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1	Romances of the self: single women, neoliberalism and the nationalist imaginary in Indian chick lit Carvalho, Charmaine Austin 04 July 2018 (has links) In the mid-2000s, novels written by Indian women featuring a single woman's adventures in work and romance joined a transnational genre of writing called "chick lit" epitomized by novels such as Bridget Jones's Diary (Fielding 1996) and Sex and the City (Bushnell 1997). While chick lit has garnered some scholarly attention (Ferriss and Young 2006; Gill 2007; Harzewski 2011), studies remain largely focused on Anglo-American writing even while acknowledging the genre's global spread. There has been no in-depth analysis of chick lit written by Indian women in India, and it is this lacuna that this study seeks to fill.;The emergence of chick lit in India roughly a decade after economic liberalization makes the novels a useful lens through which to observe the formation of a new feminine neoliberal subjectivity - "the Indian singleton". I argue that the discourse of singleness in Indian chick lit novels is deployed not so much to solve the problem of being unmarried, but to resolve the tension between the demands of "Indian tradition" on urban, middle-class, young women and their desire for a selfhood inflected by transnational, neoliberal discourses of autonomy. By shifting my analytical focus away from the protagonist and her romantic partner to the mother-daughter relationship in the novels, I show how "tradition" and "modernity" are crystallized through discourses of food, fashion and the body. While "tradition" and "modernity" are conceptualized in these narratives as a binary, the protagonists seem to be attempting to articulate a selfhood that merges the two poles without having to pick a side. I draw on postcolonial, poststructuralist and feminist theory to argue that in their refusal to conform to ideas of Indian selfhood wherein individualism is circumscribed by community, the single women in Indian chick lit present, if not entirely represent, the idea of synthesis.
2	Allegory and the Transnational Affective Field in the Contemporary Mexican Novel (1993-2013) Bernal Rodríguez, Alejandra 08 October 2019 (has links) This thesis identifies continuities and disruptions within the tradition of literary allegory in Latin America and critically revisits the category of “national allegory” (Jameson 1986) in order to articulate an interpretative model suited to contemporary “transnational allegorical fiction”. Based on the analysis of seven Mexican novels that register the transition of neoliberalism from the political-economic order to a form of biopolitical control (Althusser, Foucault, Žižek), I identify the emergence of what I call a “transnational affective field”: a symbolic horizon, alternative to the nation, where the prospective function of foundational romances (Sommer) and the retrospective function of mourning akin to postdictatorial fiction (Avelar), converge. This ideological device negotiates power relations, facilitates the transfer of local/global meaning, promotes intercultural empathy and compromise, and denounces mechanisms of exclusion; thereby, reconfiguring the affective and political functions of allegory in Latin American fiction. Part One discusses critical approaches to allegorical fiction in both Latin American and World literatures. Part Two compares the representation of the binomial nation/world in three historiographic metafictions by Carmen Boullosa, Francisco Rebolledo and J.E. Pacheco through recent approaches in post-/de-colonial and memory studies. Part Three examines the depiction of the nation as simulacrum and the figuration of postmodern subjectivities in Jorge Volpi and Juan Villoro from a poststructuralist perspective. It also contends that Álvaro Enrigue’s and Valeria Luiselli’s novels are representative of an emergent meta-allegorical imagination that, in an ironic reversal of allegory (de Man), simultaneously constructs it as a mechanism of ideological control as well as a conscious strategy to resist commodification and symbolic violence (Bourdieu) in the contemporary world. The analysis demonstrates the vitality of Mexican transnational allegorical fiction as a socio-political and affective counter-hegemonic discourse that also functions as an effective strategy of recognition in the international literary field. Allegory Transnationalism Contemporary Literature Mexico Transnational literature Global novel Affective Field Nationalism Cosmopolitanism Mexican Literature Postnationalism Romance Mourning Postmodernism Affect Cosmopolitan memory Carmen Boullosa Cielos de la Tierra Francisco Rebolledo Rasero José Emilio Pacheco Morirás lejos Jorge Volpi El fin de la locura Juan Villoro Arrecife Alvaro Enrigue Vidas perpendiculares Valeria Luiselli La historia de mis dientes Neoliberalism in literature Walter Benjamin and allegory Paul de Man and allegory Mexican World Literature

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Romances of the self: single women, neoliberalism and the nationalist imaginary in Indian chick lit

Allegory and the Transnational Affective Field in the Contemporary Mexican Novel (1993-2013)