NRG are delighted to announce the next in our series of talks, which will take place this Wednesday 19 March (4pm, Casterbridge), when Dr Sam Goodman will discuss colonial and imperial themes in the work of JG Farrell.
A Great Beneficial Disease: Colonial Medicine & Imperial Authority in J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur.
Dr Sam Goodman (Media School)
This paper examines J. G. Farrell’s depictions of colonial medicine as a means of analysing the historical reception of the further past and argues that the end-of-Empire context of the 1970s in which Farrell was writing informed his reappraisal of Imperial authority with particular regard to the limits of medical knowledge and treatment. His Booker Prize-winning novel The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) illustrates how Farrell repeatedly sought to challenge the authority of medical and colonial history by making direct use of period medical and historical material in the construction of his fictional narrative; by using these sources with deliberate critical intent, Farrell directly engages with the received historical narrative of colonial India, that the British presence brought progress and development, particularly in matters relating to medicine and health. Overall the paper will argue that Farrell’s critique of colonial medical practices, apparently based on science and reason, was shaped by the political context of the 1970s and used to question the wider moral position of the Empire throughout his fiction.
Sam Goodman is Lecturer in Linguistics at Bournemouth University. His current research explores the intersection between medicine and popular Anglo-Indian fiction of the late-twentieth century, and he is the author of British Spy Fiction & the End of Empire (forthcoming Routledge, 2015). He is also the editor of Medicine, Health & the Arts: Approaches to the Medical Humanities (Routledge 2013) with Victoria Bates (Bristol) and Alan Bleakley (Plymouth).