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 Monsoon caught in Gulmohars(2005-05-13) Kanani, Jesal Harin; Collins, Merle; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Monsoon Caught in Gulmohars is a collection of short stories that seeks to explore how otherwise perfect characters find themselves flawed as they try to reconcile with change in their life, and how they view themselves differently, as they try to settle in their new skins. Some of these stories try to understand how they respond, ignore or adapt to change. Other stories function as mirrors in which a certain way of life, a certain place, is magnified. The stories set in US are interpretations of a new environment from the eyes of an immigrant community that is close-knit but insular. Stylistically, a variety of voices, of points of view and identities have been adopted with varying syntax to heighten the manner in which characters perceive their individual realities, their individual stories. The stories have been arranged in the order of their achievement in realizing this vision.Item The Cultural Production of Controversy: Feminism, Women Authors, and the Mapping of China(2005-04-27) Zhu, Aijun; Liu, Jianmei; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project deconstructs the controversy of globally located Chinese women authors trapped in a dilemma between feminism, nationalism and neocolonialism, a dilemma complicated by the sometimes liberating yet voyeuristic, even pornographic, global popular culture. It attempts to negotiate a space for the female body in the age of economic and cultural globalization between feminism that celebrates it, nationalism that disciplines it and the flourishing global consumerism that profits from it. The project argues that the controversy of differently located Chinese women authors, especially the contradiction between women and the nation/community, is culturally produced, as much by their works as by literary and cultural criticism of limited theoretical paradigms. It also argues that this controversy almost always goes hand in hand with the cultural production of an often reductive and distorted version of feminism. The ambition of the project is to un-produce the controversy through an alternative feminist framework of criticism beyond current theoretical entrapments. Focusing on four controversial contemporary women authors at different Chinese locations, this project emphasizes a politics of literary criticism or reading. Reading is crucial not because it understands an author's intended meaning but because it actively and aggressively produces different and often times conflictary cultural and political meanings of the text and the author. The project challenges the notion of "representational inevitability," a pervasive but seriously flawed reading practice that reduces creative texts to documents that essentialize the social, cultural or political conditions of their racial or national communities. Instead, it accentuates the more flexible concept of "cultural production." Instead of "representing" a preconceived essentialized totality of national realities, texts by Third World women authors produce part of national landscapes, which are constantly being produced, reproduced, revised or changed by different texts, authors and critics. The goal is not just to provide a different feminist production of the texts by women authors of different global Chinese communities, but it is also to participate in the cultural production of feminist discourses, bringing attention to the often neglected negative representation of feminism in contemporary culture and to revise the feminist project in such a way as to detangle feminist critics from theoretically produced dilemmas. The controversy of Chinese women authors does not mean contradictions between women and the nation but tensions between feminist and nationalist discourses. It is necessary that feminism should be envisioned from outside, not of the nation but of (masculinist) nationalist discourses, in order to maintain its critical edge.