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<p>The essay investigates the film adaptation <em>The Remains of the Day</em>. The novel and film are used to give examples of ways the story of a novel can change when it is adapted for film. The theoretical framework is based on Linda Hutcheon's concept of orginality and fidelity.</p>

The essay investigates the film adaptation The Remains of the Day. The novel and film are used to give examples of ways the story of a novel can change when it is adapted for film. The theoretical framework is based on Linda Hutcheon's concept of orginality and fidelity.

The idea of witnessing through the lense of cultural trauma is one which has been described by Dominick LaCapra and others as a encompassing and far reaching from the private to the public spheres. In some cases, when trauma is so overwhelming, the response is to remain silent and do nothing to acknowledge acceptance of the causing factors of the cultural trauma. Novelists such as Kazuo Ishiguro employ various methods of discussing cultural trauma in their works. Ishiguro’s novels, Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day harbor narrators whose inner traumas reflect the trauma of the culture at large. The silent spaces in these novels arise in situations where the extreme measures taken by governing entities is also clearly stated, particularly in their discussions of the Holocaust and World War II.

Kazuo Ishiguro's novels The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go exhibit many of the same characteristics as his other works. Out of all of those works, however, only these two novels have been adapted to film as of yet. Because of Ishiguro's reliance on first-person narration and point-of-view his novels are particularly more problematic to adapt to screen. This phenomenon is partially due to the audio-visually dependent medium of film and the camera lens' limitations when it comes to exhibiting character interiority. Therefore, the effect of the translation to screen for both of these films is a shift in how the viewing audience responds to the characters as both characters and as human beings. This shift at times augments, expands, or changes the philosophical implications of Ishiguro's works. This paper explores those shifts and permutations and argues that they can ultimately lead to a more empathetic connection between the viewer and the characters in the stories.

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.

Gerald Dworkin's influential account of Personal Autonomy offers the following two conditions for autonomy: (i) Authenticity - the condition that one identify with one's beliefs, desires and values after a process of critical reflection, and (ii) Procedural Independence - the identification in (i) must not be "influenced in ways which make the process of identification in some way alien to the individual" (Dworkin 1989:61). I argue in this thesis that there are cases which fulfil both of Dworkin's conditions, yet are clearly not cases of autonomy. Specifically, I argue that we can best assess the adequacy of Dworkin's account of autonomy through literature, because it provides a unique medium for testing his account on the very terms he sets up for himself - ie. that autonomy apply to, and make sense of, persons leading lives of a certain quality. The examination of two novels - Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day and Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady - shows that Dworkin's explanation of identification and critical reflection is inadequate for capturing their role in autonomy and that he does not pay enough attention to the role of external factors in preventing or supporting autonomy. As an alternative, I offer the following two conditions for autonomy: (i) critical reflection of a certain kind - radical reflection, and (ii) the ability to translate the results of (i) into action - competence. The novels demonstrate that both conditions are dependent upon considerations of the content of one's beliefs, desires, values etc. Certain of these will prevent or hinder the achievement of autonomy because of their content, so autonomy must be understood in relation to substantial considerations, rather than in purely formal terms, as Dworkin argues.

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.

M.A. / This study was prompted principally by two events: reading Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989), and encountering Pico lyer's Time article "The Empire Writes Back" (1993). lyer argues that the late twentieth century has been witness to an important event in the world of literature: the emergence of a new generation of writers writing in English, but not necessarily originating from British-colonial (or postcolonial) backgrounds. Among the writers lyer mentions are Vikram Seth, Michael Ondaatje, Ben Okri and - most notably - Kazuo Ishiguro. Ishiguro was born in Japan but emigrated with his parents to the United Kingdom at the age of six. This study focuses on his biculturalism and the impact that his mixed upbringing has had on his style and thematic concerns. This forms the principal focus of the first part of the study. The influence of Japanese writers, that of Japanese film and, finally, that of the European literary tradition are looked at in turn. The core of this study is a comparative analysis of Ishiguro's first three novels: A Pale View of Hills (1982), An Artist of the Floating World (1986), and The Remains of the Day (1989). Here certain common pre-occupations are identified and discussed - chiefly, Ishiguro's concern with memory, with constructions of the past, and his use of "unreliable" first-person narrators. It is argued that Ishiguro returns insistently to these thematic concerns in his first three novels, and that they can therefore be seen as constituting a three-part exploration of the notion of memory, of "reconstructing" the past. A separate chapter briefly examines Ishiguro's most recent work, The Unconsoled (1995), in which these themes are once again present, although they are bodied forth in a strikingly different style. The purpose of examining this novel is mainly to illustrate its formal and stylistic divergence from the first three (far more successful) novels - a divergence which in turn serves to throw into relief the thematic integrity of the first three novels. The study concludes by drawing together the discussion of the first three novels before moving on to a consideration of Ishiguro's place in what has become known as "New Internationalism". Here it is argued that Ishiguro's work has important resemblances to that of other writers loosely grouped into this literary movement and that he deserves his place among this illustrious group of writers who are changing the face of world literature written in English.