Ryan Trimm
University of Rhode Island, English, Faculty Member
Research Interests:
Bringing together heritage studies and literary studies, this book examines heritage as a ubiquitous trope in contemporary Britain, a seemingly inescapable figure for relations to the past. Inheritance has been an important metaphor for... more
Bringing together heritage studies and literary studies, this book examines heritage as a ubiquitous trope in contemporary Britain, a seemingly inescapable figure for relations to the past. Inheritance has been an important metaphor for characterizing cultural and political traditions since the 1970s, but one criticized for its conservatism and apparent disinheritance of "new" Britons. Engaging with contemporary literary and cinematic texts, the book interrogates metaphoric resonances: that bestowing past, receiving present, and transmitted bounty are all singular and unified; that transmission between past and present is smooth, despite heritage depending on death; that the past enjoins the present to conserve its legacy into the future. However, heritage offers an alternative to modern market-driven relations, transactions stressing connection only through a momentary exchange, for bequest resembles gift-giving and connects past to present. Consequently, heritage contain...
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Modernism stands as the signal literary upheaval of the long 20th century, and yet the tenuousness of its appeal to “make it new,” as Ezra Pound commanded, entails the period or periods that follow are likewise uncertain save in their... more
Modernism stands as the signal literary upheaval of the long 20th century, and yet the tenuousness of its appeal to “make it new,” as Ezra Pound commanded, entails the period or periods that follow are likewise uncertain save in their reference to modernism. However, even here there is ambivalence: contemporary authors might be charted regarding their modernist literary forebears, yet many explicitly reject modernist methods altogether; others continue this legacy, and still more look to complexly incorporate and negotiate modernist methods. Likewise, theoretical accounts of postwar fiction mark what comes after in reference to modernism: postmodernism, post-postmodernism, and the like. Modernism’s outsize shadow stems from its association with literary experimentation, aesthetic innovations elevating its austere emphasis on form above such traditional concerns as telling stories and creating characters. Though swaths of Anglophone fiction reject these modernist impulses and return ...
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Published in the Rowman & Littlefield collection _Haunted Landscapes: Super-Nature and the Environment_. Edited by Ruth Heholt and Niamh Downing. British fiction's postwar experience of place is framed by a postimperial hangover. As... more
Published in the Rowman & Littlefield collection _Haunted Landscapes: Super-Nature and the Environment_. Edited by Ruth Heholt and Niamh Downing.
British fiction's postwar experience of place is framed by a postimperial hangover. As demographics changed, as the collision of the " over there " and the " here " became increasingly visible, a host of novels explored these issues through interrelated tropes: hospitality, the reframing of suburbia, a revision of the country house novel, accounts of migrant communities, echoes of overseas legacies. Both in town and country, Britain appeared haunted by the specter of Empire, by the way internal spaces were beset by traces of the past marked by violence and legacies of this imperial elsewhere. Moreover, conceptions of place were undergoing change, particularly as designation of historic areas by conservation organizations shifted from " heritage landscapes " to the " historic environment, " a term increasingly used by from the 1990s on. The " historic environment " was employed during the New Labour years to avoid the uncomfortable resonances of " heritage " and " landscape, " most particularly connotations of elitism. Both tropes suggest an exclusiveness, distinguishing some places as more aesthetic or historic, some as heirs and others as outside the national family. Given the context of a Britain increasingly aware of itself as multicultural, these tropes effectively suggested the groups and places associated with " new Britons " were outside the national imaginary, that the central icons of national identity could not be extended to all. The " historic environment " was a new formulation, one designed to work, not from the past forwards but from the present back: the entirety of the present shared a locale; this present looked back on the whole of the past without focusing on single moments. In sum, the " historic environment " envisions a locale as a palimpsest, one still evolving and thus not bound to one time or one group of inhabitants. This conception finds its echo in post-millenial
British fiction's postwar experience of place is framed by a postimperial hangover. As demographics changed, as the collision of the " over there " and the " here " became increasingly visible, a host of novels explored these issues through interrelated tropes: hospitality, the reframing of suburbia, a revision of the country house novel, accounts of migrant communities, echoes of overseas legacies. Both in town and country, Britain appeared haunted by the specter of Empire, by the way internal spaces were beset by traces of the past marked by violence and legacies of this imperial elsewhere. Moreover, conceptions of place were undergoing change, particularly as designation of historic areas by conservation organizations shifted from " heritage landscapes " to the " historic environment, " a term increasingly used by from the 1990s on. The " historic environment " was employed during the New Labour years to avoid the uncomfortable resonances of " heritage " and " landscape, " most particularly connotations of elitism. Both tropes suggest an exclusiveness, distinguishing some places as more aesthetic or historic, some as heirs and others as outside the national family. Given the context of a Britain increasingly aware of itself as multicultural, these tropes effectively suggested the groups and places associated with " new Britons " were outside the national imaginary, that the central icons of national identity could not be extended to all. The " historic environment " was a new formulation, one designed to work, not from the past forwards but from the present back: the entirety of the present shared a locale; this present looked back on the whole of the past without focusing on single moments. In sum, the " historic environment " envisions a locale as a palimpsest, one still evolving and thus not bound to one time or one group of inhabitants. This conception finds its echo in post-millenial
Givenness frequently forecloses the future; however, the term has a complex legacy through both economic accounts of the gift and phenomenological explorations of the given. Jean-Luc Marion, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy all invoke... more
Givenness frequently forecloses the future; however, the term has a complex legacy through both economic accounts of the gift and phenomenological explorations of the given. Jean-Luc Marion, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy all invoke both gift and given; however, their formulations of givenness differ strikingly with regard to temporality. Marion conceives the given as revelation, a vision summoning (and thus preceding) the givee. Derrida thinks of the given as an inheritance received from the future and thus responsible to what is to come. Nancy locates the given in the present but finds givenness to be the mutual relation and imbrication of beings, a web of entanglement that spaces but does not determine those beings. The thinking of gift and givenness has a peculiar legacy. Giving of course has been the beneficiary of formulations from thinkers encompassing Seneca, Thomas Aquinas, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Friedrich Nietzsche but received its largest endowment from the line of thought initiated by Marcel Mauss. 1 Mauss's legacy entails tracing the spirit of the gift, a charting that often stresses the complex cycles of economic exchange behind benefaction.
Chapter Summary: Multicultural British fi ction is associated with central urban areas, especially London. Linking new British ethnicities and cities unintentionally echoes tension between the purportedly organic English countryside and... more
Chapter Summary: Multicultural British fi ction is associated with central urban areas, especially London. Linking new British ethnicities and cities unintentionally echoes tension between the purportedly organic English countryside and cosmopolitan openness. National identity apparently resides in " natural " and unifi ed roots, while migration and urban alienation render cities places of transit, diversity, and newness. The multicultural suburban novel initiated by Hanif Kureishi upends this contrast: The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) locates complex, mobile ethnicities and sexualities in quotidian, domestic spaces. Gone are immigrant ghettos, bedsits, and tourist topographies of previous multicultural fi ction for places all-too-ordinary, suburban locales reorienting the division between English countryside and diverse urban center. This suburban stress remaps Englishness. Distinctions between old and new, between Commonwealth and English ethnicities no longer hold, but rather roil in a melee. Consequently, identities and places are fl uid, generating a " new breed as it were, " undoing old taxonomies of English and alien, city and country.
... DOI: 10.1080/00111610903380105 Ryan S. Trimm a pages 249-271. Available online: 09 Jun 2011. ...
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... This felicitous coincidence allows Baucom to follow a similar hybridization in Kim in the way that the "little friend of all the world ... theoretical misreadings are strong in the Bloomian sense, alchemically breathing new... more
... This felicitous coincidence allows Baucom to follow a similar hybridization in Kim in the way that the "little friend of all the world ... theoretical misreadings are strong in the Bloomian sense, alchemically breathing new life into old arguments-hi treatment of Pierre Nora is particularly ...
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... hospitality and immigration offers a version of heritage attuned to the ways images of the past can be reworked and national and cultural identity revised, a rearticulation enacted in very different way in the Hanif Kureishi and... more
... hospitality and immigration offers a version of heritage attuned to the ways images of the past can be reworked and national and cultural identity revised, a rearticulation enacted in very different way in the Hanif Kureishi and Stephen Frears's film My Beautiful Laundrette and in ...
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Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books works against the heritage... more
Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books works against the heritage film's generic obsession with setting by foregrounding its soundstage as a textual and performative space.
... Such emphasis on process, on the animated text, materializes writing and textuality not as an already bound book but as propagation ... As postwar cinema increasingly stresses abrupt cuts and shifts displacing any sense of an... more
... Such emphasis on process, on the animated text, materializes writing and textuality not as an already bound book but as propagation ... As postwar cinema increasingly stresses abrupt cuts and shifts displacing any sense of an extra-cinematic organic world, this raw succession of ...
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... I will just thank a few friends who have stayed with me ever since the beginning: Sara Beam, Melissa Goldman, David Hensley, Harriet Nowell ... I would like to thank Abdul JanMohammed for taking an inter-est in this book and Ray Ryan... more
... I will just thank a few friends who have stayed with me ever since the beginning: Sara Beam, Melissa Goldman, David Hensley, Harriet Nowell ... I would like to thank Abdul JanMohammed for taking an inter-est in this book and Ray Ryan of Cambridge University Press for facili ...
Research Interests:
Bringing together heritage studies and literary studies, this book examines heritage as a ubiquitous trope in contemporary Britain, a seemingly inescapable figure for relations to the past. Inheritance has been an important metaphor for... more
Bringing together heritage studies and literary studies, this book examines heritage as a ubiquitous trope in contemporary Britain, a seemingly inescapable figure for relations to the past. Inheritance has been an important metaphor for characterizing cultural and political traditions since the 1970s, but one criticized for its conservatism and apparent disinheritance of "new" Britons. Engaging with contemporary literary and cinematic texts, the book interrogates metaphoric resonances: that bestowing past, receiving present, and transmitted bounty are all singular and unified; that transmission between past and present is smooth, despite heritage depending on death; that the past enjoins the present to conserve its legacy into the future. However, heritage offers an alternative to modern market-driven relations, transactions stressing connection only through a momentary exchange, for bequest resembles gift-giving and connects past to present. Consequently, heritage contains competing impulses, subtexts largely unexplored given the trope’s lapse into cliché. The volume charts how these resonances developed, as well as charting more contemporary aspects of heritage: as postmodern image, tourist industry, historic environment, and metaculture. These dimensions develop the trope, moving it from singular focus on continuity with the past to one more oriented around different lines of relation between past, present, and future. Heritage as a trope is explored through a wide range of texts: core accounts of political theory (Locke and Burke); seminal documents within historic conservation; phenomenology and poststructuralism; film and television (Merchant-Ivory, Downton Abbey); and a broad range of contemporary fiction from novelists including Zadie Smith, Julian Barnes, Hilary Mantel, Sarah Waters, Alan Hollinghurst, Peter Ackroyd, and Helen Oyeyemi.
Table of Contents
Chapter I. Introduction: "In a Wondrous Age"
Chapter II. Heritage’s Patina: Troping Polity and Preservation
Chapter III. Heritage as Givenness: The Legacy of Phenomenology
Chapter IV. Icon and Image: Heritage as Postmodern Spectacle
Chapter V. Legacy Visions: The Image of Heritage Cinema in Brideshead Revisited, The Remains of the Day, and Downton Abbey
Chapter VI. Enterprising Heritage: Industry, Tourism, and Metaculture
Chapter VII. Fictions of Industry, Tales of Culture
Chapter VIII. From Heritage to Historic Environment: Diversity and Spatialized Inheritance in the New Labour Year
Chapter IX. Haunting the Environment: Roots and Specters in Smith, Mantel, and Oyeyemi
Chapter X. Conclusion
Table of Contents
Chapter I. Introduction: "In a Wondrous Age"
Chapter II. Heritage’s Patina: Troping Polity and Preservation
Chapter III. Heritage as Givenness: The Legacy of Phenomenology
Chapter IV. Icon and Image: Heritage as Postmodern Spectacle
Chapter V. Legacy Visions: The Image of Heritage Cinema in Brideshead Revisited, The Remains of the Day, and Downton Abbey
Chapter VI. Enterprising Heritage: Industry, Tourism, and Metaculture
Chapter VII. Fictions of Industry, Tales of Culture
Chapter VIII. From Heritage to Historic Environment: Diversity and Spatialized Inheritance in the New Labour Year
Chapter IX. Haunting the Environment: Roots and Specters in Smith, Mantel, and Oyeyemi
Chapter X. Conclusion