English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item Postcolonial Refashionings: Reading Forms, Reading Novels(2009) Comorau, Nancy Alla; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation reads the postcolonial novel through a lens of novel theory, examining the ways in which the postcolonial novel writes a new chapter in the history of the novel. I explore how Postcolonial writers deploy--even as they remodel--the form of the British novel, which provides them a unique avenue for expressing national and individual historical positions and for imaginatively renegotiating their relationships to the canon and the Commonwealth, past and present. In doing so, they remake the forms they have inherited into the genre of the postcolonial novel. The novel, due to its connection to modernity, the nation, and the formation of the subject, holds different possibilities for postcolonial writers than other forms. My dissertation answers readings of postcolonial texts, which, while often superb in their interpretation of the political, fail to focus on genre. In a fashion, postcolonial novels are read as anthropological works, providing glimpses into a culture, and in a peculiar way the novel comes to operate as the native informant. Given the proliferation of the Anglophone postcolonial novel, I argue that it is important that we consider how the postcolonial novel renders established genres into new forms. I focus on a set of postcolonial novels that specifically engage with canonical British novels, calling attention to the fact that while they share much with their predecessors, they function differently than the novels that have come before them. Unlike early postcolonial arguments about empire "writing back" to the center, which position postcolonial and "English" writers in an antipodal power struggle, I argue that the Anglophone postcolonial novel is at once a descendent of the British novel and a genre unto itself--forming a new limb from the British novel's branch. In doing so, these novels perform new ways of writing modernity, the nation, and the subject. Working from a Bakhtinian theory of the modern novel as a form that creates newness, I demonstrate how postcolonial writers use the history and tradition of the British novel to write, revise, and refashion the novel in English.Item Screams Somehow Echoing: Trauma and Testimony in Anglophone African Literature(2008-07-26) Brown, Michelle Lynn; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Postcolonial literary critics note persistently recurring representations of colonial violence in post-independence Anglophone African novels. I suggest that complex psychological and political processes of colonial trauma compel this narrative repetition. This dissertation juxtaposes postcolonial and trauma studies in order to analyze literary representations of colonial violence in terms of race, gender, identity, and the post-independence nation-state. To do so, I engage with black feminisms, African history, Subaltern Studies, and Latin American testimonio studies. I contend that, despite variations in aesthetic mode, melancholia, haunting, and mourning recur in realist and postmodern Anglophone African and diaspora novels with interesting variations beyond the usual stylistic differences. This tendency spans sub-Saharan Africa, the Atlantic, and generations. My work suggests that we use the vocabulary of psychoanalysis to fruitfully read post-independence literature as testimony representing the trauma of colonial occupation. Trauma and justice studies teach that testimony is the route to surviving productively after an experience of traumatizing violence. While mine is not the first analysis of Anglophone African literature to employ the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, it is the first to suggest doing so in the context of traumatic testimony. I explore three modes of telling--testimonial bodies, censored testimony and its ghosts, and trans-generational testifying wounds--represented in Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments (Ghana, the United States, and France), Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (Zimbabwe), Nuruddin Farah's Maps (Somalia), Moses Isegawa's Abyssinian Chronicles (Uganda and the Netherlands), Meja Mwangi's Carcase for Hounds (Kenya), Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl (Nigeria and Britain), and in Zoë Wicomb's David's Story and J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (South Africa). Modes of telling crisscross the continent, suggesting that traumatic suffering binds different communities together. Read as traumatic testimonies, the texts critique the intersected, normalizing discourses of globalization, trans-Atlantic migration, women's rights, and decolonization. They demonstrate that moments of national birth mark historical sites of potential for the collective to revise the past, create a national citizenry, and chart a socially progressive future through transformative mourning processes.Item WHO WILL BURY THE DEAD?(2008-05-05) Ehikhamenor, Victor E; William, Henry L; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Who Will Bury The Dead is a collection of interconnected short stories. The characters navigate rural and urban life in an African country. These characters also traverse the world beyond their shores, all the way to a new living in America. Though the landscapes keep shifting, the village of Uwessan keeps re-occurring in memory and reality.Item The Footsteps and Other Stories(2008-05-05) Ocita, James; Norman, Howard; Casey, Maud; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Set in part in a remote Ugandan countryside and in part in the squalid slums of Kampala, The Footsteps and Other Stories explores the pains and the struggles and the aspirations of wretched lowly folks when the state not only abdicates from its responsibility of protecting them but also turns its repressive instruments against them. In their flight from misery, in their unrelenting quest for the ever elusive security, personal or economic, they discover a voice for themselves--the one thing the state cannot take away from them. In spite of themselves, their attempts to make sense of their lives, of the events that they find themselves caught up in, are often times quite comical, sometimes bordering on the farcical. And the landscapes, depicted in a language that is quite lucid and lyrical, often times mirror the situations that the characters themselves are caught up in.Item (Re)Constructing A Homeland: Reflective Nostalgia In The Works Of Contemporary Francophone North African Jewish Women Writers(2007-04-23) Strongson, Julie Deborah; Eades, Caroline; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This work examines the role of nostalgia in texts by Judeo-Maghrebian women writers who write retrospectively about their lives in North Africa. I study authors from Algeria (Rachel Kahn, Myriam Ben, Hélène Cixous and Annie Cohen), Tunisia (Annie Goldmann and Nine Moati), and Morocco (Paule Darmon). I specifically look at the ways in which these authors' multiple layers of identity--as Jews, as Arabs, as, in many cases, French citizens, and as women--inform their works and fuel the nostalgic tone of their narratives, shaping the way in which they recreate their homelands through their texts. Drawing on theoretical discussions of "home" and nostalgia, I consider these authors' writing processes, including their own reflections on nostalgia; their reliance on symbols related to nature and the body; their diverse depictions of the relationships between the North African Jews and their fellow non-Jews; and their representation of women's roles in Jewish and North African cultures.