Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Postcolonial novels'
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1
Comorau, Nancy Alla. "Postcolonial refashionings reading forms, reading novels /." College Park, Md. : University of Maryland, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1903/9951.
Abstract:
Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2009.Thesis research directed by: Dept. of English. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.
2
Yao, Kouadio Dieudonné. "Mythes et discours postcolonial : approche comparée de quelques romans postcoloniaux." Electronic Thesis or Diss., Université Côte d'Azur, 2024. http://www.theses.fr/2024COAZ2011.
Abstract:
S'inscrivant dans une perspective à la fois interdisciplinaire et interdiscursive, cette étude établit un rapports entre Mythe (élément anthropologique) et littérature - relevant de la création - (discours postcolonial). Ce rapport, en se basant sur le mythe en tant que référentiel ancré principalement dans l'inconscient d'une communauté et transcendant les différences tant sociétales qu'historiques est appréhendé en tant que dénominateur commun des discours littéraires développés par les écrivains postcoloniaux réunis dans un corpus très diversifié et représentatif des différentes situations postcoloniales. On y retrouve en effet Maurice Bandaman (Le Fils de-la-femme-mâle), Achebe Chinua (Le Monde s'effondre), Nadine Gordimer (Un Monde d'étrangers), Tahar Ben Jelloun (La Nuit sacrée), Salman Rushdie (Les Versets sataniques) et Patrick Chamoiseau (Les Neuf Consciences du Malfini). L'outil d'investigation sollicité est principalement la mythocritique, dont les approches incarnées respectivement par Pierre Brunel et Gilbert Durand se voient sollicitées tant dans leur communauté d'orientation que dans leur complémentarité réciproque. Aussi, d'un point de vue de la pensée postcoloniale, la confrontation des « maîtres » colons et de « l'autochtone humilié » telle que l'évoque Hubert Félix Thiéfaine est l'opposition essentielle autour de laquelle s'est construite notre démarche. Ce travail est ainsi périodiquement ponctué par d'autres citations de Thiéfaine qui offrent un contrepoint évocateur aux réflexions développées dans les différents chapitres. Il s'agit alors de déterminer dans quelle mesure l'incorporation du mythe apparaît comme un élément obligé de la constitution d'un discours postcolonial, la substitution de celui-ci au discours colonial s'articulant à travers le recours à un legs mythique qui combine réappropriations du legs culturel véhiculé par le colonisateur et renouvellement du fonds mythique local, avec des accentuations différentes selon la localisation du texte et de son auteur en Afrique noire, au Maghreb ou en Inde. On aboutit ainsi tant à la constatation de divergences marquantes dans le choix des éléments mythiques à privilégier qu'au diagnostic d'une convergence des modalités de leur sollicitation dans le discours postcolonial, dont ils constituent dans tous les cas étudiés un ingrédient essentiel. Ainsi est-il apparu que plusieurs éléments afférents au mythe manifestent leur présence dans les textes littéraires postcoloniaux qui ont fait office de terrain d'analyse dans le cadre de notre étude. Il s'agit notamment de symboles et mythèmes qui ont plus d'un rapport avec la résurgence de figures mythiques anciennes, marquant leur éternel retour. En dehors de ces structures symboliques, l'exploitation des textes a montré qu'en contexte postcolonial, les figures mythiques telles que celles de Prométhée et de Dionysos sont des configurations d'images plausibles qui de par la rupture entre elles opèrent une sorte de transition dans la transmission des valeurs et systèmes de pensée qu'elles véhiculent et qui sous-tendent du même coup les faits colonial et postcolonial. Après analyse des catégories fondamentales dans les romans de notre corpus, il convient de souligner un dynamisme de ces catégories romanesques commandé par le contexte postcolonial qui lui-même subit le dynamisme des structures mythiques qui sous-tendent la pensée des peuples et qui subséquemment constituent le substrat des créations littéraires et artistiques qui sont en accord avec les préoccupations du moment. Dès lors, notre étude postule, in fine, la possibilité d'un discours mythique commun à ces textes. Il s'agit d'une projection d'imaginaires de la transition en contexte postcolonial s'enracinant dans l'eschatologie pour déboucher sur de nouvelles cosmogoniesBased on an interdisciplinar and interdiscursive perspective, this study creates a relationship between Myth as an anthropological element and Literature - falling as such in the category of creation - in the form of postcolonial discourse. By considering myth as a framework having its origin in the inconscious background of a human community and being as such able to transcend both societal and historical differences, this relationship is described as a common denominator of the literary discourses practized by the postcolonial writers who are brought together, building so a wide-ranged corpus that reflects the different postcolonial situations. We find here Maurice Bandaman (The Son of the Male Woman), Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart), Nadine Gordimer (A World of Strangers), Tahar Ben Jelloun (The Sacred Night), Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses) and Patrick Chamoiseau (The Malfini's Nine Consciences). The most used investigative tool is the mythocritical approach, especially represented by the studies of Pierre Brunel and Gilbert Durand taken into account both in their common research orientation and in their reciprocal complementarity. From the perspective of postcolonial world view, our approach is focused of the essential antagonism that consists in the confrontation between « masters » (i.e. the colonists) and the « humiliated autochton » described by Hubert Félix Thiéfaine. In the same way, this study is periodically punctuated by other quotes from Thiéfaine's texts, which provide a suggestive counterpoint to the views exposed in the different chapters. One has to determine to what extent the incorporation of mythical elements actually appears as a key part by the emergence of a postcolonial discourse, while the shift from colonial to postcolonial discourse occurs through the recourse to a mythical legacy which combines reappropriations of the cultural legacy brought by the colonisators and renewal of the local mythic background, in this case with differents accentuations depending on the localisation of the text and its author in Black Africa, Maghreb or India. The recognition of significant divergences concerning the selection of the most important mythical elements goes in fact hand in hand with a large similarity in the treatment modalities concerning their integration in the poscolonial discourse, of which they are an essential part in all the cases studied. Several elements belonging to the mythical domain appear thus to be present in the poscolonial literary texts analysed in the present study. We find in particular symbols and mythems related to the resurgence of very old mythical figures and revealing in this way their eternal return. Apart from those symbolical structures, the investigation of the texts shows that mythical figures like Prometheus or Dionysos appear in postcolonial context as acceptable configurations of representations whose disruptive potentialities contain the possibility of a transition in the transmission of the values and systems of thoughts they convey and that underlie in the same way both the colonial and postcolonial facts. The investigation of the main categories in the novels building our corpus allows to describe the specific dynamics inherent to those novelistic categories and determined by the postcolonial context, which stays itself under the influence of the dynamics inherent to the mythical structures that underlies the thinking of people and also appears as the substrate of the literary and artistic achievements which are in touch with current concerns of our time. Henceforth our study postulates as a last result the presence of a mythical discourse common to all those texts. It appears as a projection of imaginary representations of transition in postcolonial context, grounded in eschatology and tending to the emergence of new cosmologies
3
Laurušaitė, Laura. "Baltic Novels of Exile: A Postcolonial Analysis." Doctoral thesis, Lithuanian Academic Libraries Network (LABT), 2011. http://vddb.laba.lt/obj/LT-eLABa-0001:E.02~2011~D_20110920_152550-94621.
Abstract:
The dissertation seeks to newly conceptualize the situation of the Baltic post-war exile and the way it was reflected in the Lithuanian and Latvian novels through the lens of the postcolonial criticism. Forced emigration after the Second World War is related to cardinal changes, thus the following post-colonial concepts marking the shifts become the analytical instruments: liminality (V. Turner), hybridity and mimicry (H. Bhabha), imagined community (B. Anderson), nostalgia (S. Boym), and trickster (M. Bachtin).
The analysis focuses around the Latvian and Lithuanian exile novels of the second half of the 20th century about war and life in exile written by the authors who suffered the same fate. The researcher uses a binary scheme of physical and mental colonization to consider the selected body of works. The chapter “Physical Colonization” analyzes war novels along the male/female gender lines. The “Mental Colonization” chapter explores works that reflect the scale of the survival strategies; the scale ranges from attachment to one‘s own culture to its voluntary renunciation. Three means of interface with the new countries stand out, which help to shed light onto the three stages of identity transformation of an emigrant, namely anti-colonization, hybridization, and self-colonization.
The post-colonialism used in the analysis of Baltic novels and its proposed definitions proved to be functional and effective. The conclusion can be drawn that the emigration experience and... [to full text]Disertacijoje naujai teoriškai konceptualizuojama baltų pokario išeivių bendruomenės situacija bei jos raiška lietuvių ir latvių romanuose. Prievartinė emigracija iš baltų kraštų po II pasaulinio karo susijusi su kardinaliomis permainomis, todėl analizės instrumentais tampa lūžį ir slinktis ženklinantys postkolonializmo konceptai: liminalumas (V. Turner), hibridiškumas ir mimikrija (H. Bhabha), įsivaizduojama bendruomenė (B. Anderson), nostalgija (S. Boym), triksteris (M. Bachtin). Analizės centre – latvių ir lietuvių XX a. II pusės egzodo romanai apie karą, pasitraukimą ir gyvenimą išeivijoje, sukurti rašytojų, kurie patys tą lemtį patyrė. Pasirinktų tekstų korpusui skvarbyti pasitelkiamas dvinaris fizinės ir mentalinės kolonizacijos modelis. „Fizinės kolonizacijos“ skyriuje analizuojami karo romanai pagal vyrų/moterų lyties skirtį. „Mentalinės kolonizacijos“ skyriuje tyrinėjami kūriniai, atspindintys išlikimo strategijas, kurios įvairuoja nuo prisirišimo prie savos kultūros iki savanoriško jos atsižadėjimo. Įžvelgiamos trys išeivio tapatybės transformacijos pakopos: antikolonizacija, hibridizacija, savikolonizacija. Baltų romanų analizei taikyta postkolonializmo metodologija, jos pasiūlytos sąvokos ir tipologizavimo modelis pasirodė funkcionalūs. Konstatuota, kad emigracinė patirtis ir tapatybės virsmai ne tiek pavaldūs etninei prigimčiai, kiek išgyvenami bendražmogiškai.
4
Daud, Rukhsana. "Retelling the story : postcolonial revisions of the canon." Thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.327296.
5
Burkitt, Katharine Helen. "Epic proportions : post-epic verse-novels and postcolonial critique." Thesis, University of Salford, 2007. http://usir.salford.ac.uk/26600/.
Abstract:
My thesis is based on the premise that verse-novels occupy a marginalised and contested position in contemporary literature: as they tread the generic boundaries of poetry and prose writing, they are always marked by their incongruous nature. This makes for uncomfortable reading as expectations are disrupted and undermined, and, for the poet, the adoption of the verse-novel form becomes both a risky and consciously political move. Each of the verse-novels that I consider is self-conscious of its anomalous generic affiliations and utilises them in order to replicate the postcolonial politics of the text. These texts all engage with the verse-novel form in different ways and draw attention to its problematic and marginal nature. This is used to highlight their postcolonial nature, as they are all concerned with matters of racial and national identity in a world where these categories are complicated. The commonality in these works is their relationships with epic form, in this thesis I identify this as a post-epic mode of writing. My study is based on the relationship between poetic form and postcolonial critique; it focuses upon three texts: the Australian poet Les Murray's Fredy Neptune, the Canadian poet Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, and British writer Bernardine Evaristo's The Emperor's Babe. These texts and their authors call for a reconsideration of postcolonialism; this is both demonstrative of a conceptual shift towards global notions of identity, whilst also being problematic in terms of the political commitment of the texts. Each of these works demonstrates an awareness of the contradictory nature of their positions as they shy away from Utopian visions. In line with this, my aim is to demonstrate the way in which the self-reflexive employment of experimental poetry compliments an engagement with the transformative aspect of contemporary postcolonial politics.
6
Borrell, Sally. "Challenging humanism : human-animal relations in recent postcolonial novels." Thesis, Middlesex University, 2009. http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/6520/.
Abstract:
This thesis identifies and examines a conjunction between white postcolonial cultural and species concerns within recent novels from South Africa, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. The argument takes as a starting point a suggestion by Philip Armstrong that postcolonial and animal studies discourses might form an alliance based on a common antagonist: humanism. Here, this idea is applied in the context of literature by white postcolonial writers. I explore the extent and nature of the alliance and the degree to which it can be called successful within the selected novels. Each of the five chapters concerns a different text, and the thesis is also divided into two sections. The first addresses the contrasting approaches to humanism and to animals offered by J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) and Yann Martel's Life of Pi (2001). The second addresses the representation of these themes in Fiona Farrell's Mr Allbones' Ferrets (2007), Julia Leigh's The Hunter (1999), and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2003), set in the past, present and future respectively, to illustrate the temporal dimension of the white postcolonial-animal alliance in question. Overall, the thesis emphasises the relevance of species concerns within white postcolonial culture, and posits the existence of a thread running through contemporary white postcolonial novels in which animals are a priority. All of the novels examined here, I argue, represent animals as more than victims in relation to humanist discourse: they emphasise animals' potential to disrupt that discourse by affecting the attitudes of individual humans or by resisting humanist endeavours by their own actions. The result of this, I suggest, is that animals appear as allies in white postcolonial cultures' attempts at self-definition against historical colonialism and contemporary globalisation, while white postcolonial literature portrays animals in ways that promote positive human perceptions of them.
7
Gardner, Barbara J. "Speaking Voices in Postcolonial Indian Novels from Orientalism to Outsourcing." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2012. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_diss/85.
Abstract:
In Orientalism, Edward Said identified how the Westerner “spoke for” and represented the silent Orient. Today with the burgeoning call-center business with India, it seems that the West now wants the Orient to speak for it. But is the voice that Western business requires in India a truly Indian voice? Or is it a manipulation which is a new form of the silencing of the Indian voice? This dissertation identifies how several Postcolonial Indian writers challenge the silence of Orientalism and the power issues of the West through various “speaking voices” of narratives representative of Indian life. Using Julie Kristeva’s abjection theory as a lens, this dissertation reveals Arundhati Roy as “speaking abjection” in The God of Small Things. Even Roy’s novelistic setting suffers abjection through neocolonialism. Salman Rushdie’s narrative method of magic realism allows “speaking trauma” as his character Saleem in Midnight’s Children suffers the traumas of Partition and Emergency as an allegorical representation of India. Using magic realism Saleem is able to speak the unspeakable. Other Indian voices, Bapsi Sidhwa, Khushwant Singh, and Rohinton Mistry “speak history” as their novels carry the weight of conveying an often-absent official history of Partition and the Emergency, history verified by Partition surviror interviews. In Such a Long Journey, Mistry uses an anthrozoological theme in portraying issues of power over innocence. Recognizing the choices and negotiations of immigrant life through the coining of the word (dis)assimilation, Jhumpa Lahiri’s writings are analyzed in terms of a “speaking voice” of (dis)assimilation for Indian immigrants in the United States, while Zadie Smith’s White Teeth “speaks (dis)assimilation” as a voice of multiple ethnicites negotiating immigrant life in the United Kingdom. Together these various “speaking voices” show the power of Indian writers in challenging the silence of Orientalism through narrative.
8
Tanniou, Sophie Nicole Isabelle. "Decoding identities in 'Francophone' African postcolonial spaces : local novels, global narratives." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2015. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/6360/.
Abstract:
My research bridges the gap between Anglophone postcolonial studies and Francophone literary studies by looking at Francophone literature from West and Equatorial Africa, which remains under-studied in France. This work answers key questions: how can this literature be interpreted beyond its current confines? How does it rethink local and global identities? What theoretical configurations can be applied to these writers to bring them into greater academic and public prominence? I propose a comprehensive analysis of this literature’s significance in the world through a comparative reading of five contemporary regional novels in their political, social and historical context. This multidirectional reading allows me to evoke what Dominic Thomas calls an ‘intercultural dynamics’ in which colonialism ‘finds itself relocated as a mechanism that proceeds from globalization’, and integrates various spatial zones in which thinking is produced. It brings forward key writers situated ‘outside of the parameters of Frenchness’ inscribed in cosmopolitan decolonizing and cultural reconstruction trends, such as Léonora Miano, a young Cameroonian author and winner of six French literary prizes; Fatou Diome, a Senegalese best-selling writer; Sénouvo Agbota Zinsou from Togo, 63 and in political exile; one contemporary writer, Kangni Alem (Togo), and one more established intellectual, Boubacar Boris Diop (Senegal).
9
Al-Khaldi, Mubarak Rashed. "Other narratives : representations of history in four postcolonial Native American novels /." The Ohio State University, 1998. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu148795220810831.
10
Kerskens, Christel. "Escaping the labyrinth of deception: a postcolonial approach to Margaret Atwood's novels." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/210726.
Abstract:
La thèse propose une lecture postcoloniale des romans de Margaret Atwood s'articulant sur le thème du mensonge. A travers l'étude de six aspets communs aux romans (l'intertextualité, le mensonge, le réalisme magique, le "trickster", l'hybridité et la quête), la thèse démontre l'importance du motif du mensonge dans une lecture postcoloniale de l'auteur.The thesis produces a postcolonial reading of Margaret Atwood's novels, based on the concept of deception. Articulated on six major elements of analysis (intertextual parody, deception, magic realism, trickster figures, hybridity, and quest pattern, the thesis shows how Margaret Atwood's novels can be read from a postcolonial point of view, within which the motif of deception plays a central role.
Doctorat en philosophie et lettres, Orientation langue et littérature
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished
11
Paine, Juliet. "'Exposing taboo spaces' : the postcolonial body in the novels of J. M. Coetzee /." Title page, contents and introduction only, 2001. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09AR/09arp145.pdf.
12
Chornokur, Kateryna. "Postcolonial Religion and Motherhood in the Novels by Louise Erdrich and Alice Walker." Scholar Commons, 2012. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/4009.
13
Korhonen, Jenny. "Racism and multiculturalism in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels." Thesis, Högskolan i Halmstad, 2016. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hh:diva-32144.
Abstract:
In this essay, the Harry Potter series will be analyzed in three different sections. I will use African American criticism and Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the discussion of ‘race’ and segregation that occurs between three different groups. This section will explain along what lines the world of Harry Potter is segregated and to what extent. Further, it will contain a case-study of house-elves through the lens of postcolonial criticism, that shows how certain groups are relegated to the status of “subaltern”, what form their oppression take and how they respond to it. I have chosen the elves, who are at the very bottom of the social ladder, because the extent of their oppression has been cut out from movie adaptions, and Rowling herself has liquidated the house-elf plot from the last novels. They provide the clearest example of differentiation between the groups of magical creatures, even though as a group they do not play an important part the series. The main concepts that will be used in this section are the issues of subaltern, mimicry and anticolonialist resistance. Finally, I will look at the novels through a multicultural perspective to see how Rowling has portrayed contemporary multicultural England and how it connects to the racial divisions in the magical world.
14
Alghamdi, Alaa. "The representation of home and identity of Muslim characters in selected British postcolonial novels." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.555964.
Abstract:
The concepts of home and identity are at the heart of any Postcolonial examination of literature and society. Home and identity are profoundly impacted by the power dynamics of the colonial relationship, by the individual immigrant's experience, and by the multicultural setting in which the subject finds him or herself. This study undertakes an interrogation of home and identity in the work of British authors Salman Rushdie, HanifKureishi, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, and Fadia Faqir. All of the novels studied deal with Muslim subjects - in most cases, first and second generation immigrants -living in England. Home and identity have powerful, multiple and contested meanings for these subjects. Drawing upon the theoretical work of Homi Bhabha, Rosemary Marangoly George, Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak and Edward Said, the conception of home and the formation of hybrid identities in these subjects is examined and connected to larger cultural manifestations of Muslim/Westem relationships. Specifically, the ways in which the subjects define their home - to what degree is the new setting 'home', and to what degree does that term seem to refer to an increasingly imagined and unchanging homeland? - are examined. The necessity of reference to home in order to establish identity and, accordingly, the emerging sense of home as the precursor to a successful hybrid identity formation are observed. The marginalized or 'Othered' position of the immigrant Muslim subject is considered, as is the ability of these texts (written by "Third World Cosmopolitans", as one critic maintains) to represent the voice of the subaltern subject. In this context, Spivak's seminal enquiry about the ability of the subaltern to speak is actively engaged and examined. The power dynamics caused by colonialism influence, but do not define, the voice of the Postcolonial subject. In many cases, the voice of the Postcolonial subject does indeed speak, and yields unique and creative solutions to dilemmas of home and identity. These are aptly represented in the works of the authors studied, as are the occasional assertions that the open possibilities and competing pressures of hybrid identity formation in a Postcolonial world might lead to an untenable level of strain in the individual subject.
15
Ndomaina, Aiah K. "Repetition, Resistance, and Renewal: Postmodern and Postcolonial Narrative Strategies in Selected Francophone African Novels." The Ohio State University, 1998. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1392392192.
16
Ndomaïna, Aiah K. "Repetiton, resistance, and renewal : postmodern and postcolonial narrative strategies in selected francophone African novels /." The Ohio State University, 1998. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1487950658545574.
17
White, Laura. "Fictions of progress the eco-politics of temporal constructions in colonial and postcolonial novels /." Diss., Online access via UMI:, 2009.
18
Paul, Nalini Caroline. "Identities displaced and misplaced : aspects of postcolonial subjectivity in the novels of Jean Rhys." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2008. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/474/.
Abstract:
This thesis examines various aspects of female subjectivity in the characters of Jean Rhys’s five novels: Quartet (1928), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934), Good Morning, Midnight (1939), and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). These aspects are informed by race, gender and class, unique to each of the novels, and all involving a degree of performance and/or mimicry. Although the phrase, “Stages of Postcolonial Subjectivity” was considered, it was replaced with “Aspects”, as a term that more accurately reflects subjectivity in these novels. The word “stages” denotes progress, suggesting that the subject is at some point unified or fixed, and progresses from one stage to the next. However, the term “aspects” suggests some of the central themes to the thesis, including mirroring, reflecting looking and gazing. For Rhys’s characters, it conjures up their awareness of others viewing them, and the ways in which this awareness shapes their own subjectivities, which in turn are constantly undergoing change and flux, and are never at any point fixed or unified. The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter provides a critical overview of Rhys’s last and best-known novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, building on some of the key debates in subsequent chapters, including psychoanalytical readings, postcolonial readings, race, gender, representation and the ability of the text to “write back” to the centre of power. The second chapter explores the phenomenon of the postcolonial female gaze in Wide Sargasso Sea, that of the white Creole and of Christophine as a black woman. Using film theory as a theoretical framework, the discussion focuses on Antoinette’s female gaze directed against her English husband, as well as Christophine’s ability to exert her own “other” power that lies outside of language and Englishness. The third chapter charts the fragmented subjectivity of Rhys’s female characters, examining their ambivalence towards England and an assumed other culture, from which they have originated. Postcolonial and psychoanalytical theories are applied to the analysis, which explores the female characters’ ability to challenge fixed categories of race and gender. The fourth chapter also challenges these fixed categories, exploring the performativity of the female protagonists in Rhys’s early novels, in terms of clothes, hair and make-up. These seemingly superficial details convey a deeper sense of understanding about the societies in which these characters live, the spaces they inhabit and the male figures with which they interact, and on whom they depend. The fifth and final chapter examines Rhys’s early female protagonists as metaphorical zombies, using sociological research into the Haitian zombie as a theoretical framework. Despite their zombification, however, these characters demonstrate their ability to engage in life through the use of memories and nostalgia. My analyses of Rhys’s female protagonists take into account the many, varied and often contradictory critical responses to her work and themes, which result from the complex and subtle evocations of the characters themselves.
19
Kirca, Mustafa. "Postmodernist Historical Novels: Jeanette Winterson." Phd thesis, METU, 2009. http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12610813/index.pdf.
Abstract:
The aim of this dissertation is to study postmodern historical novels, which are labeled &ldquohistoriographic metafictions&rdquo
(Hutcheon 1989: 92), in terms of their allowing for different voices and alternative, plural histories by subverting the historical documents and events that they refer to. The study analyzes texts from feminist and postcolonial literature, Jeanette Winterson&rsquo
s The Passion and Sexing the Cherry, and Salman Rushdie&rsquo
s Midnight&rsquo
s Children and Shame as examples in which the transgression of boundaries between fact and fiction is achieved. Basing its arguments on postmodern understanding of history, the thesis puts forward that historiography not only represents past events but it also gives meaning to them, as it is a signifying system, and turns historical events into historical facts. Historiography, while constructing historical facts, singles out certain past events while omitting others, for ideological reasons. This inevitably leads to the fact that marginalized groups are denied an official voice by hegemonic ideologies. Therefore, history is regarded as monologic, representing the dominant discourse. The thesis will analyze four novels by Winterson and Rushdie as double-voiced discourses where the dominant voice of history is refracted through subversion and gives way to other voices that have been suppressed. While analyzing the novels themselves, the thesis will look for the metafictional elements of the texts, stressing self-reflexivity, non-linear narrative, and parodic intention to pinpoint the refraction and the co-existence of plural voices. As a result, historiographic metafiction is proved to be a liberating genre, for feminist and postcolonial writers, that enables other histories to be verbalized.
20
Lutsyshyna, Oksana. "Postcolonial Herstory: The Novels of Assia Djebar (Algeria) and Oksana Zabuzhko (Ukraine): A Comparative Analysis." [Tampa, Fla] : University of South Florida, 2006. http://purl.fcla.edu/usf/dc/et/SFE0001459.
21
Al, Janabi Hazam K. A. "Postcolonial nationalism and contemporary literary theory : Algerian and Iraqi novels from 1962 to the present." Thesis, University of Leicester, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/2381/43044.
Abstract:
This thesis investigates identity and postcolonial nationalism as expressed in selected Iraqi and Algerian historical novels published after 1960. The study examines eight novels: Assia Djebar's Children of the New World (1962), Muhsin al-Ramli's Scattered Crumbs (2000), Yasmina Khadra's The Sirens of Baghdad (2008), Ali Bader's The Tobacco Keeper (2011), Abdul-Aziz Gramoule's Za'eem al-Aqaliyah al-Sahiqah [Leader of the Overwhelming Minority] (2005), Khadair al-Zaidi's Valyoom Asharah [Valium 10] (2015), Rashid Boudjedra's The Barbary Figs (2012) and Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013).Through a critical analysis of the selected data, the study investigates how historical fiction can create and legitimatize nationalist discourse on the one hand and counter hegemonic discourses on the other hand. The thesis also explores how, and to what extent, the critical awareness and blindness of postcolonial nationalism contributes to social and cultural formations in a pan-Arabic context, and how nationalist leaders exploit and oppress their citizens. The thesis also explores - through its investigation of literary texts - the perpetuation of Western cultural imperialism in Iraq and Algeria through the imposition of modern cultural apparatus such as nationalism, the religious/secular distinction and military action such as the War on Terror. It concludes that postcolonial nationalism extends colonial imperialism both ideologically and discursively. Postcolonial nationalist regimes in Iraq and Algeria have divided and exploited citizens by perpetuating Western concepts of nationhood and identity. By examining literary responses to postcolonial nationalist states, my critique explores its divisive and exploitative practices and explores authors' imagined alternative visions for more peaceful multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and multi-religious societies.
22
Biswas, Amrit Lal. ""Newness" and anti-absolutism in Salman Rushdie's novels : the aesthetics of postcolonial hybridity and postmodernism." Thesis, University of Northampton, 2006. http://nectar.northampton.ac.uk/2956/.
Abstract:
This thesis analyzes the newness of ideas in Salman Rushdie’s narrative art in the following eight novels: Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Furyy and Shalimar the Clown. These novels are concerned with the experience of formerly colonized, still disadvantaged peoples, uprooted, disoriented by the fragmentary tendency of postmodernism and undergoing metamorphosis in their postcolonial migrant conditions, which Rushdie believes represent a “metaphor for humanity” (IH 394). From Rushdie’s point of view, humanity is exposed to the transformation which “comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs” (IH 394). Humanity rejoices in “mongrelization (hybridization), and fears the absolutism of the Pure” (IH 394). In narrating such a medley of human existence, Rushdie creates a new literary language and a form to convey his perspectives of this uncertain world within which human beings have to exist. The thesis is structured in eight chapters interposed between an introduction and a conclusion. For its pivotal significance in Rushdie’s oeuvre The Satanic Verses occupies the first chapter; the other chapters are arranged in chronological order to represent the sequence of publication of the remaining seven novels. Each novel is concerned with a distinctive mise en scene, characterized by its unique motif depicting Rushdie’s insights into the predicament of human existence in a world of indeterminacy adrift in the historic confluence of postcolonialism, postmodernism and neo-colonialism. Ideologically, the thesis deconstructs Rushdie’s view of the world of migrants who are confounded by the force of entrenched metaphysical myths of unreliable provenance. Such view naturally leads Rushdie to critique all forms of fundamentalism which represses the freedom of expression to challenge conventional beliefs
23
Maufort, Jessica. "Ecological Magic Realism and Magic Realist Ecopoetics: Storying Place in Postcolonial Canadian and Australasian Novels." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2018. https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/276457/5/Contrat.pdf.
Abstract:
This comparative reading of contemporary Australasian and Canadian fiction privileges a reciprocal interaction between ecocriticism and magic realism within the field of postcolonial studies. My research shows that few works examine magic realism as a distinct aesthetic mode, while many ecocritical and postcolonial studies favour colonialist and pessimistic perspectives. Seeking to balance thematic and aesthetic concerns, my concepts of ecological magic realism and magic realist ecopoetics re-evaluate this still often misunderstood mode: its techniques in postcolonial narratives not only transcribe the cultural plight of the postcolonial subject, but also translate the missing ecological link between the environment and human beings. Informed by ecopoetic reflections on figurative language, Delbaere-Garant’s notion of mythic realism, and material ecocriticism, my concepts take the narrative and physical agency – or poiesis – of the non-human world as their focal point. Recognizing the dialogical web of human and non-human energies raises the issues of eco-imperialism as well as those of environmental and social justice. My thesis discusses two main configurations of ecological magic realism common to Anglo-Celtic and Indigenous texts within my corpus: synergy and crisis. These shifting interspecies relations are explored through the contexts of eco-spiritualities, scientific approaches to Nature, Nature writing, gothic-like metamorphoses, eco-apocalypse, and the Anthropocene. Rejecting dualistic worldviews, magic realism in these collaborative or competitive humans/Nature interactions remains ambivalent: on the one hand, it re-enacts human beings’ failed embeddedness in their non-human surroundings; on the other, it also re-opens the possibility of a mutually-enriching symbiosis.Doctorat en Langues, lettres et traductologie
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished
24
Jones, Diana. "Postcolonial concerns : gender, race and the dynamics of representation in six novels by Alin Laubreaux /." [St Lucia, Qld.], 2001. http://www.library.uq.edu.au/pdfserve.php?image=thesisabs/absthe16320.pdf.
25
Bower, Kerstin. "The postcolonial rewriting of Latin American history : with special reference to four novels by Abel Posse." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2002. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.270615.
26
Rosales, Figueroa Iliana. "Rebellious Detours: Creative Everyday Strategies of Resistance in Four Caribbean Novels." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1337716381.
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Barclay, Fiona J. "Postcolonial France? : the problematisation of Frenchness through North African immigration : a literary study of metropolitan novels 1980-2000." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2006. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/3248/.
Abstract:
This thesis undertakes a literary study of contemporary novels published by metropolitan French writers between 1980 and 2000, and analyses their representation of the changing relationship between France and North Africa. It begins by analysing the specificity of the situation in France, arguing that this is largely due to the functioning of the French Republican tradition, which equates inassimilable difference with inferiority. Consequently, France’s former colonies represent a privileged site of the Republican relationship with difference. This is particularly acute in the case of Algeria, by virtue of its former status as an integral part of the French Republic, and as a result of the large population of Algerian origin resident within France. It therefore offers a useful perspective from which to assess the extent to which French identities and systems of representation have been problematised in the post-colonial era. Part One examines contemporary French attitudes towards the wider Maghreb, including examples from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Drawing on traditions which extend back to Montaigne and Montesquieu, it considers contemporary updating of Orientalist traditions within which French writers have explored other countries as seen from the Hexagon. Part Two concerns the singularity of Algeria’s relationship with France. By focusing on a case-study – representations of the Paris massacre of 17 October 1961 – the thesis draws wider conclusions about the way in which attitudes to the Algerian War are changing, and the key role potentially played by literary and other artistic representation. The final chapter looks at recollections of life in Algeria in the work of two women writers, Marie Cardinal and Hélène Cixous. It concludes that their early experience there of conflict and otherness was fundamental in shaping the development of their writing project, and that their literary memories destabilise notions of a unified ‘Frenchness’.
28
Schwerdt, Dianne. "Reconstructing identity in postcolonial African fiction / individualism and community in the novels of Ngugi wa Thiong'o / Dianne O. Schwerdt." Title page, abstract and contents only, 1994. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09PH/09phs4148.pdf.
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Sirkin, Elizabeth Taryn. "Popular Images and Cosmopolitan Mediation: Mass Media and Western Pop Culture in the Anglophone South Asian Novel." online version, 2007. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=case1175776213.
30
Rine, Dana. "Small Flowerings of Unhu: the Survival of Community in Tsitsi Dangarembga's Novels." Scholar Commons, 2011. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/3312.
Abstract:
This thesis examines the presence of unhu, a process of becoming and remaining human through community ties, in Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not by Tsitsi Dangarembga. Dangarembga interrogates corrupt versions of community by creating positive examples of unhu that alternatively foster community building. Utilizing ecocritical, utopian, and postcolonial methodologies, this thesis postulates that these novels stress the importance of retaining a traditional concept like unhu while also acknowledging the need to adjust it over time to ensure its vitality. Both novels depict the creativity and resilience of unhu amid toxic surroundings.
31
Lau, Hor-ying Esther. "The migrant experience, identity politics, and representation in postcolonial London : contemporary British Novels by Zadie Smith, Hanif Kureishi and Monica Ali /." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2008. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B39634309.
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Mostafa, D. S. "Re-Cycling the Flâneur : The Image of the Narrator in Three Postcolonial Novels on the Cities of Cairo, Karachi, and Beirut." Thesis, University of Manchester, 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.502113.
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Teal, Scott Allen. "Specters of poverty and sources of hope in the novels of Amitav Ghosh and Rohinton Mistry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:ab0fd761-9143-4192-82bf-43336c48f070.
Abstract:
This thesis attempts to reformulate the concept of hope represented in, and inflected by, the Indian English novel. This comparative literary study focuses primarily on Amitav Ghosh and Rohinton Mistry, whose novels offer myriad examples and resultant effects of a reflexive hope. I argue in light of their work to refigure hope in its varied and multiple articulations: positive and negative, for-life and for-death, dependency, waiting, nostalgia, narcissism. All of these, I suggest, manifest in a nominal-messianic hope that formulates a powerful critique of global capital most advantageously constellated in these Indian English novels. I arrive at this from the early writings of Jawaharlal Nehru and his unshakable belief in socialist progress that informs the productive tension within hope that inform the readings of Ghosh’s and Mistry’s novels. Concomitant to this thesis on hope is the recalibration of definitions of poverty to the principles of capabilities that allow for the simultaneous discussion of how the state can shape social opportunities for its citizens. This, I argue, is necessary for the flourishing of more nuanced understanding of hope. Moving away from purely quantitative measurements of poverty to more qualitative capabilities pushes the novel to the foreground of these arguments. Just as Nehru explores his own formulations of hope and hopefulness through the poetry of Matthew Arnold, the Indian English novel, here, is best able to enunciate a reflexive hope that is central to the notion of capabilities. This is why poverty studies in India needs the Indian English novel.
34
Fransson, Sophia. "Using Selected Novels of Harry Potter as a Tool for Discussion in the English as a Foreign Language Classroom with Postcolonial and Marxist Perspectives." Thesis, Södertörns högskola, Institutionen för kultur och lärande, 2015. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-29560.
Abstract:
The Harry Potter novels written by J.K Rowling have been popular since the first book was released in 1997. Rowling has written seven books about Harry and the first four together with the Swedish National Agency for Education constitute the primary sources of this essay. The essay discusses how these supposed children’s’ novels can be used to construct a lesson for students in the Swedish upper secondary classroom. The lesson plan created is based on the analysis of the possible themes of the novels using Postcolonial and Marxist critical perspectives. The theories are used to show how discrimination and suppression can be seen in the Harry Potter novels. Previous research has shown that the occurrences in Harry Potter is similar to the occurrences happening in the real world and the lesson plan is created to compare these fictional happenings with the ones happening in our real society. The lesson plan constructed consequently focuses on how the Harry Potter novels can be used to discuss discrimination and suppression takes place in English speaking societies as required by the rules and guidelines provided by the Swedish National Agency for Education.
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Karshmer, Elana D. "The Karoo, The Veld, and the Co-Op: The Farm as Microcosm and Place for Change in Schreiner, Lessing, and Head." Scholar Commons, 2019. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/7823.
Abstract:
The farm novels of southern Africa can be considered microcosms of gender stereotypes and racial attitudes. Reading these novels using post-colonial, Marxist, and feminist theory is especially useful in thinking about how these novels reflect female writers’ perspectives about the success of the imperialism in Africa and the lasting effects of colonialism on gender and race relations. In addition, these novels provide interesting insight into colonialism, allowing each author to comment on the effect of imperialism on both the colonized and those who take up the colonial project.
This dissertation examines novels by three female African writers: The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner, The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing, and When Rain Clouds Gather by Bessie Head. Written at different stages of colonial power, each novel represents agrarian life in southern African colonies that share similar cultural, historical, colonial, and racial attitudes. These novels can be interpreted as building on, challenging, and “writing back” to the concept of the plaasroman, a genre central to the South African colonial experience.
In addition to discussing how these novels undermine traditional forms of pastoral literature in order to comment explicitly on those forms’ failure to account for the farm experience in southern Africa, this dissertation applies postcolonial, Marxist, and ecofeminist criticism to delve into issues of postcolonial identity, racism, and the role of the farm as both a microcosm and a catalyst for change.
36
Corbett, Sarah. "Dreamriser : writing the postcolonial body in Les Murray's Fredy Neptune." Thesis, University of Manchester, 2013. https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/dreamriser-writing-the-postcolonial-body-in-les-murrays-fredy-neptune(6391ca97-1959-47b3-8b71-2ed6b337941d).html.
Abstract:
This thesis is presented in two parts. The first part, Dreamriser, is a verse-novel in two books, the second part a critical essay, ‘Writing the Postcolonial Body’ in Les Murray’s 1997 verse-novel Fredy Neptune. Dreamriser is split into two books. In ‘The Runner’ Felix Morning wakes on a backstreet of a strange city with no memory of who he is. Flick shows him the way to The Bunker, an underground club where he meets the Dreamriser, a mysterious woman he half remembers. She gives him a parcel he must deliver to the place of the lost things. In ‘Pinky’ Iain and Esther meet on a train and they start a love affair. Damaged by her experience with men, Esther has been sent by the Dreamriser cult to take her revenge. When she falls in love with Iain she must make a choice between destruction and union. Dreamriser was inspired by the idea of the verse-novel, its possibilities and parameters. But where Fredy Neptune is an extended narrative through Twentieth Century history, Dreamriser messes with time frames and layers of reality and is located within the lost interior ‘history’ of the protagonists. I was interested in finding out how far I could push the lyric under the pressure of narrative, and play with the idea of linear narrative under the pressure of the lyric. I hoped to achieve a sense of the lyric poem across the whole structure of the ‘verse-novel’ as much as within each stanza, section or chapter. In this way Dreamriser mimics rather than attempts to emulate the conventional idea of the novel. Fredy Neptune moves towards and is constantly seeking that resolution and return to wholeness for its protagonist; Dreamriser refuses and actively undermines expectations of resolution and conclusion. Where Dreamriser and Fredy Neptune meet is in their treatment of the body as subject and material for the poem, in the location of the mind and the myriad layers of identity within the body, and in its consideration of gender and gender relations. In the following critical essay, ‘Writing the Postcolonial Body in Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune’ I look at how Murray addresses postcolonial identity in Australia in his verse novel through the medium of the body. History, gender, national identity and the poem itself are embodied in the very act of writing and in the physical experience of reading the poem. I argue that Murray writes identity through the body in the poem of Fredy Neptune.
37
Khan, Shoukat Yaseen. "History, culture and identity in the novels of Bapsi Sidhwa, Bharati Mukherjee and Hanif Kureishi." Thesis, Tours, 2017. http://www.theses.fr/2017TOUR2018/document.
Abstract:
L'objectif de cette thèse est d'étudier trois romans écrits par des auteurs anglophones du Pakistan ou de l'Inde, à savoir Bapsi Sidhwa, Bharati Mukherjee et Hanif Kureishi. On pourrait être tenté de placer les trois écrivains de cette étude dans la catégorie «littérature des immigrants». Ils écrivent tous à un moment de migration de masse lorsque l'idée de «choc culturel» parmi les peuples occidentaux commence à être plus évidente. Les trois écrivains sont affectés par des thèmes qui apparaissent seulement de manière marginale dans le débat évoqué ci-dessus, l'accent étant principalement mis sur les difficultés culturelles et sociales des femmes dans la société indo-pakistanaise. Quant à Kureishi, la polarisation mentionnée ci-dessus suppose un accent très différent, impliquant la situation d'un Asiatique né et élevé dans la société occidentale. Dans cette évaluation globale du contexte idéologique et historique commun aux trois écrivains, il sera important d'examiner les attitudes spécifiques adoptées par chaque écrivain par rapport à son expérience personnelle. L'objectif principal de cette étude sera donc thématique, en se concentrant sur les préoccupations spécifiques de ces écrivains et sur la manière dont cela se manifeste dans leur représentation particulière des tensions en jeuThe objective of this thesis is to study three novels written by English-speaking authors of Pakistan or India, namely Bapsi Sidhwa, Bharati Mukherjee and Hanif Kureishi. One might be tempted to place the three writers of this study in the category of "literature of immigrants." They all write at a time of mass migration when the idea of "cultural shock" among Western peoples begins to be more evident. All three writers are affected by themes which appear only marginally in the debate evoked above, much of the emphasis being on the cultural and social difficulties of women in Indo-Pakistani society. As for Kureishi, the polarization mentioned above assumes a very different emphasis, involving the situation of an Asian born and brought up inside Western society. Within this overall assessment of the ideological and historical context common to all three writers, it will thus be important to examine the specific attitudes adopted by each writer in relation to his or her own personal experience. The main focus of this study will therefore be thematic, centering on these writers’ specific preoccupations and the way this is seen in their peculiar depiction of the tensions at stake
38
Sorensen, Eli Park. "Postcolonial melancholia : theory, interpretation and the novel." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 2007. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1446117/.
Abstract:
In my doctoral dissertation, I discuss and explore notions of the literary and literary form in postcolonial studies. Beginning with a focus on recent expressions of unease about the theoretical paradigms through which the postcolonial perspective responds to literary texts, I discuss the emergence of what I call postcolonial melancholia, an atmosphere induced by the increased institutionalisation in academia in recent years. Using Freud's notion of melancholia, as a form of ghostly identification with an absent object, I explore what leading critics have seen as a loss of contemporary postcolonial criticality, and which I see as intimately related to the problematic ways in which the dimension of the literary has been used. In the second part of my dissertation, I analyse and discuss various literary strategies as formulated in three formally different postcolonial novels---Ousmane Sembene's Xala, J.M. Coetzee's Foe, and Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance---in order to map the contradictions, limitations but also possibilities of novelistic representation in postcolonial space. My overall critical perspective will be informed by the works of Georg Lukacs, and in particular his notion of a utopian-interpretive realist ideal, developed in the early work Theory of the Novel. My argument is that this utopian-interpretive realist ideal can also be seen as a particularly useful notion in connection with what I see as the literary dimension in many postcolonial novels, as it is situated in between complex socio-political agendas and aesthetic-representational problematics. Lukacs's formal-literary ideal is repeated in his later writings on realism from the thirties, but notably in a transfigured way---as an extra-literary, authoritative norm. The dynamic of this trajectory, one that moves from idealism to dogmatism, can (with certain modifications) be seen as similar to the development of the field of postcolonial critical discourse---moving from an early, idealistic beginning, to an increasingly dogmatic, prescriptive and authoritarian academic discourse. By using the trajectory of Lukacs's realist ideal as a comparative background, I attempt explore alternative ways of conceiving postcolonial literariness ways that may help the field of postcolonial studies to come to terms with what I see as the symptom of postcolonial melancholia, haunting the contemporary discipline.
39
Clarke, Anna. "In a postcolonial world : the Indian novel in English." Thesis, University of Essex, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.423519.
40
Warnes, Christopher Graham. "Magical realism and the cultural politics of the postcolonial novel." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2003. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.411212.
41
Bhattacharya, Sourit. "The crisis of modernity : realism and the postcolonial Indian novel." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2017. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/97322/.
Abstract:
This thesis attempts to understand, through a study of postcolonial Indian novels, the nature and character of Indian (post)colonial modernity. Modernity is understood as the social condition that (post)colonial modernisation and development have given rise to. This condition underlies a historical crisis which is manifest in various kinds of catastrophic events – famine, peasant insurgency, caste violence, communal riot, state repression, and so on. By analysing three of these historical events – the 1943-44 Bengal famine, the Naxalbari Movement (1967-1972), and the State of Emergency (1975-1977) – this thesis argues that a careful reading of the dialectic between event and crisis can offer crucial insights into the conditions of postcolonial modernity. It claims that novels that register these events are able to capture the event-crisis dialectic through their use of form and mode. Socially committed writers adopt the realist form to represent the historical aspects and traumatising consequences of the events. However, because the nature, form, and orientation of these events are different, their realisms undergo immense stylistic improvisation. These stylistic shifts are shaped primarily by the writers’ adapting of various literary modes to the specific requirements (i.e. the historical context). Modes are chosen to represent and historicise the specific character and appearance of an event. In order to represent the Bengal famine, the thesis argues, Bhabani Bhattacharya and Amalendu Chakraborty use analytical-affective and metafictional modes, while Mahasweta Devi and Nabarun Bhattacharya deploy quest and urban fantastic modes to register the Naxalbari Movement and its aftermath. For the Emergency, writers such as Salman Rushdie, O. V. Vijayan, and Arun Joshi use magical, grotesque and mythical modes, and Nayantara Sahgal and Rohinton Mistry employ critical realist modes, defined sharply by the writers’ class- and caste-based perspectives. These modes shape the realisms in the respective texts and transform realist literary form into a highly experimental and heterogeneous matter. Contrary to the prevailing academic belief that modernity breeds modernism, the thesis posits that, in the postcolonial Indian context, the conditions of modernity have provoked a historically conscious, experimental, and modernistic form of ‘crisis realism’.
42
Mavromatidou, Eleni. "The Role Of The (Postcolonial) Intellectual/Critic: Textualization Of History As Trauma: The African American And Modern Greek Paradigm." Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1213616340.
43
Quiroz, Ciriaco Victor Felipe Segundo. "Pensamiento andino y crítica postcolonial. Un estudio de Rosa Cuchillo de Óscar Colchado." Bachelor's thesis, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 2006. https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12672/440.
Abstract:
Mi primer acercamiento a Rosa Cuchillo (1997), novela de Óscar Colchado Lucio (Huallanca, Ancash 1947), estuvo motivado por el deseo de participar, desde el campo de los estudios literarios, en el debate sobre la violencia política que azotó nuestro país durante el conflicto armado interno producido en las dos últimas décadas del siglo XX. En efecto, mis primeras lecturas de esta importante obra se circunscribían a los aspectos que me permitieran atender esta urgente e ineludible agenda re/instalada a raíz de la publicación del Informe Final de la Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación en agosto de 2003. Así, mientras cursaba el último año del pregrado en la Facultad de Letras de la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, el 2004, me dediqué a discutir mis reflexiones en torno a esta novela con algunos compañeros y profesores. Sin embargo, con el transcurrir de los meses, y luego de incesantes lecturas, surgieron otras interrogantes que me llevaron a profundizar mi interés en Rosa Cuchillo y a ampliar mi inicial campo de investigación. En ese momento comencé a reunir el escaso material crítico sobre esta trascendental obra con el objetivo de encontrar algunas respuestas a mis nuevas inquietudes, labor que, en gran medida, resultó infructuosa.
Las diversas problemáticas que presenta Rosa Cuchillo giran en función a la interconexión de dos aspectos fundamentales. En primer lugar, su condición de novela bicultural, es decir, de obra literaria que se inserta en las fronteras de dos sistemas socioculturales (o semiósferas) que interactúan y se conjugan tensionalmente en nuestro territorio nacional: el andino y el occidental. En segundo lugar, como ya hemos adelantado, la representación del tema del conflicto armado interno (1980-2000) acrecienta la necesidad del análisis de la novela ya que inscribe los principales problemas de nuestra sociedad (las herencias coloniales, la violencia y la exclusión social) en el momento más dramático de nuestra historia republicana. La compleja representación discursiva de estas dos grandes problemáticas, centrales para repensar nuestro futuro como nación, genera que Rosa Cuchillo ocupe un lugar privilegiado dentro de la narrativa peruana de finales del siglo XX.
Me interesa investigar la presencia activa del pensamiento andino en Rosa Cuchillo en sus diferentes manifestaciones. Entiendo por pensamiento andino el modo particular de la sociedad andina de racionalizar y conceptualizar la realidad, el cual hunde sus raíces en la era prehispánica. Sin embargo, es necesario precisar que este modo de pensamiento no se ha mantenido como un núcleo “esencial” o “incontaminado” desde la antigüedad hasta la época contemporánea. Por el contrario, a través de disyunciones, fusiones y sincretismos, ha permanecido en forma de principios cognoscitivos que se actualizan en las distintas prácticas socioculturales de la comunidad andina.Tesis
44
Stein, Mark. "Black British literature : novels of transformation /." Columbus (Ohio) : the Ohio state university press, 2004. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb39937052q.
45
Palapala, Joan Linda. "There Is No Place For African Women: Gender Politics in the Writings of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie." OpenSIUC, 2018. https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/dissertations/1537.
Abstract:
My dissertation interrogates Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s representation of African women in her literary oeuvre. I argue that her female characters bear witness to intersecting oppressions of African women portraying them as being extremely marginalized at home and lacking achievable alternate homes. This study also interrogates Adichie’s feminist philosophy and posits that she typically agitates for equality for all regardless of sex, gender, race, and/or other defining identities. Lastly, I argue that Adichie uses the practice of the African novel to rewrite the character of African women in African literature where her uniqueness hinges on her interrogation of the place of Africans in contemporary world culture, in turn, uses the novel to critique society’s hierarchies of privilege and oppression and of stereotypical representation of Africa and Africans in the world arena.
46
Daigle, Amelie. "Transnational Communities and the Novel in the Age of Globalization:." Thesis, Boston College, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:108571.
Abstract:
Thesis advisor: Kalpana SeshadriThe novel is generally read through a Western lens that privileges both individual subjectivity and the nation-state. My dissertation acts as an intervention into the critical tradition that sees the novel as a genre preoccupied with the individual, the nation-state, and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship through which the two relate to each other. This tradition includes seminal theorists Ian Watt, Fredric Jameson, and Benedict Anderson as well as contemporary critics such as Pascale Casanova and Joseph Slaughter. Transnational Communities challenges this accepted framework for understanding the novel genre through an examination of novels which decenter the categories of individual and nation-state and argues that in this moment of unprecedented globalization, the novel’s ability to imagine new forms of community is an increasingly relevant social function
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2019
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: English
47
Juarez, Sarah. "A Question of Power: Reinstating Political Agency in the Postcolonial Novel." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2018. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/1100.
Abstract:
In A Question of Power, Bessie Head presents the production of the subject by using the postcolonial novel as a form of constructivist action against colonialism. Arguing against the compartmentalization of the postcolonial novel as merely literary aesthetic, Head instead presents the novel as a form of political literature, offering intricate details of the manifestation of subjectivity and representations of the liminal subject in decolonizing states through the replication of formal colonial powers in informal social institutions.
48
Mingay, Philip Frederick James. "Vivisectors and the vivisected, the painter figure in the postcolonial novel." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2001. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/NQ60328.pdf.
49
Rochester, Rachel. "Postcolonial Cli-Fi: Advocacy and the Novel Form in the Anthropocene." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/23736.
Abstract:
Through the filters of postcolonial theory, environmental humanities, and digital humanities, this project considers the capabilities and limitations of novels to galvanize action in response to environmental crises. My findings suggest that novels are well equipped to engage in environmental education, although some of the form’s conventions must be disrupted to fully capitalize upon its strengths. The modern novel is conventionally limited in scope, often resorts to apocalyptic narratives that can breed hopelessness, is dedicated to a form of realism that belies the dramatic weather events exacerbated by climate change, defers authority to a single voice, and is logocentric. By supplementing conventional novels with a variety of paratexts, including digital tools, scientific findings, non-fiction accounts of past, present, and future activism, and authorial biography, it is my contention that the novel’s potency as a pedagogical tool increases.
After addressing this project’s stakes and contexts in my Introduction, Chapter II assesses three South Asian novels in English that are concerned with sustainable development: Bhabani Bhattacharya’s Shadow from Ladakh, Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine, and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. I conclude by considering how StoryMaps might further disrupt pro-sustainable development propaganda alongside more traditional novels. Chapter III examines how explicitly activist South Asian novelists construct authorial personae that propose additional solutions to the environmental problems identified in their novels, focusing on Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People. Chapter IV coins the term “locus-colonial novel,” a novel that decenters the human, situating place at the fulcrum of a work of historical fiction, using Hari Kunzru’s Gods without Men as one exemplar. I examine Kunzru’s novel alongside promotional materials for planned Mars missions to consider how narratives of colonialism on Earth might lead to a more socially and environmentally sustainable colonial model for Mars. Chapter V introduces the concept of a digital locus-colonial novel that allows users to develop informed, environmentally focused scenarios for colonial Mars. Through these chapters, this dissertation identifies specific rhetorical techniques that allow conscientious novels to create imaginative spaces where readers might explore solutions to the social, economic, and increasingly environmental problems facing human populations worldwide.
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Karajayerlian, Asdghig. "Large Worlds/Small Places: Critical Cosmopolitanism and Stereoscopic Vision in the Global Postcolonial Novel." Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies / OhioLINK, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1264031967.