Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Writings of V.S. Naipaul'

Dans le sillage de la décolonisation, les récits colonialistes ont systématiquement été réécrits à partir de perspectives autochtones. Ce phénomène est appelé « The Empire writes back to the centre » - une tendance qui s'affirme dans la critique postcoloniale à la fin du XXe siècle. L'objectif de ces actes de réécriture est de lire des textes colonialistes d'une manière barthesienne à l'envers, de déconstruire les dogmes orientalistes et colonialistes, et éventuellement créer un dialogue où il était seulement un monologue. Tourner le texte colonial dedans/dehors et le relire à travers la lentille d'un code ultérieur permet le texte postcolonial de déverrouiller son précurseur colonial et le changer de l'intérieur. Dans ce cadre critique, Heart of Darkness (1899) de Joseph Conrad a été un texte particulièrement influent pour Chinua Achebe et V. S. Naipaul. Leurs romans Things Fall Apart (1958) et A Bend in the River (1979) peuvent être considérés comme une réécriture du roman de Conrad. Cependant, avant d'examiner leurs différentes stratégies de réécriture, il serait utile de les localiser dans la tradition postcoloniale de la réécriture. Alors que Achebe se démarque clairement comme la figure de proue du mouvement, le romancier trinidadien est difficile à catégoriser. Est-ce que Naipaul réécrit, de façon à critiquer, ou d'une manière d'adopter et de justifier, l’idéologie impériale? Comme pas toute réécriture est une forme de « writing back » en termes de critique anticoloniale, la position de Naipaul continue d'être considérée comme l’énigmatique entre-deux d'un «insider» devenu «outsider». Prenant acte de ses différentes perceptions critiques peut devenir un moyen de mettre en évidence de manière efficace la lecture erronée d’Achebe et le détournement de Naipaul du modèle Conradien, un moyen de fixer un cadre pour la conversation simulée cette thèse vise à créer entre les trois romanciers
In the wake of decolonization, colonialist narratives have systematically been rewritten from indigenous perspectives. This phenomenon is referred to as “the Empire writes back to the centre” – a trend that asserted itself in late twentieth-century postcolonial criticism. The aim of such acts of writing back is to read colonialist texts in a Barthesian way inside-out or à l’envers, to deconstruct the Orientalist and colonialist dogmas, and eventually create a dialogue where there was only a monologue. Turning the colonial text inside-out and rereading it through the lens of a later code allows the postcolonial text to unlock the closures of its colonial precursor and change it from the inside. Under this critical scholarship, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) has been a particularly influential text for Chinua Achebe and V. S. Naipaul. Their novels Things Fall Apart (1958) and A Bend in the River (1979) can be seen as a rewriting of Conrad’s novella. However, before examining their different rewriting strategies, it would be fruitful to locate them within the postcolonial tradition of rewriting. While Achebe clearly stands as the leading figure of the movement, the Trinidadian novelist is, in fact, difficult to pigeonhole. Does Naipaul write back to, that is criticize, or does he rewrite, and in a way adopt and justify, imperial ideology? Since not all rewriting involves writing back in terms of anti-colonial critique, Naipaul’s position continues to be explored as the enigmatic in-betweenness and double-edgedness of an “insider” turned “outsider.” Taking cognizance of these different critical perceptions can become a way to effectively highlight Achebe’s “(mis)-reading” and Naipaul’s “(mis)-appropriation” of Conrad, a way to set the framework for the simulated conversation this thesis seeks to create between the three novelists

Issu de: Thèse de doctorat--Analyse du discours--Lyon 3, 1999. Titre de soutenance : Analyse des marques stylistiques du point de vue narratif dans deux romans de V. S. Naipaul : "A house for Mr Biswas" et "The enigma of arrival.

La remise en question de l'histoire par les ecrivains afro-americains (ici, toni morrison, a travers the bluest eye, beloved et jazz) et caribeens (v. S. Naipaul a travers the enigma of arrival et a way in the world) repond a un devoir d'exhumation du passe pour remedier a l'histoire mutilee de la communaute et opposer a l'histoire officielle, partielle et partiale, la memoire qui permet a l'individu de restaurer la parole interdite et d'enclencher un processus identitaire qui l'ancre dans un espace-temps ou il peut s'appartenir. L'espace est d'abord le lieu de l'absence, ou l'individu issu des colonies ou de l'esclavage est exile a lui-meme : la litterature coloniale dit en effet le desir impossible d'appropriation et de mimetisme. Ceci amene l'ecrivain de couleur contemporain (par exemple, e. K. Brathwaite, wilson harris ou david dabydeen pour les caraibes, ou encore chinua achebe pour l'afrique, en sus des deux auteurs etudies plus en profondeur) a dire le sensible, a exhumer les corps absents, le regard disant l'absence de l'autre. Ainsi, chez naipaul francisco miranda est pris comme l'exemple de l'echec du regard exotique qui aboutit a une image de l'indescriptible. Ceci conduit a une perception eclatee du sujet qui, en dejouant une esthetique occidentale au depart source d'alienation, va doter son regard d'une perspective. Si dans beloved la memoire retrouvee vient parfois nourrir le present, il n'en demeure pas moins qu'elle achoppe sur les traumatismes de l'histoire, et que le passe (celui des humiliations et de l'horreur) reste alors a jamais dans le domaine de l'indicible. Seul naipaul semble proposer une vision prismatique du sujet caribeen, caracterise par sa multiplicite, et se logeant dans un espace-temps non plus confine a une geographie, mais celui, esthetique, des "temps flottants"
The veracity of historical texts is called into question by afro-american and caribbean writers. For instance, toni morrison's the bluest eye, beloved and jazz and v. S. Naipaul's the enigma of arrival and a way in the world are attempts to recover the past. Morrison and naipaul contrast official, partial historical texts with memory which enables the individual and his community to restore speech and does away with censorship. He may then decolonize the space he lives in by developing a poetics of identity. At first colonials are strangers to themselves and are confined within a dialectics of western mimicry. This leads contemporary postcolonial writers such as e. K. Brathwaite, wilson harris or david dabydeen in the caribbean or chinua achebe in nigeria to question the nature of western/postcolonial worldvision by re-telling parts of the past. Thus to naipaul francisco miranda's blind gaze exemplifies the caribbean fate, and his life is one of chaos and confusion. Finally, a postcolonial scattered perspective emerges. In beloved recovered memory feeds the present. However historical traumas remain for ever unsaid and are obstacles to the emergence of the subject within his community. Naipaul offers a prismatic, plural vision of the caribbean subject - he evolves in a space and time which is not geographically defined, but which elaborates subjective aesthetics, that of "floating times"

A presente dissertação propõe um estudo do espaço literário no romance A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), do escritor indo-caribenho V. S. Naipaul. Num primeiro momento, pautamos nossa leitura na relação constituída entre o espaço e o sujeito por meio do estudo dos cronotopos, de Bakhtin, verificando a presença de dois principais temas espaciais: o da clausura, sobre como o espaço influi na constituição da subjetividade dos personagens e o de transição, sobre o deslocamento do protagonista, Mr. Biswas, do espaço rural para o urbano, despertando nele um vislumbre de agência. Realizamos uma análise detalhada do jornal e da educação colonial e, em seguida, enfocamos a casa e seus constituintes estruturais, bem como as possessões que o protagonista acumula ao longo de sua vida. Concluímos que A House for Mr. Biswas é um romance metaficcional que utiliza a metáfora da escrita e da construção da casa para representar o processo de sua própria construção. A metaficção se manifesta por meio da paródia do gênero do romance de formação, já incorporado pela literatura inglesa dos séculos XVIII e XIX, resultando na criação de um novo romance que almeja pertencer à tradição literária estabelecida, mas que, ao mesmo tempo, encontra-se em dívida em relação a ela.
This dissertation examines the concept of literary space in the novel A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), by the Indo-Caribbean writer V. S. Naipaul. We have based our reading upon the relationship between space and subject by means of Bakhtins chronotopes, verifying the presence of two major themes: that of closure, related to the way in which space affects the constitution of the subjectivity of the characters, and that of transition, about the displacement of the protagonist, Mr. Biswas, from a rural to an urban space, awakening in him a glimpse of agency. We have conducted a detailed analysis of the newspaper and of colonial education, and then the focus shifts to the house and its structural components, as well as to the possessions which the protagonist accumulates throughout his life. We conclude that A House for Mr. Biswas is a metafictional novel that uses the metaphor of writing and that of the building of the house in order to represent the process of constructing the novel itself. Metafiction is disclosed through the parody of the formation novel, already incorporated by English literature of the 18th and 19th centuries, resulting in the creation of a new novel, which aspires to become part of the established literary tradition, but that is still, at the same time, is indebted to it.

Cette etude du point de vue narratif dans deux romans de v. S. Naipaul se divise en deux parties principales, la premiere consacree au roman a house for mr biswas (1961), la seconde au roman plus recent qu'est the enigma of arrivai (1987). Les bases d'une analyse stylistique precise seront posees dans la premiere partie, qui se subdivisera en trois sous-parties: le point de vue du narrateur, le point de vue des personnages, et le controle de la distance (point de vue du lecteur). On abordera d'abord le degre de presence du narrateur, son degre d'autorite, la subjectivite de son point de vue ainsi que son role dans la coherence textuelle. Puis, le role joue par le point de vue des personnages dans la caracterisation, et les points de vue reflechis seront etudies, ainsi que les modes d'expression du point de vue des personnages. La troisieme sous-partie sera consacree aux marques de distanciation que sont l'ironie et la comedie, et aux elements createurs de sympathie et d'empathie. Cette analyse conduira a observer que le point de vue developpe dans a house for mr biswas peut etre qualifie de point de vue existentiel. L'etude de the enigma of arrivai mettra a jour les marques du point de vue empirique, ou l'observation et l'experience individuelle jouent un role essentiel, ainsi que les marques du point de vue repetitif, circulaire ou cyclique. On verra en quoi le point de vue narratif ainsi defini pourra etre qualifie de point de vue metaphysique, et on s'attachera a montrer la filiation existant entre ces deux oeuvres distantes d'un quart de siecle.

Les littératures caribéennes et océano-indiennes des dernières décennies ont mis en lumière, par le trajet poétique, l’ambivalence inhérente à la circonscription de la réalité géographique insulaire qui permet d’accéder à la conscience îlienne. L’insularité s’impose alors comme le motif contenant le lancinement géographique mais également mémoriel. Lieu duquel surgit l’imaginaire, l’île est instaurée en tant que terreau commun des textes de Patrick Chamoiseau, Ananda Devi, V. S. Naipaul qui, à travers le déploiement poétique, exhibent le tiraillement de l’ancrage et de la fuite, de l’enfermement et de l’ouverture. Ainsi, dans une approche diachronique, le dessein est de saisir l’inscription de cet élément fondateur de la poésie et de sa praxis afin d’entendre le dépassement initié par ces poétiques de la Mondialité, concept-clé de la philosophie poétique d’Édouard Glissant. L’édifice de Glissant irrigue, en effet, les textes, tantôt dans la résonance avec l’oeuvre de Naipaul, tantôt par le legs perceptible dans celles de Chamoiseau et de Devi. La poétique de la Relation constitue alors l’arsenal exégétique qui permet d’accéder aux propositions de contemporanéité des auteurs. Le traitement de la malemort, la fondation de l’ouvrage total, la praxis poétique de la monstruosité désaliénant le corps protéiforme, sont alors les imprévisibles générés. La création tend ainsi à s’affranchir des catégorisations et assignations, car elle est un écho au mouvement du monde
The Caribbean and Indian Ocean literatures of the last few decades has brought to light, through its poetic journey, the inherent ambivalence of the circumscription of island geographical reality, which allows access to the island consciousness. Insularity appears as the metaphor of a chronic pain caused by the torn between geographical and memory issues. The island, the place from which the imaginary emerges, is established as a common breeding ground for the texts of Patrick Chamoiseau, Ananda Devi and V. S. Naipaul who, through their poetic process, show the conflict of anchoring and escape, of confinement and openness. Thus in a diachronic approach, the aim is to grasp the inscription of this founding element of poetry and its praxis in order to hear the overtake initiated by these poetics of Mondialité, a key concept of Edouard Glissant's poetic philosophy. Glissant’s work echoes with Naipaul’s writing, as they are contemporaries, while Chamoiseau and Devi have inherited of Glissant’s poetic and philosophical thought. Then, the poetics of the Relation constitutes the exegetical arsenal that allows access to the authors'propositions of contemporaneity. The description of the malemort, the creating process of a memorial masterpiece, the poetic praxis of the monstrosity which release the body (physical, social, and literature), are the « unpredictable » generated. Creation thus tends to free itself from categorizations and assignments, because it is an echo of the movement of the world

V. S Naipaul appartient à la première génération d'écrivains des Antilles d'expression anglaise, qui se sont exilés à Londres à la fin des années 50. Élevé à la trinité, il est d'origine hindoue. Ses romans reflètent la complexité de cet espace où il est né, qu'il perçoit comme un désordre vain qu'il rejette et dont il cherche à se libérer. Un profond désir d'émancipation représente la force motrice de son oeuvre. L'écriture a fonction thérapeutique alors que l'auteur cherche à ordonner son espace originel. Cette ecriture subit une caresse lorsque Naipaul accepte son héritage hindou et affirme que la réalité est une illusion. Il abandonne alors le réalisme picaresque (l'illusion de la realité) et se tourne vers l'allégorie pour dépeindre le sort de l'individu emporte dans le tumulte d'une societé néo-coloniale. L'oeuvre s'offre à une lecture mythique alors que Naipaul adapte à ses besoins d'écrivain antillais le mythe du paradis perdu. Les romans raconte la perte d'une innocence pré-colombienne, de liens entre la nature et l'homme malgré certaines limites artistiques, l'oeuvre de Naipaul représente un témoignage puissant qui participe à l'établissement d'une mémoire collective antillaise et enrichit la littérature
V. S Naipaul belongs to the furst generation of english-speaking westindian writers who came to london in exile at the end of the 1950's. Brought up in Trinidad of hindu descent, his novels are a reflection of the complexity of the world in which he was born. However, he perceives it as futile and disordered, ultimately rejecting it. His deep desire ro emancipate himself represents the driving force behind work. Writing has a therapeutic value as he tires to come to terms with his world. Naipaul's writing changes dramatically once he acknowledges his hindu ancestry, insisting that reality is an illusion. From then on, he abandons picaresque realism (the illusion of reality) and turns towards allegory to depict man caught up in the turmoil of post-colonial societies. His work acquires a mythical quality as he adapts the myth of the fall to the needs of a west indian writer. His work tells of loss; loss of a pre-columbian innocence and of links between nature and man. Naipaul's are a powerful testimony to our age, not without artistic flaws, but which contributes nonethe less in enriching the collective memory of the west indies and literature as a whole

Esta dissertação mapeia a rede de relações intertextuais em Half a Life (2001) e sua continuação Magic Seeds (2004), os romances mais recentes do Prêmio Nobel de Literatura de 2001, V. S. Naipaul, como contribuição para o estudo da obra do autor. A noção de intertextualidade permeia os estudos literários, e o termo tem sido largamente empregado desde que foi cunhado por Julia Kristeva nos anos sessenta. Desde então as mais variadas, e muitas vezes divergentes, teorias sobre intertextualidade compartilham a idéia de que um texto só adquire significado pleno na interação com outros textos. A abordagem metodológica proposta é baseada na teoria da transtextualidade de Gérard Genette. Esta escolha implica o estudo de intertextos, paratextos, metatextos, arquitextos e hipertextos que constituem a interface entre os dois romances e outros escritos. O nome do protagonista "William Somerset Chandran" constitui o fio que guia o estudo das várias relações transtextuais nos dois romances. A partir do prenome do protagonista – William – este estudo situa os romances no contexto da tradição do Bildungsroman, e argumenta que estes estabelecem uma paródia arquitextual do gênero na medida em que subvertem seu cerne, ou seja, a formação do caráter do protagonista. O nome do meio do protagonista – Somerset – remete à ficcionalização do escritor Somerset Maugham na narrativa, ao mesmo tempo em que esta desmistifica a ótica ocidental sobre o hinduísmo popularizada por Maugham em The Razor's Edge. O sobrenome do protagonista – Chandran – leva ao estudo do conjunto de referências à origem indiana de Naipaul e o papel desta na produção do autor. Este nome se reporta ao romance de Narayan The Bachelor of Arts, cujo protagonista também é nomeado Chandran. Narayan é um escritor de destaque na literatura anglo-indiana e referência recorrente na obra de Naipaul. Os temas de migração e choque cultural apresentados nos dois romances têm sido presença constante na obra de Naipaul. Esta pesquisa mapeia a relação de continuidade entre os dois romances em questão e o conjunto da obra de Naipaul, salientando o papel da ambientação geográfica da narrativa, marcada pela jornada do protagonista através de três continentes. A teoria da transtextualidade é uma ferramenta operacional para a pesquisa, a qual examina a densidade das referências geográficas, históricas e literárias em Half a Life e Magic Seeds, visando aportar elementos para o estudo da produção literária de Naipaul, na medida em que estes romances recentes condensam e revisitam a visão de mundo deste autor.
This thesis traces the network of intertextual relations in the two latest novels by the 2001 Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul: Half a Life (2001) and its sequel Magic Seeds (2004) as a means of contribution to the study of the author's work. The notion of intertextuality is a pervasive one within literary studies, the word itself started to be widely used in the sixties, following the definition of Julia Kristeva. Nuanced and even conflicting as the varied theories of intertextuality may be, they all share the idea that a text is not isolated or self-sufficient, but acquires full meaning in the interplay with other texts. A methodological approach based on Gerard Genette's theory of transtextuality is proposed for the analysis. This choice implies the study of intertexts, paratexts, metatexts, architexts and hypertexts that constitute the interface between the two novels at hand and other texts. The protagonist's name "William Somerset Chandran" sets the thread of several transtextual instances pervading the two novels. Taking the cue of the protagonist's first name – William – this thesis places the novels within the context of the Bildungsroman tradition and argues that these novels establish an architextual parody of this genre, subverting its core meaning of character formation. The protagonist's middle name – Somerset – leads to the discussion of the way the writer Somerset Maugham is fictionalized in the narrative and how it undermines the metropolitan ethos towards Hinduism as exposed in Maugham's novel The Razor's Edge. The protagonist's last name – Chandran – spawns a set of references to Naipaul's Indian ancestry and the role it plays in his fictional and non-fictional production; this name alludes to Narayan's novel The Bachelor of Arts, whose main character is also called Chandran. Narayan is a leading figure in Anglo-Indian Literature and a recurrent reference in Naipaul's writings. The themes of displacement and culture clash tackled by these novels have haunted the author throughout his career. The research maps out the two novels' relationship with the realm of Naipaul's previous writings; as well as brings to the fore the role of setting in the narratives, marked by the protagonist's dislocations in three continents. The theory of transtextuality provides the operational tool for the research, which examines the density of geographical, historical and literary references in Half a Life and Magic Seeds with the purpose of shedding light into Naipaul's literary production, inasmuch as these two recent novels condense and revisit the author's worldview.

De soi aux autres, du passé au présent; de l'Orient à l'occident; de l'identité à l'altérité : telles sont les différentes étapes à franchir par les personnages naispauliens qui cherchent à se définir en tant qu'êtres historiques et sociaux, en tant que citoyens et en tant qu'individus. De l'objet au sujet, de la négation à l'affirmation, du rejet des autres à l'acceptation de soi : tel est le rituel initiatique que V. S. Naipaul imagine pour des personnages qui tentent de rendre l'étrange familier et de transformer l'autre en soi. Le premier chapitre présente l'identité sous la forme d'une construction tripartite reposant sur ses composantes historiques, sociales et culturelles et perçue comme etant prédeterminée par des facteurs extérieurs et immuables. Cette partie s'attelle à rendre compte de l'impossibilité de l'appartenance en soumettant à l'examen les tentatives des personnages naispauliens et s'approprier l'histoire et de se sentir en adéquation avec le monde. L'analyse proposée dans le second chapitre rend compte de l'altérité à travers laquelle ils se définissent et définissent le monde extérieur et de leur vision d'une histoire et d'une identité vues comme prédeterminées. Tout comme le texte post-colonial déconstruit les grands récits coloniaux, de même les personnages de V. S. Naipaul déconstruisent leur propre identité post-coloniale afin de pouvoir se reconstruire sur un terrain vierge nourri par l'imagination. Ce travail révèle à terme une libération totale et complète de l'identité de toutes attaches territoriales et nationales qui conduisent à une redéfinition de soi.

L’objectif principal de cette étude est de mettre en valeur les caractéristiques d’une « poétique de l’errance » dans le roman contemporain en nous appuyant sur l’analyse comparée de trois écrivains appartenant à des aires linguistiques et culturelles différentes. Le choix de V. S. Naipaul (Trinidad, 1932), R. Bolaño (Chili, 1953-2003) et J. -M. G. Le Clézio (France, 1940) repose sur la volonté de confronter trois types d’errance : postcoloniale, narrative et exotique. Pour comprendre l’errance, il était nécessaire de prendre en compte les définitions de l’exil et du nomadisme : l’exile défini par la critique postcoloniale (E. Said, H. Bhabha) et le nomadisme utilisé par G. Deleuze et F. Guattari constituent un point de départ incontournable. Ainsi, l’errance a pu être considérée comme une manière « d’être au monde » qui ne dépend pas nécessairement du déplacement géographique. La poétique de l’errance se caractérise avant tout par la fragmentation : fragmentation du territoire, de l’identité du personnage, de la narration. Le sentiment d’être de « nulle part » des personnages issus de la colonisation chez Naipaul, la recherche des origines chez Le Clézio et l’éclatement du Sujet chez Bolaño sont les marques d’un « entre-deux » identitaire (in-between, H. Bhabha) qui aboutit à la construction d’un « troisième espace » : un lieu imaginaire (le rêve, l’activité littéraire) ou réel (Londres chez Naipaul ou le désert chez Bolaño et Le Clézio) qui permet au personnage d’assumer son errance. Les trois types d’errance se rejoignent autour de la notion « d’effacement du Sujet », qui a pour conséquence d’accorder plus d’espace à la mise en contact et à la confrontation avec « l’Autre »
The main purpose of this study is to point out the characteristics of the “poetics of exile*” by comparing three writers from different linguistic and cultural areas. The choice of V. S. Naipaul (Trinidad, 1932), R. Bolaño (Chile, 1953-2003) and J. -M. G Le Clézio (France, 1940) is due to the will to compare three different types of exile: the postcolonial, the narrative and the exotic. To understand the exile, it was necessary to analyze other terms connected with travel writing such as “wandering” and “nomadism”: the exile defined by postcolonial critics (E. Said, H. Bhabha) and the nomadism used by G. Deleuze and F. Guattari was our starting point. Thus, the exile has been considered as a way “to be in the world” that does not necessarily depend on a geographical journey. The poetics of exile is marked by fragmentation: of the territory, of the characters’ identity, of the narrative. The feeling of being from “nowhere” of the characters which come from the colonies in Naipaul, the research of origins in Le Clézio and the explosion of the Subject in Bolaño, are the marks of the “in-betweennes” of their identity (H. Bhabha) that leads them to the construction of a “third space”: an imaginary place (dream, literary activity) or a real one (London in Naipaul or the desert in Bolaño and Le Clézio) that allow the characters to assume their exile. The three types of wandering share the idea of the “disappearance of the Subject”, which as a consequence gives greater prominence to the “Other”. The term wandering exists but doesn’t have the same meaning of the French word errance. Even if charged with political meaning, we had rather use the word “exile”

La fragmentation et l’aliénation, thèmes récurrents dans la littérature postcoloniale, sont représentées par le contenu et la forme des œuvres étudiées dans cette recherche. Dans un cadre historique et fictionnel, les romans postcoloniaux de Chinua Achebe et de V.S. Naipaul inscrivent le postcolonisé fragmenté et aliéné dans des lieux et des milieux différents. La quête identitaire de ce dernier, entre tradition et modernisation, a déclenché son déracinement. En effet, tiraillé entre l’Occident et l’Orient, le postcolonisé, dans les romans de ces deux écrivains, est aliéné géographiquement et culturellement, ce qui explique son instabilité et sa quête identitaire interminable. L’espace dans le roman postcolonial est fragmenté pour aliéner davantage le postcolonisé qui cherche à mettre fin à cette aliénation. La double culture – orientale et occidentale – participe non seulement à la perte d’identité culturelle, mais aussi à celle des personnages. À la rencontre de l’Autre ou de l’Occidental, les personnages achibiens et naipauliens essayent de cacher leur « peau noire » avec un « masque blanc » par le biais du mimétisme de cet Autre. Cette littérature est distinguée par son métissage, son intertextualité ainsi que son aspect linguistique qui font d’elle une littérature dialogique avec la littérature occidentale et notamment la littérature coloniale. Une telle littérature indigène, exprimée dans une langue étrangère, reflète un attachement et un détachement. La non-linéarité joue un rôle important dans cette fiction, vu que les récits sont décomposés et fragmentés tout comme les personnages. C’est ainsi qu’on peut dire que selon des thématiques et des stylistiques divers que ces deux écrivains postcoloniaux ont réussi à présenter au lecteur la fragmentation et l’aliénation du postcolonisé dans son milieu et son ère
Fragmentation and alienation: recurring themes in the postcolonial literature, are represented by the content and the form of the studied literary works in this research. Within a historical and fictional setting, the novels of Chinua Achebe and V.S. Naipaul set the fragmented and alienated postcolonial figures in different places and surroundings. The quest for identity of these postcolonial figures, between tradition and modernization, has caused their uprooting. In fact, in the novels of these two writers, the postcolonial figures, who are torn between the Occident and the Orient, are geographically and culturally alienated. Hence, they are unstable and are in a never-ending quest. The setting in the postcolonial novel is itself fragmented so that it alienates more the postcolonial figures who try to make an end to this alienation. The double culture – oriental and occidental – does not only participate in losing the cultural identity, but also in losing the figures’ ones. While meeting the Other or the Occidental, the characters of Achebe and Naipaul try to hide their « black skin » under a « white mask » through the mimicry of this Other. This literature stands out by its hybridization, its intertextuality, as well as its linguistic aspect, which has turned into a dialogic literature, in a discourse with the occidental literature and notably the colonial one. Such an indigenous literature, revealed in a foreign language, shows an attachment and a detachment. The non-linearity plays an important role in this fiction, given that the tales are distorted and fragmented like the major characters of these stories. In this way, one can say that through varied thematic and stylistic features these two postcolonial writers have succeeded in presenting to readers the alienation and fragmentation of postcolonial figures within their surroundings and in their era

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

Le nombre d’études consacrées au problème de l’espace, y compris dans la littérature, est en nette progression depuis plusieurs décennies et surtout ces dernières années. Certains parlent d’un « tournant spatial » de l’ensemble des disciplines humanistes. Malgré cet intérêt accru, l’équivocité traditionnellement attachée à la notion d’espace demeure. Si le langage courant réserve le terme aux faits géographiques, urbains ou encore astronomiques, on a souvent mis en évidence le fait qu’il désigne à la fois un « contenu » et une « forme » (E. Husserl), une réalité en même temps « obscure » et « objective » (A. Einstein). Cette thèse tient compte de la complexité de la notion d’espace et la met à profit pour analyser ce qu’il convient d’appeler la spatialité dans la littérature. Elle porte sur un corpus diversifié qui comprend des œuvres narratives écrites par Jean Echenoz, François Bon, Radoslav Petković, David Albahari, V.S. Naipaul et Martin Amis. Telle qu’elle est étudiée ici, la spatialité pose un large ensemble de questions « formelles » et « thématiques » : la scénographie urbaine et non urbaine, la « polarisation » de l’espace (centre/périphérie, local/global, familier/étranger), l’écriture de la frontière, la toponymie, la topographie, le « balisage » de l’espace (à l’aide de pronoms, verbes et adverbes), l’espace-image et le sens autoréflexif de l’espace. À chacun de ses différents niveaux, elle se révèle profondément dynamique, composée d’éléments en interaction et en opposition, autrement dit « en mouvement »
In various fields, including literature, much work has been done on the question of space over the last few years and decades. Some refer to a “spatial turn” in humanities and social sciences. However, in spite of a considerable general interest in this topic, the notion of space remains equivocal. The term is commonly used to denote basic facts in geography, urbanism and astronomy, but the concept is also often said to be rather complex. Husserl claimed that space was both a “content” and a “form”, while Einstein believed that its genuine nature was at the same time “obscure” and “undeniably objective”. In this thesis, we take into account the complexity of the space itself and challenge the notion of spatiality in literature. The corpus consists of novels and narratives written by V.S. Naipaul, Martin Amis, Jean Echenoz, François Bon, Radoslav Petković and David Albahari. Spatiality, such as defined here, brings us to examine both content- and form-related issues, including urban and non-urban space, spatial “polarization” (“centers” and “peripheries”, “local” and “global”, “known” and “unknown” places), border, toponymy and topography. The use of some terms specifying spatial location (such as deictics) is also analyzed, as well as the iconographic representations of space referred to in the texts and, finally, different forms of self-reflexive discourse inherent in the writing of space. The analysis reveals that every level of spatiality has an essentially dynamic, non-static quality, as the elements that it is composed of are in constant opposition and interaction

博士
國立中山大學
外國語文學系研究所
103
What does it mean, “writing survival”? In what way does the fact of living after (or living over, or surviving) the significant others relate to writing? In posing these questions, this dissertation is interested in the dynamic convocation in which a writer approaches his legacy while he becomes a writer. In the works of three postcolonial writers, namely V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, and J. M. Coetzee, this project looks into three different manners in which legacy is claimed and employed in the act of writing about oneself. It asks the basic question of what makes it necessary, with each author, to survive by way of writing? How, the query goes on, does writing provide its unique footage for them to deal with death, to turn dead death into living debt, to crack self from past as one cracks salt from earth? With Naipaul, writing survival involves a serial transfiguration of death into debt, and debt further into acts of reckoning that keeps turning the self around and eventually makes him whole. A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) is case in point of how writing is exactly the vocation in which “writing survival” is coterminous with “writing to survive.” Twenty years later, in “Prologue to an Autobiography” (1982), Naipaul reaffirms this aesthetics of transfiguration employed in his fiction with facts dug up from the life and times of his father. Even when this filial linearity of legacy turns somewhat awry when it goes transnational in The Enigma of Arrival (1987), survival in life still hinges around literary legacy for Naipaul. Chapters One and Two of this dissertation look into Naipaul’s take on how the matter of filiation on the personal level is congenial to that of affiliation on the transnational and transcultural level. Chapters Three and Four, on the other hand, study how Walcott takes issue with the conflict involved in both the fact of survival and the act of writing. If, as it is with Naipaul, writing is also the vocation in which the matter of survival is a lived experience, Walcott brings in a different set of factors that lend an elemental, material force to writing. In Another Life (1973), the divided child finds a congenial voice from the sea that promises healing to the heart of the writer who mourns. In Omeros (1990), the transatlantic site gives rise to a convocation of the multiple I in the narrative that, together with the legacy that is invoked and the venues around the seas that are visited, opens up a whole new horizon of reconciliation with the conflicts. The bard is the New World survivor who, with boost from the cosmopolitan ancestry he invokes, writes the vernacular larger than the local, contemporary life it appears to live. Chapter Five examines the many points of fleeing from the fixation with the sense of belonging that haunts Coetzee’s early life in two of his autobiographical work. Different from Naipaul’s filial piety and Walcott’s transatlantic linkage in his literary affiliation, Coetzee’s texts understand debt in ways of de-(af)filiation. In Boyhood (1997) John mourns for the life on the farm and in Youth (2002) he mourns for his aborted child. In both cases, home, like the nation that is called South Africa, is where the heart yearns to leave and to leave totally behind. The tales of fleeing in Boyhood and Youth are thus petite narratives of sort in which the self of the author can be written in exactly the manner in which he survives the totalizing dictation of the state apparatus. Writing, for these three authors, is an act of survival in an ethical sense because death is enunciated in the transfigured form of debt that they invoke, employ and make present in their writing. And survival, which always involves more than one self and more than one life, is therefore a unique mode of being in which writing can live up to the creative transformative enterprise it is.

博士
國立臺灣師範大學
英語研究所
91
Metaphorizing Migrancy:V. S. Naipaul’s fiction and Diaspora Poetics Abstract This dissertation explores the representation of diaspora experience in V. S. Naipaul’s four major novels─The Mimic Men, A Bend in the River, The Enigma of Arrival, and A Way in the World. The introductory chapter builds up the theoretical framework and highlights significant aspects concerning Naipaul: his controversial position, diaspora poetics specific to his works, and his locating in the shifting topology, the metaphor of migrancy. Chapter Two reads The Mimic Men in relation to the reconceptualization of cultural roots/routes and identity prompted particularly by Stuart Hall and James Clifford, centering mainly on the metaphor of migrancy, which functions to dispense with the crisis of cultural identity and the void of re-imagination of cultural origins. Chapter Three, which discusses A Bend in the River, elucidates how Naipaul elaborates the social dynamic in a re-mapping cultural and national domain and how he addresses and redresses the shifting milieus in both the Third and the First World in a global sphere that changes. Chapter Four examines The Enigma of Arrival in relation to the configuration of diaspora identification and syncretic vision, mapping out Naipaul’s inscription of a nomadic self, an Indo-Trinidadian novelist, in the English landscape and his launching of an implicated cultural critique of the metropolitan center. The attempts to delve into the possibilities of creating new cultural hybrids and to arrive at a substantial truth about the complexity of cultural syncreticism are foregrounded, whereby the received ideas of home, exile are critically re-envisioned and redefined. Chapter Five reads A Way in the World as a postcolonial historiography that presents a way of entry into histories as tension and mutation rather than beatitude and stability. In A Way in the World, a novel that dramatizes a mobile sense of histories, an anti-teleological diasporic vision is installed; the account of migrancy is substantiated as a contributive determinant of historiography. The concluding chapter affirms Naipaul’s achievement, reiterating the metaphorization of migrancy in Naipaul’s novels as a strategy of cultural negotiation in a re-orienting world.

博士
淡江大學
英文學系
92
As an exiled writer with a multi-cultural background─ Indian by ancestry, Trinidadian by birth, and English by education─Naipaul is constantly searching for his writing position in the world. As a colonial, he has an urge to articulate his fluid, multiple and unstable identities. For him, identity is not given, but constructed and contingent. This dissertation aims at exploring the concept of home reflected in Naipaul’s works in terms of his unique postcolonial cultural perspective. I examine extensively Naipaul’s writing, focusing, among other things, on both his particularity as a postcolonial writer and his journey from the Caribbean, his birthplace, toward “home.” In addition to the investigation of Naipaul’s works and his colonial anxiety, I also explore his resistance to his displaced position through the act of writing. By accepting his homelessness and statelessness, he recreates a new identity in exile. Though some critics, including Derek Walcott, George Lamming, and A. Sivanandan, have launched a diatribe against Naipaul’s imperial writing position, others, such as Timothy F. Weiss, Selwyn R. Cudjoe, Rob Nixon, Sudha Rai, Judith Levy and John Thieme, defend Naipaul from a third-world perspective. In my dissertation, I present the pros and cons of the major arguments between these two camps with an aim of substantiating the latter viewpoint through the contextual analysis of Naipaul’s works. Most critics deal with Naipaul’s sense of homelessness, focusing on his early writings, especially those works prior to The Enigma of Arrival, but Naipaul’s philosophy of life changed from negative to positive after the publication of The Enigma of Arrival. Thus, a study of Naipaul’s works from his first published fiction The Mystic Masseur to the latest, Half a Life, affirms a change of attitude in his writing that leads to self-definition, an important theme ignored by most critics. Therefore, I argue in this dissertation that his mental journey and his writing are a journey toward self-knowledge. Naipaul’s novelistic writing as an identity recovery process undergoes a series of transformations: he negates his Caribbean homeland, adopts a stage of mimicry in England, searches for his cultural roots in India, and finally reconstructs his identity out of his multi-cultural uniqueness. His writing career comes in four stages: (1) placelessness and alienation, (2) colonial predicament, (3) cultural heritage in India, and (4) writing for self-definition. In the Introduction, I explore Naipaul’s background so as to grasp his concept of self in relation to place. Next, I attempt to introduce Stuart Hall’s assertion of unfixed identity, Homi Bhabha’s theories of hybridity, mimicry, and third space, Doreen Massey’s concept and definition of place, Rosemary Marangoly George’s politics of home, and Andrew Gurr’s definition of home as the identity-making process. A brief introduction to Naipaul’s works is followed by an in-depth analysis of Naipaul’s sense of alienation and displacement, as indicated in Miguel Street, The Mystic Masseur, The Suffrage of Elvira and A House for Mr. Biswas. In the second chapter, Naipaul’s more mature works, including The Mimic Men, In a Free State, and A Bend in the River are examined so that the complexity of the colonial predicament can be revealed. I will explore Naipaul’s travel record of India and his quest for cultural heritage in the third chapter. In this chapter, I also touch on his Indian trilogy, An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization, and India: A Million Mutinies Now. In the fourth chapter, I probe Naipaul’s self-definition through an analysis of The Enigma of Arrival, Between Father and Son: Family Letters, Reading and Writing, and Half a Life. In my concluding chapter, I will offer an assessment of how Naipaul recreates a new sense of place by accepting his position of exile.

This study proposes that Leila Sebbar and V. S. Naipaul, two widely-read contemporary novelists, intuitively understand Albert Camus' idea of revolt, using it to legitimate their non-essentialized, transcultural models of individual and collective identity. This dissertation views an Algerian teenager's rendezvous with Nobel Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul in Les Carnets de Sherazade as a magical portal through which Leila Sebbar allows us to see her fiction as a subversion and a reappropriation of the liberal philosophical principles underlying V. S. Naipaul's novels and travel journals. Although they interpret the increasing visibility of cultural, racial, and religious fundamentalisms in Western and non-Western societies as signs of a gathering nihilistic storm, neither Sebbar nor Naipaul believe that these epistemologically bounded ideologies of revolt are invincible. Instead, both depict rebellion, an epistemologically open-ended and altruistic form of revolt, as the exclusive means through which post-colonials across the globe can experience individual and communal wholeness---liberty, equality, fraternity, and peace---amidst the eponymous mixing of different peoples and truths in the late twentieth century. Chapter One explores the concepts of rebellion and nihilism in Albert Camus' The Rebel and Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. It also investigates the uncanny philosophical and thematic parallels in Leila Sebbar's and V. S. Naipaul's works. Chapter Two analyzes the theme of the returned gaze in Sebbar's Sherazade and Le Fou de Sherazade. It shows how Sherazade, Sebbar's title character, resists Orientalism and Islamic orthodoxy in a rebellious manner. The Algerian teenager challenges the "master's" desire for supremacy without denying his or her dignity. Chapter Three investigates the relationship between Sebbar's fiction and Lettres parisiennes: autopsie de l'exil, her correspondence with Canadian author Nancy Huston. It demonstrates that Sebbar's formulation of exile as a hybrid, contingent identitarian space in Lettres parisiennes is coterminous with Camus' notion of rebellion. Chapter Four is a detailed study of Sherazade's encounter with V. S. Naipaul in southwestern France in Les Carnets de Sherazade. Using Anne Donadey's model of mimicry, it claims that Sebbar subverts the British-Caribbean writer's representations of the ex-colonized's subjectivity and revalidates his underlying faith in rebellion.

碩士
國立彰化師範大學
英語學系
96
V. S. Naipaul, the winner of Nobel Prize in literature in 2001, is a controversial writer. He is a descendent of Hindu but was born in Trinidad. Since he was young, he has received British education and went to England to continue his education at the age of eighteen. He writes his fictions and non-fictions in English and often discusses the issues about the Third World. His concerns include India, Trinidad, Africa and Islamic world. He likes to criticize Third World people, the victims of colonialism, rather than to condemn the colonizers. Therefore, some critics regard Naipaul as the cringer of the white. For example, Rob Nixon in “The License of Exile” indicates that Naipaul wears the mask of an exile to smear the Third World people from the Western point of view. However, other critics, such as Bruce King and Dolly Zulakha Hassan, believe that Naipaul is an impartial exile and serves for the truth only. This thesis intends to provide an alterative perspective on Naipaul and his works. In the thesis, I argue that Naipaul is profoundly influenced by his diasporic experiences, which endow him with a double viewpoint. On the one hand, Naipaul is aware of his Hindu identity and often writes his works with Hindu philosophy. On the other hand, he internalizes Western values and often reveals his admiration for Western civilization. In other words, Naipaul’s double viewpoint generated from diasporic experiences not only makes his works ambivalent and controversial, but also enriches his writing. Because Naipaul prefers writing his own experiences in novels, his novels are often seen as semi-autobiography. Based on his own experiences, Naipaul can depict diasporic people’s lives vividly. Thus, my aim is to analyze Naipaul’s two novels, The Mimic Men and The Enigma of Arrival and elaborate how Naipaul deals with the issues about diasporic people in his novels. The thesis will focus on two issues: home and diasporic identity The introductory chapter explores critics’ disputes on Naipaul’s works, suggesting that Naipaul’s diasporic experiences have a great impact on his writing. Chapter Two mainly focuses on the concepts of diaspora. The concepts proposed by James Clifford, Robin Cohen and Avtar Brah are the main concerns. Salman Rushdie’s imaginary homeland and Angelika Bammer’s notion of home are applied to explain diasporic people’s relationship with home. Stuart Hall’s concept of cultural identity is also used to explicate the construction of diasporic identity. Chapter Three analyzes Naipaul’s The Mimic Men, representing Ralph Singh’s triangular relationship with his ancestors’ homeland, his natal homeland and the host country in order to explain why he chooses writing as his imaginary home. The second part demonstrates the construction and transformations of Ralph Singh’s diasporic identity. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival is examined in Chapter Four. This chapter indicates how Victor forms a diasporic identity with a hyphen and how he searches a place named home. The fifth chapter concludes that to define Naipaul as a diasporic writer rather than an impartial exile or the cringer of the White is an effective way to understand the author and his works.

Ce travail a pour objectif de circonscrire, dans l'oeuvre de V.S. Naipaul, une image chère à celui-ci: le home. Nous voulons mettre en valeur l'ambiguité de cette image chez celui-ci. En effet, elle désigne, dans l'oeuvre, tantôt un espace propre et vital, sans lequel le sujet ne serait pas en mesure de « tenir » face aux épreuves du réel, tantôt un lieu imaginaire et factice, symptomatique d'une personnalité schizoïde. Nous respectons dans ce travail l'ambivalence avec laquelle est « traitée » l'image du home. Il s'agira de ne pas négliger l'une ou l'autre des significations que prend alternativement celle-ci. Dans un premier temps, nous établissons un lien entre l'image du home chez Naipaul, et la notion de lieu (place) dans la théorie contemporaine anglo-saxonne. Les auteurs auxquels nous référons interrogent les diverses acceptions que peut prendre le terme de « lieu » en fonction des situations historiques. C'est la valeur de « retraite » accordée au lieu qui retient particulièrement notre attention. Dans le deuxième chapitre, nous mettons à profit les oeuvres de Gaston Bachelard et d'Emmanuel Levinas, qui tous deux ont tenté d'atteindre aux « fondements » de l'habiter. Nous tentons de saisir en quoi leurs réflexions se distinguent nettement de celles des auteurs étudiés dans la première partie. Bachelard et Levinas, grosso modo, ont eu tendance à faire l'apologie du lieu entendu comme « retraite ». Celle-ci, chez ces auteurs, est une condition insigne de l'existence. Nous faisons contraster cette apologie avec quelques romans de Naipaul dans lesquels le home figure avant tout, pour les narrateurs, un objet de détestation. La raison en est simple: chez Naipaul, les narrateurs n'ont le plus souvent pas de maison. Le home devient alors un objet de frustration. Enfin, nous soulignons une certaine tendance, chez l'auteur, à employer le langage clinique lorsqu'il s'agit du home. L'image du « lieu de retraite » est souvent, dans l'oeuvre, traitée comme une formation défensive du sujet. Le home prend ainsi place dans une théorie des défenses, que Naipaul élabore lors de ses voyages en Inde. La « retraite » prend une connotation nettement clinique qui se rapproche de la dissociation. Nous explorons ce que nous appelons la « métaphore clinique » des reportages sur l'Inde. Pour finir, nous montrons que cette « métaphore clinique » est peu à peu abandonnée par l'auteur, qui admet que le home peut être le signe d'une créativité, et non seulement d'une défense.

碩士
中國文化大學
英國語文學研究所
92
Abstract The purposes of this thesis, concentrating on analyses about two of V. S. Naipaul’s novels A Bend in the River and A House for Mr. Biswas and considering them as exilic novels, are to examine the strategy of the relocation of identity/subjectivity and to afford a possibility of reading Naipaul’s works through probing the dialectics between alienation/identity and spatiality and through M.M. Bakhtin’s novelistic theory.. The introductory chapter will render the brief introductions of Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River, spatial theory, and M. M. Bakhtin’s theory of the novel. Chapter one will elaborate on the misemployment and representation of colonial history and the impropriety of trying to retrieve a pre-colonial culture or construct essentialism as a basic strategy and will present the dilemma of modern nationalist. Chapter two will examine the usage of nation and race, and will propose that the chaos of post-colonial politics is to be attributed to the misconception of people in the Third World. Besides, the later part of chapter two attempts to study exile and alienation in Naipaul’s novels through Bakhtin’s theory. Chapter three will explore exile and alienation by endowing the spatial reading of the powerless and the powerful. The conclusive chapter proposes that identity/subjectivity, exile, and alienation can be constructed within/on various spaces, and that the most basic way of relocating identity is neither to blindly resist foreign cultures nor to accept them completely, but to know our essences and know where we want to go first; that is, identification is not a matter of root but a matter of path. This thesis, as is customary, tends to offer a possibility of reading V. S. Naipaul’s works.

Specifically, in her novel Beloved Morrison redefines the slave-narrative tradition and reveals the discredited history of slavery by unveiling the "interior life" of African American ancestors and rendering memories heretofore unacknowledged and unspoken in classic slave autobiographical narratives. Through a hybrid prose that mixes fiction with history in the novels The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World , Naipaul illuminates "areas of darkness" in the diasporic world of East Indian Trinidadian peoples and provides new ways of transforming the English literary and cultural history. Focusing on West African identity and community, especially the poorest and the most powerless, in the novel The Famished Road Okri brings a mythic and fantastic dimension to postcolonial fiction as a way of finding images to portray what the public media and the outside world fail to record and comprehend, and gives voice to people who are generally without power and almost without any place in a world of inequality and injustice. Probing into specific representations of incompleteness in the historical novels of Toni Morrison, V. S. Naipaul, and Ben Okri, this thesis underscores the indispensable role of fiction in representing life, rewriting history and enlarging reality.
With reference to Paul Ricoeur's conception of the interconnectedness between history and fiction, in particular his analyses in The Reality of the Historical Past, this comparative literary study examines narrative strategies that three contemporary writers of fiction---Toni Morrison, V. S. Naipaul, and Ben Okri---have devised to counteract incompleteness of historical representation. This thesis argues that history as a mode of rendering the past and a way of representing reality is essentially incomplete. In other words, history is incomplete as a systematic written account comprising a chronological record of past events, circumstances, and facts, and as a story or a narrative of events connected with a real or imaginary object or person. Fiction, however, with its underlying capacity to transform and transfigure reality, imagines as well as repatterns unrecognized or misrepresented aspects of individual and cultural histories. In their works of fiction, Morrison, Naipaul, and Okri purposefully address various kinds of historical negation, absence, and incompleteness.
Zhu Ying.
"May 2005."
Adviser: Timothy Weiss.
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-01, Section: A, page: 0180.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 219-233).
Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web.
Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web.
Abstracts in English and Chinese.
School code: 1307.

“In Between Places” is a study in literary geography at the end of empire. It begins from the premise that decolonization itself is a question of place and the relationship of people to places. From this premise, the dissertation explores the narrative techniques that emerge from this moment of historical transformation, in which decolonization was inevitable but not yet fully achieved. The formal elements of decolonial fiction—an emphasis on the individual transformation of place, the incorporation of narrative settings both temporary and fragile—express the ways that spatial relations were central to the political aims of late colonial and early postcolonial writers from across the globe and who express a range of complicated cultural politics. This dissertation begins with an introduction that situates British decolonial fiction in terms of theories of space and place, the transition between modernism and postcolonialism, and current critical debates surrounding forms of anticolonial critique in the twentieth century. In the subsequent four chapters, the dissertation provides case studies of the narrative fiction of Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul, George Lamming, and Doris Lessing. Combining formal analysis, archival research, and literary and political history, this dissertation reconstructs the ways that colonial and postcolonial subjects respond to the places they inhabit—at the level of the room, the house, and the city. To tell this story, the chapters move from the abstract space of geopolitics to different sites within urban environments and domestic households. “In Between Places” explains how place functions aesthetically and politically; how Caribbean, African, and English sites were physically marked by colonialism; and how midcentury writers of decolonization used literary setting to resist myths of imperial belonging as well as to uphold them.