Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Postcolonial ecocriticism'

Sally Mann (1951- ) has spent forty years photographing scenes in the American South, including domestic scenes, landscapes, and portraits. Although scholars generally interpret her work as a reflection of the region’s history of violence and oppression, my research will consider her work through the lens of postcolonial ecocriticism. In her art and writing, Mann portrays the land as an indifferent witness to history, a force intertwined with humanity, lending matter for human lives and reclaiming it after death. However, she also describes the way the environment interferes with her the antiquated technology she uses, creating dramatic flaws that imbue the landscapes with emotion absent from the scenes themselves. My research offers new perspectives on Mann’s body of work, especially the way she grants agency to the environment, thereby giving a voice to silent ecologies or silenced histories.

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.

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.

This essay explores the representation of nonhuman nature in David Malouf’s postcolonial novel Remembering Babylon. By applying a postcolonial ecocritical framework to the narrative the essay shows how nonhuman nature, including the animalised human “other”, is subject to Western ideologies that see them as resources or services to be exploited. However, the essay also reveals how the nonhuman “others” are opposing these views by resisting the Western pastoralizing practices and exposing environmental threats, as well as altering some of the Diasporic character’s views of the nonhuman “other” and their sense of displacement.

This study examines the modernist fiction by three transnational women writers who turned to the ocean in their writing during the first half of the twentieth century to navigate their divided or hyphenated national identities. The Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973), the Finland-Swedish author Hagar Olsson (1893-1978), and the New Zealand short story writer of English descent, Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), use ocean space in their fiction, in the form of both sea imagery and material seascape settings, to unsettle ideologically limiting and culturally anchored categories of identity, gender, class, place and time. The modernist aesthetics and marginal ethics of these white colonial women who existed at a slant to the geographical and cultural center of the British, masculine metropolis pivot on two competing ocean views. First, the sea features in their work as a historically compliant, smooth surface in the service of the establishment, enabling and justifying imperial expansion and colonial settlement, as well as defining and patrolling the uncompromising borders of the land-based modern nation state. Alternately, the ocean comes to disrupt progressive imperial models of history, to inspire fluid and transgressive ideologies, to bear witness to violent histories submerged by official records, and to confound our sense of scale and chronological time through outsized subterranean ecologies that blur the line between land and water, and, as a consequence, throw into question larger fundamental, ontological distinctions, such as that between the ‘human’ and the ‘non-human,’ or ‘more-than-human.’ By bringing postcolonial and ecocritical perspectives to bear on Bowen, Mansfield and Olsson’s literary representations of the ocean, my study contributes to the current expanding reach of modernist studies, ushering into the critical spotlight global regions previously overlooked and misfit writers traditionally dismissed, to locate that which modernity originally defined itself against at the vibrant heart of that construction.

Notre thèse aborde la présence des personnages féminins dans le roman italien contemporain du point de vue des relations de care, du rapport à l'écologie et à la démocratie. Selon une perspective écoféministe et postcoloniale, nous étudions le rapport des femmes protagonistes du roman italien contemporain aux 'lieux' qu'elles habitent. À travers l'analyse littéraire de trois romans essentiels, notre travail consiste à montrer le rôle de la littérature dans la réinscription de l'esthétique dans l'éthique en présentant la femme dans la littérature comme un symbole de résistance à la crise écologique, au déracinement et au néolibéralisme effréné.Dans le vaste panorama de la littérature italienne contemporaine, nous avons choisi de nous rapprocher de ces femmes qui, comme les terres polluées ou confisquées et les populations colonisées, n'ont pas vraiment de voix car subalternes à la culture néolibérale. Étudiée d'un point de vue écoféministe, postcolonial et selon une éthique du care, l'image de la femme protagoniste du roman italien contemporain peut proposer une nouvelle lecture des enjeux du féminisme actuel. Marilina Labruna de Carmen Covito dans La bruttina stagionata, Estrellita, L'Iguane d'Anna Maria Ortese ou les femmes immigrées dans l’Italie contemporaine dans les romans Amiche per la pelle de Laila Wadia, Adua d'Igiaba Scego et Pecore nere sont toutes des expressions différentes de la démocratie dans le sens où elles représentent des figures de résistance au déracinement et à l'assimilation culturelle
This thesis addresses the presence of female characters in the contemporary Italian Novel from the viewpoint of care relationships, in relation to ecology and democracy. From an ecofeminist and postcolonial perspective, we attempt to study the relationship of the female protagonists of the contemporary Italian Novel to the 'places' they inhabit. Through the literary analysis of three essential novels, our work consists of showing the role of literature in the reinstatement of aesthetics in ethics by presenting women in literature as a symbol of resistance to the ecological crisis, to uprooting and unrestrained neoliberalism. In the vast panorama of contemporary Italian literature, we have chosen to get closer to these women who, like polluted or confiscated lands and colonized populations, are voiceless because they are subordinate to neoliberal culture. Studied from an ecofeminist, postcolonial point of view and according to the ethics of care, the image of the protagonist woman of the contemporary Italian novel can offer a new reading of the challenges facing current feminism. Marilina Labruna by Carmen Covito in La bruttina stagionata, Estrellita in L'Iguana by Anna Maria Ortese or immigrant women in contemporary Italy in the novels Amiche per la pelle by Laila Wadia, Adua d'Igiaba Scego and Pecore nere are all different expressions of democracy in the sense that they represent figures of resistance to uprooting and cultural assimilation

Cette thèse présente une analyse comparée des œuvres de deux écrivains contemporains, John Maxwell Coetzee (1940-), originaire d’Afrique du Sud, et Wu Ming-yi (1971-), de Taïwan, que l’on associe au genre de la « littérature écologique postcoloniale ». À partir de leurs travaux, cette thèse propose une étude interdisciplinaire couvrant trois dimensions de leurs travaux : la théorie, la politique et le littéraire. Les textes choisis pour l’analyse sont ceux qui cherchent à la fois à fournir une image dystopique de l’exploitation des environnements naturels et des êtres non-humains et à représenter l’oppression coloniale des peuples colonisés et de l’exploitation des ressources naturelles dans différentes parties du monde. En ce qui concerne la dimension théorique, la thèse aborde le questionnement suivant : comment la philosophie occidentale contemporaine prend en compte les animaux et les êtres écologiques (êtres non-humains et non-animaux), afin de reconsidérer la question plus générale de l’altérité. Quant à la dimension politique, la thèse adopte une posture philosophique afin de questionner les contextes historiques des pays postcoloniaux, notamment ceux de l’Afrique du Sud et de Taïwan. Enfin, la dimension littéraire examine les écrits de Coetzee et de Wu afin de montrer comment leurs textes décrivent l’« autre écologique » (ecological other) en tant que moyen pour lutter contre l’identité politique postcoloniale
This thesis presents the literary works of two contemporary writers—John Maxwell Coetzee (1940-), originally from South Africa, and Wu Ming-yi (1971-) from Taiwan—whom it analyses as key exponents of postcolonial eco-literature. The thesis offers an interdisciplinary study of their works in their theoretical, political and literary aspects. The texts selected for analysis are those that seek to present a dystopian image of the exploited natural environment or nonhuman entities, while, at the same time, associating and articulating these representations with the suppressions and exploitations carried out within colonial frameworks in different parts of the world. As regards the theoretical perspective of the thesis, it addresses the subject of how contemporary continental philosophy takes nonhuman animals and other kinds of ecological beings into account and rethinks the philosophical question of the other. With respect to politics, it contextualises this philosophical questioning by looking at the history of various postcolonial countries, notably South Africa and Taiwan. Lastly, as far as literature is concerned, it examines the writings of Coetzee and Wu in order to show how their texts depict the ecological other as a way of contesting postcolonial identity politics

In my thesis, I examine Aminata Sow Fall's sixth novel Douceurs du bercail "The Sweetness of Home" through three lenses: race, gender, and nature. I analyze the way Sow Fall approaches each of these three areas in terms of paradox to emphasize her understanding of the complexity of these issues and her reluctance to outline them rigidly. Instead of putting forth hard opinions about how race, gender, or nature should be understood, Sow Fall exhibits a propensity to allow each area to remain complicated. I study why she allows racial, gendered, and environmental paradoxes to circulate around one another in her text rather than attempting to resolve them, concluding that she uses this strategy both as an organizing principle and as an invitation to her readers to question the extant theories surrounding these three issues. Sow Fall's use of language in all three areas signals an underlying fascination with the paradoxes inherent in each. In the chapter on race, I discuss the contrasting narrative styles Sow Fall uses to describe European airport officials versus the protagonist Asta's best friend, a French woman named Anne. Sow Fall's language is significant here because she contrasts two white Europeans, one characterized as systematic and cold, the other warm and open, respectively. I also discuss the way Sow Fall uses an informal and lethargic narrative voice to characterize a black secretary living in Senegal, further highlighting the disconnect between the two racial groups. In the chapter on feminism, I discuss a shift in Asta's language as she becomes more assertive. I also analyze the various aspects of femininity in Douceurs du bercail which have led some scholars to carry out feminist readings of the text, such as Asta's decision to leave her domineering and abusive husband, but recognize the more traditional aspects of the novel, such as Asta's marriage to Babou at Naatangué, as problematic to a purely feminist reading of the text. In the chapter on nature, I study Sow Fall's problematic use of Westernized language to describe the development of the untouched land of Naatangué into a lucrative farm. Throughout the chapters, I interpret Naatangué as the ultimate paradoxical space which is at once wrought with complicated language and conflicting ideals yet acts as a quasi-paradise where Asta and her friends balance the conflicting forces of tradition and modernity. Naatangué also acts as an organizing principle where all three areas of my study intersect.

In this dissertation, I argue that contemporary cultural narratives are infused with ongoing ideologies of Euro-American imperialism that prioritizes Western bodies and ways of engaging with living and nonliving beings. This restriction severely hinders possible responses to the present environmental crisis of the era often called the 'Anthropocene' through constant creation and recreation of imperial power relations and the presumed superiority of Western approaches to living. Taking inspiration from postcolonial theorist Edward Said and theories of cultural studies and empire, I use interdisciplinary methods of narrative analysis to examine threads of imperial ideologies that are (re)told and glorified in popular American science fiction television series Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001). Voyager follows the Star Trek tradition of exploring the far reaches of space to advance human knowledge, and in doing so writes Western imperial practices of difference into an idealized future. In chapters 2 through 5, I explore how the series highlights American exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, a belief in endless linear progress, and the creation of a safe 'home' space amidst the 'wild' spaces of the Delta Quadrant. Each of these narrative features, as presented, rely on Western difference and superiority that were fundamental to past and present Euro-American imperial encounters and endeavors. Through the recreation of these ideologies of empire, Voyager normalizes, legitimizes, and universalizes imperial approaches to engagement with other lifeforms. In order to move away from this intertwined thread of past/present/future imperialism, in my final chapter I propose alternatives for ecofeminist-inspired narrative approaches that offer possibilities for non-imperial futures. As my analysis will demonstrate, Voyager is unable to provide new worlds free of imperial ideas, but the possibility exists through the loss of their entire world, and their need to constantly make and remake their world(s). World making provides opportunity for endless possibilities, and science fiction television has the potential to aid in bringing non-imperial worlds to life. These stories push beyond individual and anthropocentric attitudes toward life on earth, and although such stories will not likely be the immediate cause of change in this era of precarity, stories can prime us for thinking in non-imperial ways.
Doctor of Philosophy
In this dissertation, I argue that contemporary cultural narratives feature continuing Euro-American imperialism that prioritizes Western bodies and ideas. These embedded narratives recreate centuries of Western imperial encounters and attitudes, and severely hinder possible responses to the present environmental crisis of the 'modern' era. Taking inspiration from postcolonial theorist Edward Said, I use interdisciplinary methods of narrative analysis to examine threads of imperialism written into popular American science fiction television series Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001). Voyager follows the Star Trek tradition of exploring the far reaches of space to advance human knowledge, and in doing so inscribes Western imperial practices of difference and power into an idealized future through features of exploration, modernity, and progress. In order to move away from these imperial modes of thinking, I then propose alternatives for new narrative approaches that offer possibilities for non-imperial futures. As my analysis will demonstrate, Voyager is unable to provide new worlds free of imperial ideas, but the possibility exists through the loss of their entire world, and their need to constantly make and remake their world(s). World making provides opportunity for endless possibility, and science fiction television has the potential to aid in bringing non-imperial worlds to life. These stories push beyond individual and human centered attitudes toward life on earth, and although such stories will not likely be the immediate cause of change in this era of environmental crisis, stories can prime us for thinking in non-imperial ways.

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.

This essay examines J.R.R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings through the application of a theoretical framework of postcolonial ecocriticism, endeavoring to discern the author’s concerns and the environmental and colonial underpinnings interwoven in the novel through a thematic analysis focusing on the concepts of pastoral, nature, wilderness and development. The results show that Tolkien undoubtedly projected his profound sentiments for environmental disruption as a product of a rapidly changing world during his lifetime. Although Tolkien’s trilogy is a work of high fantasy written in a different context, this essay argues that it is valid for scrutiny in relation to contemporary society. Furthermore, this study investigates the implementation of the text in the Swedish EFLclassroom with the purpose of raising students’ awareness for, and investment in the environment, whilst improving their all-round communicative skills, ultimately educating for a sustainable future.

La logique impérialiste et anthropocène a donné lieu à des pratiques dont les traces se lisent dans un hégémonisme environnemental et une difficulté à tenir compte du lien au vivant, à cet autre différent, humain ou non-humain, qui participe cependant de la relation. Par une analyse écocritique postcoloniale, il apparaît que ces exploitations qui se perpétuent dans la contemporanéité ont un lien avec la crise écologique. Une approche comparatiste des œuvres de Bessora, Patrick Chamoiseau, Nadine Gordimer et Kate Grenville éclaire cet état de crise : elle guide le lecteur vers de nouvelles réalités et annonce les contours changeants d’un environnement naturel en mutation. Les œuvres réapprennent également à l’humain à poser un regard autre sur la nature environnante et véhiculent des valeurs culturelles propres à enrichir la relation au vivant. En ce sens, la littérature contribue à montrer que la réconciliation se construit par l’éveil d’une conscience environnementale, c’est-à-dire la modélisation de l'interaction entre l’humain et l’environnement pour préserver la nature. La réconciliation se tisse en outre par un rapprochement entre l’imagination littéraire et l'inclusion de réalités socioculturelles, qui conduit à une poétique sensible de l’habitation du monde. La trajectoire culturelle d’un groupe étant liée à la terre, il est nécessaire que la prise de conscience écologique passe d’abord par les cultures locales. Autrement dit, il faut décoloniser le savoir écologique afin d’aboutir à une restauration de l’environnement naturel et des relations entre les différentes formes de vie. Le but de ce travail est donc de mettre en évidence les éléments qui rendent possible une réconciliation entre exigences anthropocentrées et éthique environnementale
The imperialist and anthropocene logic has given rise to practices whose traces are to be found in an environmental type of hegemonism and a difficult apprehension of the connection to the living, to this different, human or non-hum another, who nevertheless participates in the relation. A postcolonial ecocritical analysis shows that these exploitations which are perpetuated in the contemporary world have a link with the ecological crisis. A comparatist approach to the works of Bessora, Patrick Chamoiseau, Nadine Gordimer and Kate Grenville highlights this state of crisis: it guides the reader to wards new realities and announces the evolving contours of a changing natural environment. These works also teach humans to look at the surrounding nature in a different way and convey cultural values that are likely to enrich the relationship with the living. In this sense, literature shows that reconciliation cannot be achieved without man’s awakening to an environmental conscience, that is to say the modelling of the interaction between humans and the environment to preserve nature. Reconciliation means that the working together of the literary imagination and the inclusion of socio-cultural realities will lead to a sensitive poetics of inhabiting the world. Since the cultural trajectory of a group is linked to the earth, ecological awareness must first be developed by local cultures to then influence global cultures. In other words, it is necessary to decolonize ecological know ledge in order to restore the natural environment and the relationships between the different forms of life. The goal is therefore to identify the elements that enable a reconciliation between anthropocentric requirements and environmental ethics

This thesis attempts to develop a concept of 'ecological misapprehension' by means of an object-oriented ecocritical analysis of several works by J. M. Coetzee. Noting Coetzee's profound, often overlooked interest in nonhuman, nonanimal ecological existents (on the one hand), and his neomodernist propensity to interrogate the viability of signification (on the other), I argue that his works repeatedly gesture towards an ontological reality of ecological objects that is necessarily extratextual. I further argue that if human ‘readers’—both of and within Coetzee’s fiction—are inextricably entangled within modes of discourse by which meaning is made of those objects, the encounter between human subject and ecological object always takes place across a discursive threshold best understood in terms of the ‘irreducible gap’ that object-oriented ontology identifies between an object’s being and its perception. This gap problematises our apprehension of the ecological object as such, thus rendering ecological misapprehension inevitable—and, by extension, demanding that we remain attuned to the character, density, or degree of our propensity to misapprehend. Variants of this dynamic—and its troubling ramifications—are illuminated by means of close readings of a range of Coetzee’s texts, with particular attention paid to Disgrace, Life & Times of Michael K, and the short story ‘Nietverloren’, and are subsequently compared with examples of misapprehension in the world beyond the page. By developing this concept and identifying examples of it both within and without Coetzee’s works, the thesis aims to illuminate a fundamental obstacle to productive modes of environmental thinking in the Anthropocene, to suggest the activist potential of metafiction and the postmodernist reading practices it encourages, and to reaffirm the potential social utility of literary scholarship when it is conducted with an awareness of its own tendency to misapprehend.

Ce travail de recherche propose une étude de l’œuvre intégrale, en vers et en prose, de Fred D'Aguiar, à travers le prisme du mythe, de la métaphore et de la mémoire, et dans le cadre d'une définition large, inclusive et interculturelle de la littérature caraïbe. A partir de la mise en lumière de la relation hypomnésique de la métaphore à la mythologie et à la métaphysique occidentale, l'argumentation s'étend sur des questions telles que celle du lien entre référent et monde et élabore une vision à la fois interculturelle et géographique de la métaphore en tant que tropicalité. La tropicalité donne, à son tour, son élan à l'argumentation, en permettant, pour la première moitié de ce travail de recherche, la production d'une lecture singulière de la poésie de Fred D'Aguiar, qui s'avère aussi liée à un vaste corpus littéraire, s'étendant de l'Antiquité romaine au réalisme magique américain et caraïbe, du romantisme britannique à la philosophie de Jacques Derrida. La deuxième moitié de ce travail explore la prose de Fred D'Aguiar à travers le thème de l'orphelinat, car tous les protagonistes de ses romans sont des orphelins – et, qui plus est, parce-que le roman est aussi, par définition, le genre qui nie toute filiation. Divisée en deux chapitres, cette deuxième partie de l'étude commence par une problématisation des liens qui opèrent entre textualité et orphelinat ainsi qu'entre orphelinat et esclavage, mais aussi entre esclavage et illettrisme, afin d'étudier la représentation de l'esclavage dans les romans de Fred D'Aguiar. Cette deuxième moitié progresse ensuite vers une réflexion sur les qualités surnaturelles, voire orphiques des orphelins de la prose d'aguiarienne, ainsi que sur leur relation, tout autant orphique, à l'environnement. En conséquence, le présent travail de recherche se clôt sur deux questions : celle de la tradition orphique qui sous-tend l'histoire de la littérature, de l'antiquité jusqu'à présent, et celle de la dimension écocritique de la littérature contemporaine, que l'on proposera de défendre pour certains cas, en tant qu'environnementalisme vatique
The present dissertation proposes a study of Fred D'Aguiar's complete verse and prose works, through the triple lens of myth, metaphor and memory, and from within a broad, inclusive, and cross-cultural understanding of Caribbean literature. Beginning with an exacerbation of metaphor's hypomnesic relationship to mythology and Western metaphysics, the argument expands to address issues such as that of the relationship between word and world, and elaborates a cross-cultural, and geographically-based understanding of metaphor as tropicality. Tropicality in turn gives the argument its thrust, as it allows, in the first half of the dissertation, for a singular reading of Fred D'Aguiar's entire verse corpus, which is also shown, in the process, to intersect with a vast body of literature, ranging from Roman antiquity to American-Caribbean magic(al) realism and from British romanticism to the philosophy of Jacques Derrida. The second half of this research work explores D'Aguiar's novels in terms of orphanhood, as all the protagonists of his six novels – itself a genre which, presenting itself as newness, denies filiation – are orphans. Divided in two chapters, the second half of this dissertation begins with a problematization of the links that relate textuality to orphanhood and orphanhood to slavery, but also slavery to literacy, in order to study Fred D'Aguiar's novelistic accounts of slavery. It then proposes a reflection on the supernatural, Orphic qualities of D'Aguiar's orphan characters, and of their relation to the environment, which leads, in turn, to reflections on the Orphic traditions pervading literary history, and opens up onto the ecocritical dimensions of contemporary literature, through the tentative coinage of the notion of vatic environmentalism

Ancrée dans les réalités du monde océanien contemporain et prenant comme thématique centrale les questions de la représentation de la terre et du lien à la terre, cette recherche doctorale consiste en une analyse comparative et écocritique des textes et contextes formant le champ particulier des littératures autochtones produites en Polynésie, tant en français qu’en anglais. Les problématiques environnementales et la question de l’attachement à la terre sont au cœur des œuvres littéraires polynésiennes contemporaines, tant francophones qu’anglophones, dont elles permettent de questionner la parenté. Le choix d’une approche critique novatrice et originale, basée sur les "postcolonial ecologies", permet de faire dialoguer « texte » et « monde » et d’ainsi toucher à l’universel. En s’attachant à certaines problématiques humanitaires et écologiques cruciales, dont l’urgence se fait de plus en plus pressante en cette ère où le réchauffement climatique et les pollutions multiples mettent en péril la survie de nombreuses cultures et écosystèmes, ce travail doctoral dépasse le domaine purement littéraire et réaffirme avec force le pouvoir de l’imagination poétique dans la réinvention d’un autre rapport au monde, plus juste socialement et écologiquement.

Par le choix de son objet autant que par celui de sa méthode, où le dialogue interdisciplinaire et interculturel occupe une place essentielle, cette étude se veut doublement novatrice. Elle embrasse plusieurs objectifs. Premièrement, faire connaître une production littéraire francophone largement méconnue, issue d’une aire géographique et culturelle spécifique (la Polynésie). Deuxièmement, renforcer le dialogue trans-océanique grâce à la confrontation des productions francophones et anglophones, et s’inscrire ainsi pleinement dans l’actualité de la recherche sur les littératures océaniennes. Troisièmement, usant des apports de ce dialogue et des outils proposés par l’analyse écocritique, poser la question de l’existence ou non d’un univers littéraire trans-linguistique et océanien. Quatrièmement, contribuer à enrichir et éclairer les théories littéraires écocritiques grâce aux spécificités et aux problématiques soulevées par les littératures polynésiennes. Œuvres littéraires et méthode critique s’inscrivent donc dans un processus d’échanges et de retours constant et dynamique, s’éclairant réciproquement afin de parvenir à une compréhension mutuelle plus profonde et féconde de nouvelles possibilités.

Doctorat en Langues et lettres
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Esta disertación examina diversas expresiones artísticas y literarias de finales del siglo XX y principios del XXI desde una perspectiva ecocrítica. La tesis sostiene que la literatura contemporánea y el arte en general ofrecen experiencias por medio de las cuales se puede reconceptualizar lo que hoy se conoce como crisis medioambiental, para dar a conocer su dimensión ética y entenderla como una crisis moderna del conocimiento. Como una intersección de teoría crítica y estudios ambientales la ecocrítica ha abordado la dicotomía cultura-naturaleza como un dualismo cartesiano convencional. Este trabajo complejiza la dialéctica de sujeto y objeto, integrando perspectivas de la teoría poscolonial y los estudios de performance, y examina cómo la representación se apropia de espacios retóricos y epistémicos para intervenir en la percepción que el individuo tiene de la realidad. Del estudio surge un marco analítico que se identifica con la sustentabilidad y responde a tensiones sociales y culturales contemporáneas que se tejen entre el conocimiento local y las fuerzas globales. Mediante la inclusión de perspectivas acotadas de investigación, el estudio mantiene la referencialidad de las obras y permite plantear interrogantes sobre la naturaleza ontológica y epistémica de los estudios culturales. La tarea se aborda a lo largo de tres ejes: un análisis de las instalaciones de la escultora mexicana Helen Escobedo y de los artistas argentinos Nicolás García Uriburu y Marta Minujín, un examen de obras literarias -principalmente La loca de Gandoca de Anacristina Rossi (Costa Rica) y Un viejo que leía novelas de amor de Luis Sepúlveda (Chile)- y un trabajo de campo llevado a cabo con la comunidad Rapa Nui de Isla de Pascua (territorio chileno). Este último eje revela aspectos de una cosmovisión diferente, perteneciente a una identidad colectiva en búsqueda de reconocimiento dentro del mundo multicultural latinoamericano. La tesis concluye con un epílogo que analiza brevemente El libro del silencio de Ricardo Chávez Castañeda (México). A modo de síntesis, mediante juegos del lenguaje, esta novela expone la modernidad contemporánea como una crisis mucho mayor que se reproduce en múltiples dimensiones, donde el desequilibrio medioambiental se reconstituye en síntoma de una crisis de la civilización.

Écrites dans le vague souvenir des romans d’apprentissage du début de l’ère industrielle, les œuvres de Marcel Proust, Osman Lins, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, Joyce Carol Oates et Roberto Bolaño reviennent avec mélancolie à une question qui marque la modernité : comment tracer l’histoire de l’arrivée dans une grande ville ? À la Recherche du temps perdu et Blonde examinent des rituels mondains au sein des capitales transformées par la guerre. L’absence d’ordre produit des fils énigmatiques, à l’image du kaléidoscope, de la spirale, du labyrinthe et de la cité de sable, ces dispositions s’appliquant à l’écriture de l’espace urbain et du récit qui y conduit. L’Énigme de l’arrivée les relie aux problématiques de la migration, de la langue mondiale et de l’empire multiculturel qui se consolide dans la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle. L’œuvre de Lins fait converger l’urbanité, l’ésotérisme et des mondanités intellectuelles : l’imitation, la citation, la bibliographie. L’urbain devient une satire chez Bolaño : ses arrivistes et ses carriéristes, qui sont des poètes et des professeurs de littérature, appartiennent à la famille des meurtriers de masse. La nostalgie du roman d’apprentissage urbain, désormais sous le signe du regret, demande une réévaluation intégrale. Alors que la métaphore végétale indique des processus stylistiques de décomposition qui joignent la désurbanisation et l’émergence de la vie de l’esprit, l’écriture des plantes peut conduire plus largement à de nouvelles possibilités d’individuation, moins motivées par la pulsion mondaine qui caractérise les récits capitalistes, et plus discrètement marquées par l’inscription non instrumentale et involontaire, autrement violente, dans la nature
Written with the vague memory of the novels of formation of the beginning of the industrial era, the novels of Marcel Proust, Osman Lins, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, Joyce Carol Oates and Roberto Bolaño return with melancholy to a question that has marked modernity: how do we record the story of the arrival in a big city? In Search of Lost Time and Blonde examine the worldly rituals at the heart of the capitals transformed by war. The absence of order produces enigmatic forms: in the image of the kaleidoscope, the spiral, the labyrinth and the city of sand, these forms arrange the writing of the urban space and the narrative that leads into it. The Enigma of Arrival links those processes to the problematics of migration, global language and the multicultural empire that has taken shape during the second half of the twentieth century. The work of Lins brings together urbanity, esoterism and elements of intellectual worldliness: imitation, quotation, bibliography. The urban becomes a satire in Bolaño: his arrivistes and his careerists, who are poets and teachers of literature, belong to the family of mass murderers. The novel of urban formation, now available only as a lost object, a target for nostalgia under the sign of regret, merits thorough reevaluation. Seeing that the vegetal metaphor points to stylistic processes of decomposition that bring together de-urbanization and the emergence of the life of the mind, the writing of plants may lead to new possibilities of individuation, less motivated by the worldly pulsion that characterizes capitalistic narratives, and bearing more discreet traces of the non-instrumental and involuntary, more violent inscription into nature

abstract: This dissertation considers the potential of desire to protect humans, animals, and the environment in the biopolitical times of late capitalism. Through readings of recent South African Literature in English from a postcolonial ecocritical perspective, this project theorizes desire as a mode of resistance to the neocolonial and capitalist instrumentalization of communities of humans and nonhumans, where they are often seen as mere "resources" awaiting consumption and transformation into profit. Deleuze and Guattari posit this overconsumption as stemming in part from capitalism's deployment of the psychoanalytic definition of desire as lack, where all desires are defined according to the same tragedy and brought into a money economy. By defining desire, capitalism seeks to limit the productive unconscious and attempts to create manageable subjects who perform the work of the capitalist machine--subjects that facilitate the extraction of surplus value and pleasure for themselves and the dominant classes. Thinking desire differently as positive and as potentially revolutionary, after Deleuze and Guattari, offers possible resistances to this biopolitical management. This different, positive desire can also change views of others and the world as existing solely for human consumption: views which so often risk bodies towards death and render communities unsustainable. The representations of human and animal desires (and often their cross-species desires) in this literature imagine relationships to the world otherwise, outside of a colonial legacy, where ethical response obtains instead of the consumption of others and the environment by the dominant subjects of capitalism. This project also considers other attempts to protect communities such as animal rights, arguing that rethinking desire is a necessary corollary in the effort to protect communities and lives that are made available for a "non-criminal putting to death" since positive desire precedes the passing of any such laws and must exist for their proper administration. These texts often demonstrate the law's failures to protect communities through portraying corrupt officials who risk the communities they are charged with protecting when their protection competes with government officials' personal capitalist ambitions. Desire offers opportunities for imagining other creative options towards protecting communities, outside of legal discourse.
Dissertation/Thesis
Doctoral Dissertation English 2014

Text in Afrikaans
This study investigates postcolonial aspects of the prose oeuvre of André P. Brink, with specific reference to his historiographical texts `n Oomblik in die wind, Houd-den-Bek, Die eerste lewe van Adamastor, Inteendeel, Sandkastele and Donkermaan. The texts can be described as links in a textual history of South Africa: a history corresponding to the official version, revisioning it in an imaginative way. The texts also criticize political (mal)practices, and the pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial social contexts of the country are critically scrutinized. The texts offer suggestions for a new political dispensation. Since the seventies the Brink oeuvre has developed a multi-dimensional postcolonial approach. Aspects of post-colonialism, post-structuralism, magical realism and feminism as articulated in the texts, are analyzed and interpreted. Brink's investigation of problems concerning historiography, and the relation between history and fiction, comprised an important aspect of the research leading to this report.
Afrikaans & Theory of Literature
D.Litt. et Phil