This dissertation explores the experience of modernity outside of Europe by considering the portrayal of the railway in selected literature of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. I examine what I see as a mutually constitutive process: the way subjectivity is constructed within modernity, and the way modernity, in turn, transforms as it travels to the “periphery.” My dissertation explores these transformations by looking at the way people inhabit, resist and remake the spaces in and around the railway. Using literary works by Senegalese writer Sembène Ousmane, Turkish poet Nâzim Hikmet, and selected South Asian writers, I consider the place of aesthetics and representation in this process. I argue that all these authors contribute to a genre that might be called postcolonial modernism, literature from the Third World that is both creating and responding to the advent of modernity. Chapter One provides an overview of theories of modernity. My discussion brings together those critics who theorize modernity primarily within the Western context and those who have opened a discussion of alternative modernities. Chapter Two introduces contemporary theories of space as a way to explore how modernity travels. Looking specifically at spaces of the railway, I consider how modernity is realized through material and imaginative practices. Chapter Three focuses on Sembène Ousmane's God's Bits of Wood (1960), and demonstrates how the novel's conflict between generations during the colonial period reveals two relationships to modernity that coexist in the colonial setting. My fourth chapter brings the discussion to the context of South Asia and the literature of partition, including Khushwant Singh's novel Train to Pakistan (1956). I argue that these Indian and Pakistani writers represent the railway as a contradictory space traversing a geography fragmented by communal allegiances. Chapter Five analyzes Turkish poet Nâzim Hikmet's epic poem Human Landscapes (1950), written during a period of intense national modernization. I present Hikmet's view of modernity as an ambivalent one, representing the altered modes of perception brought by modern technology at the same time underscoring, through his portrayal of the Turkish peasantry, the fact that modernity has not fulfilled its promise of emancipation.

This dissertation explores the nature and context of the dialogue between African and African American writers, buttressed by the extensive use of history and memory by Chinua Achebe, John Edgar Wideman, and Zakes Mda, the three writers at the center of this study. Through the reading of three primary texts – Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Wideman’s The Cattle Killing, and Mda’s The Heart of Redness – the dissertation examines not only the writers’ engagement with memory and history but also their deployment of “African” metaphysics, modes of apprehension and narrative traditions. The study foregrounds how a growing number of contemporary African and African American writers share an interest in probing connections, common fissures and tensions in their historical experiences. It explores the writers’ investment in history, concern with memory acts, the deployment of the logistics of ogbanje and its allied concepts within their communicative economies, and their involvement in a tripartite trans-Atlantic response to hegemonic discourse.

This dissertation seeks to argue that the vast majority of Black South African writers were no neutral sitters on the fence under apartheid rule. Each generation of Black writers assiduously and consciously deployed different genres and techniques in recording the plight of their people during years and years of subjugation under Nationalist rule. However, for each generation of committed Black South African writers the objectives were essentially consistent: to inspire, record and aid revolt against an unjust system which had been universally condemned as a crime against humanity. This dissertation is a story about the engagement of Black South African writing with its political context. It is also a journey back of sorts, because the Black writers who are at its core take us back to different phases and seasons of our shameful past as a fractured society. They take us through the consequences of the Land Act of 1913, which is universally regarded as one of the world's infamous acts of social engineering; they take us back to the notorious Bantu Education Act and its tragic consequences. In the early years of consolidating democracy in South Africa, there must be a galvanizing and self-critical vision of the goals of our society. Such a vision in turn requires a clear-sighted grasp of what was wrong in the past. It is indeed a blind progeny that acts without indebtedness to the past. The composition and orientation of Black writers who constitute this dissertation are eclectic. The dissertation draws heavily on the writings of world-renowned luminaries such as Es'kia Mphahlele, Wally Serote, Mbulelo Mzamane and Njabulo Ndebele. This dissertation falls squarely under the Citizenship Studies rubric and seeks to argue further that the Nationalists' vision of citizenship was seriously flawed because it was exclusive, violent, sectional and rooted in bigotry and racism. The task of reconstructing the post-apartheid society is going to involve massive acts of interpretation in which the historical memory will be a crucial factor.

This dissertation investigates selected third world women writers' texts to explore how they reevaluate the relationship between woman and nation from postcolonial feminist perspectives. Further, this dissertation proposes that these texts, Kamala Maskandaya's Nectar in a Sieve (1954), Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day (1980), Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (1988), and Ama Ata Aidoo's Changes (1991), revealing a rootedness in the nation, resist national cultures, which are complicit with patriarchal ideologies, making it possible for us to see their "national" constructions of woman's identity as postnational. Chapter One formulates the dissertation's theoretical framework, drawing on selected writings of postcolonial third world feminist critics, among others, that are relevant to my discussion. Applying Benedict Anderson's concept of nation and identity as "imagined" constructs, in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, I explore how these texts challenge the "imagined" patriarchal constructions of women as signifiers of national cultures. Chapter Two focuses on the impact of Markandaya's colonial heritage and diasporic consciousness in generating an ambivalence towards the concept of nationalism as seen in Nectar in a Sieve. Chapter Three analyzes how Dangarembga's feminist consciousness critiques the role of colonial and patriarchal agendas in creating a "nervous" national culture with neocolonial repercussions for women. Chapter Four compares feminist consciousness across cultural, geographical, and historical differences in Nectar in a Sieve and Nervous Conditions to examine how the latter text's postcolonial awareness reconceptualizes woman's empowerment. Chapter Five explores third world feminism, decolonization, and the modes of resistance to patriarchal structures in Changes, Clear Light of Day, and Nervous Conditions. Chapter Six, the Conclusion, offers a few questions for further exploration. Central to my analysis is the postnationalism I read into these texts which, I suggest, derives from the writers' more immediate concerns with female empowerment that problematize the female gendered identity and critique the role of nationalism, particularly in its complicity with the patriarchal. In doing so, these writers' diasporic consciousness leads towards a postnational conceptual paradigm, which reveals what is most particular in their writings--an inherent paradox implicit in that they both oppose and reaffirm nationalistic agendas.

Submitted to the Faculty of Arts in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Department of African Languages at the University of Zululand, 1998. / In this research work an attempt is made to clear certain misconceptions and generalizations which prevail amongst certain literary critics, viz that characterization in the Zulu novel is static and should be modelled on the Eurocentric canon. Investigation into this problem shows the opposite. Particular attention is devoted to demonstrating that characterization in the Zulu novel is evolutionary. And it is indeed so. Characterization in the Zulu novel has changed over the changing times under changing circumstances. The study shows that factors such as folktale residual material, traditional beliefs, christianization, urbanization, industrialization, etc. all have in one way or another impacted on the art of characterization in the Zulu novel. For this purpose we have divided the Zulu novel into three different developmental periods. These literary periods are: the period of Zulu narrative which is mostly dominated by folktale material and traditional beliefs. The second period is characterized by traditional beliefs and historical material. This manifests itself mostly in the historical novel. The third period is dominated by the social or psychological novel. Characterization during this period is characterized by such factors as christianisation, acculturation, urbanization, apartheid laws, industrialization which forced people to move to big cities like Johannesburg. During this period social adjustment problems manifest themselves in antisocial, criminal behaviour and maladjustment on the part of the characters who find themselves in this strange environment. It is, however, important to note that these periods are not watertight entities. But research has shown that a progression - retrogression tendency is found amongst the Zulu novel writers. A case in point is the impact of ancentral beliefs which transcends the three periods of the novel investigated. This means one cannot divorce entirely a literature from its past, which is why we accept lyesere's theory that the modern writer is to his indigenous oral tradition trapped as a snail is to its shell. Even in foreign habitat, a snail never leaves its shell behind, (The Journal of Modern African Studies 1975: 107-119). The study shows that characterization in the Zulu novel follows a definite pattern of development. Therefore the Zulu novel is a literature in its own right. The research shows that the present Eurocentric tools of criticism have grown alongside western literacy tradition, but definitely outside the African milieu. It is noted that characterization in the Zulu novel has been, to a very large extent, influenced by the cultural and traditional background of the Zulu people. The study shows that while using general laws of literary criticism scholars must be mindful of the fact that the Zulu novel is a novel in its own right and has peculiar characteristics of its own.

No description available.

Thesis (M.A.)--Villanova University, 2007. / English Dept. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 1998. / Title from title page screen, viewed July 11, 2006. Dissertation Committee: Ronald L. Strickland (chair), Jonathan M. Rosenthal, Cecil Giscombe. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 203-208) and abstract. Also available in print.

Fictional narrative can be viewed as a communication between a sender and a receiver. In any narrative related by an overt speaker (or writer), "I," we can identify three sender-receiver pairs: narrator and narratee, implied author and implied reader, real author and real reader. While real author and real reader do communicate in a sense, they do so through their implied counterparts. Both the implied author/implied reader and the narrator/narratee pairs are immanent to the narrative text. The implied author and reader can be thought of as structures made up of the various perspectives of the text as a whole while the narrator and the narratee each provides one of these perspectives. By examining, within the context of narrative as communication, the roles and functions of narrator and narratee and their relationship to each other, the structures of implied author and implied reader become more clearly discernible. / The present study is an examination of the perspectives of the overt "I" narrator who tells his own story to a directly addressed "you" narratee and of how they structure the role of the implied reader. The first chapter is a survey and synthesis of the recent work of narratologists such as Genette, Bal, Chatman, and Prince on the concepts of narrator and narratee. It includes a discussion of Iser's conception of the implied reader as a textual structure made up of various perspective, including those of narrator, fictitious reader (narratee), characters and plot. In the type of self-conscious first person narration chosen for this study we see that the perspectives of narrator and narratee are the most dominant in the structure of the implied reader's role. / The following three chapters examine the narrator/narratee roles and relationships in John Barth's The Floating Opera, Albert Camus' The Fall, and Gunter Grass' Cat and Mouse. Each employs a self-conscious "I" narrator of questionable reliability who tells his story to an explicitly addressed "you." Barth's Todd Andrews, adopting the role of "author," addresses a "reader, " whose response to the fictionalized account of his past Todd carefully tries to direct by frequent interruptive commentary. For Todd, this unnamed "reader" comes to take the place of his long dead father. Camus' Jean-Baptiste Clamence, by confessing the ignominies of his past, attempts to persuade an unheard interlocutor to his vision of the world and to an answering confession of duplicity and guilt. Here there is no pretense of authorship. Clamence speaks with no apparent mediation to, and in response to, a companion who occupies the same fictional space in the here and now of the narrating situation. Grass' Pilenz, who purports to write the story of Joachim Mahlke, appears to address himself to several narratees, including the perhaps-dead Mahlke who is the subject of his story. Mahlke, described as "he" in the story, is addressed as "you" in the discourse. An examination of this unusual narrator/narratee relationship reveals that Pilenz's narration is as much his story as it is Mahlke's. / The narrator/narratee relationships in the Barth, Camus, and Grass narratives break or stretch conventions of narrating established by the traditional realistic novel, thereby forcing the reader, in his role as implied reader, to take special note of the narrating act or discourse. In each of these narratives, the discourse becomes a story in its own right, a story in which the narratee's presence is essential to the narrator's attempt to order his past. Thus, the perspective of the narratee must be recognized as pivotal in the structure of the implied reader's role in these first person narratives. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 42-01, Section: A, page: 0205. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1981.

This study examines the works of contemporary writers (such as Pedro Verges, Junot Diaz, Maria Olinda Beja, Luis Rafael Sanchez and Manuel Ferreira) whose works intersect on the levels of ideology, narrative, and construction within the insular imagination. Encompassing the Atlantic island nations of Cape Verde, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Sao Tome e Principe, it argues that the insular subject, a victim and agent of our modern world contemporary Diaspora, is in a perpetual voyage toward a shifting identity. The project maintains that transit and migrancy, in our (Post)-Modern/(Post)-Colonial moment, erase and eradicate the subject's original identity, and impose a new 'indefinable' identity that is shadowed by loss, in a betweenness of place and being. The conceptual voyage of the subject's identity in modern migrancy maps out the migrant cycle that the subject undergoes: the relationship the subject develops with the insular space, the dislocation from place, the relocation of culture and place, and the attempt of a homecoming Based on the ideas that Benitez Rojo proposes in La isla que se repite, the existence of a shared experience among the many island nations of the Caribbean, particularly the colonial legacy, aids in effectively legitimizing the Atlantic cultural bridge. The repeated experience of colonialism that Benitez Rojo proposes as a link among Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico, allows the comparison with Portugal's colonial project while it ruled in Africa, and specifically in Cape Verde and Sao Tome e Principe. Thus, legitimizing the common experience of their transatlantic colonial past. Indeed, the Atlantic insular experience is based on repetition, and this project links the diasporic migration, represented in insular literature, to the present day status of these nations The conclusion argues in favor of a relationship among migrancy, (Post)Coloniality/(Post)Modernity and insular identity and creates a link between the repeating Atlantic colonial past and the current labor diasporas. It reiterates the creation of new hybrid identities, and the cultural role as a 'dangerous supplement' that migrancy plays in the modern proliferation of shifting identities / acase@tulane.edu