Douglas Kerr

The University of Hong Kong, School of English, Honorary Professor

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Honorary Professor of English, University of Hong Kong
Honorary Research Fellow, Birkbeck College, University of London
Address: School of English
University of Hong Kong
Pokfulam Road
Hong Kong

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Papers by Douglas Kerr

The Reader in the Labyrinth of Conrad’s “The Brute”

Conradiana, 2019

Was Joseph Conrad right about ‘The Brute’ when he advised a friend to read the story in the train... more Was Joseph Conrad right about ‘The Brute’ when he advised a friend to read the story in the train and then throw the magazine out of the window? This essay explores the experience of being a reader of this tale, which sometimes seems like a labyrinth offering a clutch of threads that might lead to a satisfying issue of thematic richness and coherence, only to leave the reader, all too often, at a dead end. The essay examines four images in the tale. Are they the kind of thematically significant semes which readers interpret to construct the meaning of the text, or are they ‘just there’, necessary but non-meaningful infrastructure serving what Roland Barthes called ‘the reality effect’? On this question may depend our reaction to Conrad’s advice about what to do with ‘The Brute’. KEYWORDS Conrad – ‘The Brute’ – interpretation – Roland Barthes – reader response – allegory

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Let us annex China!’Visuality and Ventriloquism in the Far East

Figures of Rule

Eastern Figures, 2008

Hinterland

Eastern Figures, 2008

The Virtual Geographies of Nineteen Eighty-Four

The Cambridge Companion to <I>Nineteen Eighty-Four</I>, 2020

Every novel creates its own map, with its places of dwelling and meeting and conflict, its infras... more Every novel creates its own map, with its places of dwelling and meeting and conflict, its infrastructure of communication, its borderlands, its inaccessible or disputed spaces. Nineteen Eighty-Four has at least two, showing the topography of its personal and its geopolitical life: the relatively restricted landscape through which Winston Smith moves – basically urban, with one excursion to the countryside – and the global context shaped by the brutal political realities of Orwell’s imagined future. These geographies are virtual, in the sense that they are fictional, but in other ways too. The geopolitical map of Nineteen Eighty-Four is a story inscribed by ideological forces on the physical geography of the planet. The story, and the map, may change from one minute to the next. Only in a very qualified way could we describe it as the real world, even in the restricted terms of the novel. For Winston Smith it is certainly less real, less present to him, than the Golden Country he dreams about, waking with the word “Shakespeare” on his lips (36). This essay investigates Nineteen Eighty-Four’s geography of interiority, social interaction and private space, expressed for the most part in novelistic discourse, and that of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, created in journalistic or strategic language.

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A century of travels in China

... Kipling, Wee Willie Winkie (1988); John Clare in Context: Bi-Centenary Essays with Adam Phill... more

Not Knowing the Oriental

Eastern Figures, 2008

It is twenty-five years since the publication of Edward Said"s Orientalism (1978). In no trivial ... more It is twenty-five years since the publication of Edward Said"s Orientalism (1978). In no trivial sense, we are all after Said. It is to him that we owe among other things a fundamental understanding of colonial discourse, that enables us to see it as a Foucauldian system of knowledge/power, whereby control over a part of the world is brought about, exemplified and stabilized by knowledge and its institutions. Through Orientalism, the west authors the east and becomes its authority. Our understanding of postcolonial resistance is predicated on an acceptance of the same intellectual architecture. Power enables knowledge, knowledge legitimises power. This essay, however, is about ignorance. For everyone except God, there is always a horizon or frontier of knowledge, behind which stretches the great Hinterland of ignorance. This is an idea memorably expounded in a poem published in the year in which Britain acquired the island of Hong Kong, a known and chartered quantity that might be the gateway to a mainland of sublime vastness. 1 For Tennyson"s Ulysses, experience, what we know, is an arch, "wherethrough / Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades / For ever and for ever when I move". The great imperial melancholy of that poem was to find an attenuated echo more than fifty years later in Kipling"s "Recessional", with its call to humility and contrition, and a seemly modesty in recognition of one"s own limits. Tennyson"s hero recognized that no amount of travel and discovery will reduce the "untravelled world" to known space, since the margin of our own ignorance travels with us and ahead of us, forever out of reach. There is always more to be ignorant of. Furthermore, there are certainly occasions when it is more prudent not "to follow knowledge like a sinking star", as Ulysses acknowledged in another rather defeatist metaphor, for, as he admitted to his mariners, "It may be that the gulfs will wash us down", and the quest may end in disaster and drowning. This essay considers the

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Conan Doyle and the rhetoric of genre

English: Journal of the English Association

Arthur Conan Doyle is recognized as a master of narrative. This essay argues that this mastery ex... more Arthur Conan Doyle is recognized as a master of narrative. This essay argues that this mastery expresses itself in his management of genre, at a time when social and cultural changes had created a literary environment that saw the emergence of what is now called genre fiction. Crucial elements in the field of literary publishing which his stories served included the expansion of the monthly magazine market, the emergence of the short story as a popular form of fiction, and the appearance of a broad-based new reading public, well educated in the conventions of genre fiction and equipped with reading skills deriving from this ‘genre literacy’, which an author like Conan Doyle could foster and manipulate for rhetorical effect. I describe the conditions that created a taste for the popular genre fiction on which, somewhat to his chagrin, Conan Doyle’s reputation rested. He moved between genres with a versatility rivalled in his time only by Rudyard Kipling. But he also combined genres t...

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Orwell and Empire

Oxford University PressOxford eBooks, Jul 14, 2022

George Orwell was born in India, and served in the Imperial Police in Burma as a young man. ORWEL... more George Orwell was born in India, and served in the Imperial Police in Burma as a young man. ORWELL AND EMPIRE s a study of his writing about the East, and the East in his writing. It argues that empire was central to his cultural identity, and that his experience of colonial life was a crucial factor, in ways that have not been recognised, in shaping the writer he became. ORWELL AND EMPIRE is about all his writings, fictional and non-fictional. It pays particular attention to work that derives directly from his Burmese years, including the well-known narratives ‘A Hanging’ and ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and his first novel Burmese Days. It goes on to explore the theme of empire throughout his work, through to Nineteen Eighty-Four and beyond, charting the way his evolving views on (for example) class, race, gender, and authority were shaped by his experience in the East and the Anglo-Indian attitudes he had inherited. Orwell’s socialism and his hatred of authoritarianism, for example, grew out of his anti-imperialism, as The Road to Wigan Pier makes explicit. But this was not a straightforward repudiation, or a painless process. He understood that ‘it is very difficult to escape, culturally, from the class into which you have been born.’ His whole career was a creative quarrel with himself and with his Anglo-Indian patrimony: he remained Oriental Orwell to the end. In a way that anticipates our current debates about the imperial legacy, he struggled to come to terms with his own history.

A History of Poetry

Wilfred Owen's Voices, 1993

Conan Doyle and Forms of Knowledge

Introduction: Difference and Convergence in Globalization

It is customary nowadays to accept that a cross-national and cross-regional production of knowled... more It is customary nowadays to accept that a cross-national and cross-regional production of knowledge and the integration of academic communities are no longer just an idea or a desire, but a given and an experience. In the process of globalization, it is often claimed and believed that academics in the humanities are empowered by a new set of international conditions of possibility in critical ... [Project MUSE

George Orwell

Leung Ping-Kwan's Amblings: A Review of the Right-hand Pages

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Joseph Conrad: Last Essays. Ed. by Harold Ray Stevens and JH Stape. Joseph Conrad: Youth. Heart of Darkness. The End of the Tether. Ed. by Owen Knowles. Joseph Conrad: Suspense. Ed. by Gene M. Moore

Joseph Conrad: Last Essays. Ed. by Harold Ray Stevens and JH Stape. (= The Cambridge Edition of t... more Joseph Conrad: Last Essays. Ed. by Harold Ray Stevens and JH Stape. (= The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. lv. 480 pp ; Joseph Conrad: Youth. Heart of Darkness. The End of the Tether. Ed. by Owen Knowles. (= The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. lxviii, 475 pp ; Joseph Conrad: Suspense. Ed. by Gene M. Moore (= The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. li, 357 pp

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The strange case of the creeping man

The Strange Case of the Creeping Man Arthur Conan Doyle’s story of 1923, “The Creeping Man”, has ... more The Strange Case of the Creeping Man Arthur Conan Doyle’s story of 1923, “The Creeping Man”, has been described as “a weak reworking of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”. This paper looks at continuities and differences between the two tales, both of which tell the story of a brilliant scientist whose secretive behavior alarms his friends and household, and who is discovered to have fallen, as a result of his scientific researches, into dangerous atavism and violence. Both stories participate in contemporary discussions of evolution and degeneration, repression and sexuality, science and scandal, and human and animal nature. In the Conan Doyle tale it is Sherlock Holmes, the scientific detective, who provides the explanation of this scientific aberration. “When one tries to rise above Nature one is liable to fall below it,” is his verdict on the case. “The Creeping Man” has attracted little critical notice, appearing to be a fairly humdrum Watson-narrated Sherlock Holmes tale and certainly lacking the aesthetic and intellectual radicalism of Dr Jekyll. But this paper will argue that it repays attention, and that in the regressions of Professor Presbury, the creeping man of the title, we can find a fictional figure thematically linked not just to Dr Jekyll but to Sherlock Holmes himself, and also to Dracula, Dorian Gray, Peter Pan and the Kaiser.

Academic Freedom, Political Interference and Political Accountability: The Hong Kong Experience

George Orwell's Conrad

This essay is not so much a study of &#39;influence&#39; as an attempt to observe some of... more This essay is not so much a study of &#39;influence&#39; as an attempt to observe some of the ways his reading of Conrad helped to clarify for Orwell the writer he himself needed to become. His response to Conrad as a writer about Oriental places and people, and as a political novelist, has an important bearing on his own practice, and through his reading of Conrad we can watch him struggling with questions of theme, attitude, and technique that confronted his own creative work. Finally, this essay looks at the case of the haunting presence of Conrad&#39;s Lord Jim in the working notes for A Smoking-Room Story, the novel Orwell was planning in 1949, the last year of his life.

A Century of Travels in China: Critical Essays on Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940s

This book represents the work of expert scholars, it is also accessible to non-specialists with a... more

Kipling in China: Empires of Noise

This essay sets out to answer the question: by what mode of transport did Rudyard Kipling visit C... more This essay sets out to answer the question: by what mode of transport did Rudyard Kipling visit China in 1889? That year, Kipling journeyed from India to Europe by way of Japan and the United States and in early April he arrived in the British crown colony of Hong Kong. Later, he left for an excursion upriver to visit Guangzhou (Canton) in imperial China. He reported on his journey in a series of articles for the Pioneer and Pioneer Mail in Allahabad, later published as From Sea to Sea (1899). Kipling is a reporter of genius, and he evokes these Chinese cities for his readers with a brilliant visuality. His reportorial eye warrants a rapid assumption of expertise which enables him to take possession of a subject on which, for once, he was not knowledgeable. But the Chinese soundscape he experienced simply as noise. From this he ventriloquises a Chinese discourse he cannot hear, to produce a well-behaved industriousness (in the colony) and a bloodthirsty racial hostility (in Canton) ...

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Douglas Kerr

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