A multidisciplinary approach is needed to critique the frequently invoked but seldom questioned notion of "human dignity," a discursive tool that is subtly serving abusive power structures while seemingly promoting human rights. The discourse of human dignity misrepresents the meaning of empowerment for modern citizens, making them interested more in political gestures and less in profit, comfort and protection from abuse. Dignity‘s epistemes—self-assertion, recognition, political action, public-spiritedness, responsibility, resistance, the denial of animal instinct, sacrifice—should not be human ideals, for they are exactly the opposite of the sovereign‘s characteristics and because they are responsible for recursive violence that preserves the status quo. They should be replaced with ethics based on sensuous interest, instinct, and natural-spiritedness (a sense of mystical oneness with other living beings). This dissertation answers Foucault‘s question about how the modern state endows citizens with a political subjectivity while simultaneously subjecting them to a totalized system, exposing human dignity as just the link between individuation and totalization. It questions Agamben‘s notion of the indistinction between political life and natural life, arguing that sovereign power, using the discourse of human dignity, creates a clear distinction. The human dignity discourse keeps the human within political life, representing such life as the middle point between the instinctive life of the animal and the mechanical life of the laborer. In reality, the dissertation shows, these two demonized modes of life are the same mode, which should be championed as a valuable and empowered state of being. In the literary field, a close examination reveals that J. M. Coetzee‘s fiction subverts the human dignity discourse while Kazuo Ishiguro‘s work is enmeshed in it. Coetzee generates sympathy for humans who lack the sense of human dignity and act on mere instinct. He offers ―disgrace‖ as a spiritual-ethical state of sensuality, acceptance and humility and promotes an agenda of desire-based rights in lieu of dignity-based ones. His writings also eschew authorial dignity as they discount the values of newness and originality in favor of expression attuned to desire, even when such moves appear selfish and politically irresponsible.

This thesis attempts to analyze Japanese British writer Kazuo Ishiguro¡¦s The Remains of the Day by tracing Ishiguro¡¦s engagement with such problematic issues as the recuperation of history, the negotiation with Englishness, and the fetishization of professionalism. To critically study the thematic concerns of Ishiguro¡¦s novel¡Xits examination of the conflicts between memory and history, its critique of the discursive formation of Englishness, and its scrutiny of psychic costs of the subject formation of a professional butler, I adopt a critical stance that is hybridized in nature and read The Remains of the Day as an incisive deconstruction of the colonial cultural legacies that the English both embrace and disavow. The first chapter explores the ways in which the macronarratives of the nation¡¦s history impact and influence the micronarratives of personal memory. Stevens¡¦s yearning for the glorious past of colonial Britain and his disavowal of his shameful memory well reflect the collective symptom of post-imperial melancholia that the British people experienced in the ¡¦80s. The second chapter applies Homi Bhabha¡¦s ideas of ¡§stereotype¡¨ to study the discursive formation of Englishness through acts of cultural coercion and problematize the concepts of Englishness as discursively constructed fetishes. By paying concentrated attention on English imaginaries of the landscape of English country side, the English country house, and the English gentleman, Ishiguro mocks and questions, if not ridicule, the concepts of Englishness by making parodies of these three prototypes of Englishness. By using Michel Foucault¡¦s concepts of discipline, sexuality, and subjectivity, the third chapter studies Stevens¡¦s professionalism, his conflicts between personal affections and desire and his professional principles. Even though Ishiguro proffers a critique of Stevens¡¦s blind loyalty and exposes the political consequences of the butler¡¦s non-political stance, the novel ends with an open ending that leaves undecided how Stevens is to face the ¡§remains¡¨ of his days, or, as an analogy, how the English are to tackle with the ¡§remains¡¨ of their days.

Thesis (M.A.)--Michigan State University. Dept. of English, 2007. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Aug. 11, 2009) Includes bibliographical references (p. 33-34). Also issued in print.

This essay investigates the colonized self in Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day, by analyzing the novels from a postcolonial perspective. Furthermore, it discusses how and why Masuji Ono and Mr. Stevens are affected by Japanese imperialism and British colonialism. Through a close reading of the novels, this essay argues that the protagonists are ‘colonized’ by their own countries, and eventually also ‘imperialized,’ or influenced, by America following the Second World War. Ono is ‘colonized’ by his colleague Matsuda, while Mr. Stevens is ‘colonized’ by his employer, Mr. Darlington. Later on, they are both ‘imperialized’ through the American occupation and influence.

This essay argues that repression and defense mechanisms contribute to the unreliability of Stevens’ narrationthrough three aspects: Stevens’ uncertainty of certain memories, his failure to report certain scenescorrectly and his defensive, self-contradictory discourse. There is no single best way to define what is consideredreliable and what is unreliable in narratology because the complexity of fictional characters will renderdifferent kinds of unreliability. This essay detects three kinds of unreliability of Stevens corresponding to thethree aspects mentIoned above: the first kind results from the untrustworthiness of our memory, the secondkind is the contradiction between the voice of the narrator and the other characters and the third kind lieswithin the narrative discourse. The unreliability of Stevens’ narration attributes to repression and defensemechanisms. The five kinds of defense mechanisms analyzed in the essay are selective memory, denial,projection, reaction formation and rationalization. In order to defend his self-image as a great butler, Stevenslies to or hides from himself and tries to avoid acknowledging certain undesirable thoughts or emotions. Eventhough Stevens becomes more reliable as he gains more self-realization during the road trip, his defensesare still on.

This thesis undertakes a critical study of ethics in the postcolonial novel. Focusing on four authors, namely Amitav Ghosh, Chimamanda Adichie, Caryl Phillips, and Kazuo Ishiguro, I conduct a comparative analysis of the ethical engagement offered in a selection of their novels. I argue that the recognitions and related emotional responses of characters are integral to the unfolding of these novels’ ethical concerns. The ethics thus explored are often marked by the complexity and impurity characteristic of the tragic – an impurity which is productively thought together with Jacques Derrida’s understanding of “radical evil”. I arrive at this through deploying an approach to ethics in the postcolonial novel that is largely drawn from the work of Martha Nussbaum, David Scott, and Terence Cave. This approach is attentive to both the particular contexts in which the novels’ ethical concerns unfold, as well as the general ethical questions in relation to which these can be understood. Crucial to this is the concept of anagnorisis, that is, the recognition scene. Functioning as both a structural and a thematic element, it serves as a hinge between the general and the specific ethical considerations in a novel. There are three ethical themes that I consider across the thesis: the ethics of remembrance, the human, and religion. The works of these four authors cluster around these concerns to differing degrees and with differing perspectives. What emerges is that while each engagement is focused on the particular details that the novel represents, the range of perspectives can nevertheless be productively read alongside one another as interventions into these general concerns. Following from this I also conclude that as a suitable, if not privileged, form in which to engage questions of the ethical, the postcolonial novel hosts the ethical difficulty that I name as the tragic, and which is characterised by the term radical evil.

The purpose of this thesis is to analyse unreliable narration and its motivation in the two novels by Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World (1986) and The Remains of the Day (1989) using the taxonomy of Zuzana Fonioková and James Phelan and Mary Patricia Martin. In its theoretical part, this thesis explores the concept of unreliability in contemporary narratology, furthermore, it studies self-deception and memory, two phenomena essential for understanding the motivations for unreliable narration. The practical part consists of an analysis of the textual signals of unreliability, which proves the complexity of Ishiguro's narrative strategies. The thesis concludes that the climax of both the novels is created through the spelling out of the narrators' self-deception, which is the cause of their unreliability in the first place. KEYWORDS Kazuo Ishiguro, unreliable narration, self-deception, memory, An Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day

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