help us to understand why Joyce produced works like Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in
his maturity. The deformations of the English language and of the traditional form of the novel
which we encounter in these are anticipated in the conflict between Irish, Hiberno-English and
standard English which is a feature of the Irish writing Joyce knew.

The most important of Joyce’s Irish predecessors was the poet James Clarence Mangan (1803–
49), whose tragic and miserable life was represented by Joyce as an emblem of the characteristic
alienation of the true artist. More significantly, Joyce exaggerated the extent to which Mangan
had been ignored by his countrymen after his death. For, as Joyce saw it, Mangan also represented
the artist who was spurned by his countrymen in a typically treacherous fashion, largely because
he had identified his own multifarious woes with those of his suffering country.

Joyce’s obsession with betrayal manifests itself in unmistakable fashion in the lectures he delivered
on Mangan, in Dublin in 1902 and in Trieste in 1907. Wherever he looked, in Irish political or
literary history, he found that the master-theme was betrayal. The great political crisis which
dominated his early life – the fall of Parnell – probably governed this reading of his country’s past
and helped to define for him the nature of the embattled future relationship between him and his
Irish audience.

Parnell was, in Joyce’s view, a heroic spirit brought low by his own people, who sold him ‘to the
pharisaical conscience of the English non-conformists’ (OCPW 144) or, in a more famous
formulation, listened to Parnell’s plea that they should not throw him to the English wolves. ‘They
did not throw him to the English wolves: they tore him apart themselves’ (OCPW 196).

(The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce)

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