Thesis (Ph. D.)--Open University. BLDSC no. DX93574.

Issu de: Thèse de doctorat--Analyse du discours--Lyon 3, 1999. Titre de soutenance : Analyse des marques stylistiques du point de vue narratif dans deux romans de V. S. Naipaul : "A house for Mr Biswas" et "The enigma of arrival.

Ce travail a pour objectif de circonscrire, dans l'oeuvre de V.S. Naipaul, une image chère à celui-ci: le home. Nous voulons mettre en valeur l'ambiguité de cette image chez celui-ci. En effet, elle désigne, dans l'oeuvre, tantôt un espace propre et vital, sans lequel le sujet ne serait pas en mesure de « tenir » face aux épreuves du réel, tantôt un lieu imaginaire et factice, symptomatique d'une personnalité schizoïde. Nous respectons dans ce travail l'ambivalence avec laquelle est « traitée » l'image du home. Il s'agira de ne pas négliger l'une ou l'autre des significations que prend alternativement celle-ci. Dans un premier temps, nous établissons un lien entre l'image du home chez Naipaul, et la notion de lieu (place) dans la théorie contemporaine anglo-saxonne. Les auteurs auxquels nous référons interrogent les diverses acceptions que peut prendre le terme de « lieu » en fonction des situations historiques. C'est la valeur de « retraite » accordée au lieu qui retient particulièrement notre attention. Dans le deuxième chapitre, nous mettons à profit les oeuvres de Gaston Bachelard et d'Emmanuel Levinas, qui tous deux ont tenté d'atteindre aux « fondements » de l'habiter. Nous tentons de saisir en quoi leurs réflexions se distinguent nettement de celles des auteurs étudiés dans la première partie. Bachelard et Levinas, grosso modo, ont eu tendance à faire l'apologie du lieu entendu comme « retraite ». Celle-ci, chez ces auteurs, est une condition insigne de l'existence. Nous faisons contraster cette apologie avec quelques romans de Naipaul dans lesquels le home figure avant tout, pour les narrateurs, un objet de détestation. La raison en est simple: chez Naipaul, les narrateurs n'ont le plus souvent pas de maison. Le home devient alors un objet de frustration. Enfin, nous soulignons une certaine tendance, chez l'auteur, à employer le langage clinique lorsqu'il s'agit du home. L'image du « lieu de retraite » est souvent, dans l'oeuvre, traitée comme une formation défensive du sujet. Le home prend ainsi place dans une théorie des défenses, que Naipaul élabore lors de ses voyages en Inde. La « retraite » prend une connotation nettement clinique qui se rapproche de la dissociation. Nous explorons ce que nous appelons la « métaphore clinique » des reportages sur l'Inde. Pour finir, nous montrons que cette « métaphore clinique » est peu à peu abandonnée par l'auteur, qui admet que le home peut être le signe d'une créativité, et non seulement d'une défense.

Proefschrift--Universiteit Leiden, 2001. / Résumés en anglais et en frison. Bibliogr. p. 275-288.

This thesis acknowledges that the philosophical basis of the novels and short stories of Vidia Naipaul bears a significant resemblance to the tenets of Absurdity set out in Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus and witnessed in various other Absurdist writings. At the same time it attempts to demonstrate that Naipaul's Absurdist vision reflects a Zeitgeist fundamental to the West Indies. It in no way suggests, however, that Naipaul consciously imitated the thoughts of Camus or others, or that he deliberately set out to circumscribe West Indian feelings. Chapter One attempts to demonstrate that Naipaul's most crucial perceptions of life have been those of disorientation and futility. It then shows where awareness of an inharmonious existence has been especially prevalent in the twentieth century, and it goes on to examine in some detail the discovery of the Absurd Conjunction between the world and individual consciousness articulated by Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus. In addition it describes the alternatives which Camus and other Absurdist writers advance to counter-act the anguish of Absurd Discovery. The second chapter begins by revealing the relationship between the absurd as "ridiculous" and the Absurd as "anguish", demonstrating that while Naipaul's perception of the irreducibility of the world is more central to his later works, it begins already in his earlier ones. It then goes on to discuss various aspects of Absurd Discovery which appear in Naipaul’s fiction: discovery of the isolation of man; discovery of the hostility of the world to the desires of man; and discovery of the disparity between the possible and the actual. Chapter Three shows how Naipaul's characters respond to the challenge of meaninglessness with both negation and affirmation. Although his characters frequently submit to despondency, this is in most cases only an initial reaction. In a vein similar to that of Camus, Naipaul implies that the Absurd would best be confronted by rebellion, creativity, personal involvement or, barring all else, ironic assessment. The final chapter demonstrates that the world of Vidia Naipaul - the disorder to which he attests and the alternatives he offers - while exhibiting sentiments essential to the European Absurdists, also mirrors experiences general to the West Indies.. Rather than dissecting with dispassionate superiority a background from which he has had occasion to feel alienated, Naipaul has sensitively illuminated a geographical region which, both historically and sociologically, has come to encompass its own especial Sisyphean sphere. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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Trinidad, V.S. Naipaul’s native island, is consistently represented in the 2001 Nobel Prize winner’s fictional works, above all in "The Mystic Masseur" (1957), "The Suffrage of Elvira" (1958), "Miguel Street" (1959), "A House for Mr Biswas" (1961), "A Flag on the Island" (1967), "The Mimic Men" (1967), "In a Free State" (1971), "Guerrillas" (1975), "The Enigma of Arrival" (1987) and "A Way in the World" (1994). The present dissertation analyses representations of Trinidad as “play-culture” in the aforementioned writings by initiating a methodological dialogue between postcolonial/cultural studies on the one hand and performance studies, play theory, as well as cultural anthropology on the other hand. The study is divided into three parts corresponding to the three main facets of Trinidad as it appears in Naipaul’s fiction: firstly, as a childish world; secondly, as a festive place and thirdly, as a playground for the western imagination. The image of Trinidad as a childish space stands at the intersection of the autobiographical genre with the colonial/Social Darwinist discourse of the so-called “child races”. In both cases we have to do with a cultural construct of childhood whose main stereotypical features are smallness, imitation, irrationality and of course, playfulness. The second part of the dissertation focuses on the importance of rituals and festivals in shaping up Indian and African identities in Trinidad. Roughly, Hindu rituals are capital means to create diasporic Indias, whereas Carnival is a powerful symbol of the Afro-Trinidadian community. Nevertheless, they carry the potential of becoming genuine liminal spaces, where ethnic boundaries are transgressed. The third section is devoted to a discourse of play as imagination. In this respect, Trinidad appears as an adventure playground where the Westerner projects his/her desires, sometimes under the mask of scientific respectability. The eye of the European sees the tropical island as an exotic Garden of Eden, as an aesthetic space with strong pictorial and theatrical qualities. But if Trinidad occurs as an artistic, a fictional object, then Naipaul’s novels and stories describing it are fiction about fiction, and so have a very important metafictional component. At this stage, since metafiction is also a capital element of postmodernism, I trace back Naipaul’s ludic metaphors to the present-day Zeitgeist, pointing out the postmodern elements in his texts dealing with Trinidad. / Die vorliegende Dissertation, eine Studie zu V.S. Naipauls Darstellung von Trinidad als Spielkultur, untersucht das Bild, das der berühmte, aber auch umstrittene Literatur-Nobelpreisträger von seinem Heimatland durch fiktionale Mittel kreiert. Der Hauptakzent liegt auf Naipauls Romanen und Kurzgeschichtensammlungen "The Mystic Masseur" (1957), "The Suffrage of Elvira" (1958), "Miguel Street" (1959), "A House for Mr Biswas" (1961), "A Flag on the Island" (1967), "The Mimic Men" (1967), "In a Free State" (1971), "Guerrillas" (1975), "The Enigma of Arrival" (1987) und "A Way in the World" (1994); jedoch auch folgende nicht fiktionale Schriften, die Trinidad erwähnen, werden in Betracht bezogen: "The Middle Passage" (1962), "The Loss of El Dorado" (1969), "Between Father and Son: Family Letters" (1999), "The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles" (1972), "The Return of Eva Peron with The Killings in Trinidad" (1980), "Finding the Centre" (1984), "Reading & Writing" (2000) und "The Writer and the World" (2002). Der diskursive Ansatz ist der gemeinsame Nenner einer interdisziplinären Methode, die sowohl kulturwissenschaftliche und postkoloniale Fragestellungen, als auch anthropologische und ludistische Konzepte in sich vereint. Mithilfe dieses Ansatzes wird bewiesen, dass das Trinidadbild in Naipauls Schriften nicht eine objektive Widerspiegelung der “Wirklichkeit”, sondern ein soziokulturelles Konstrukt ist, das aus “kulturellen Repräsentationen” (“cultural representations”) besteht.

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Thesis (MA (English Literature))--Stellenbosch University, 2008. / Thinking through notions of homelessness and exile, this study aims to explore how V.S. Naipaul engages with questions of the construction of self and the world after empire, as represented in four key texts: The Mimic Men, A Bend in the River, The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World. These texts not only map the mobility of the writer traversing vast geographical and cultural terrains as a testament to his nomadic existence, but also follow the writer’s experimentation with the novel genre. Drawing on postcolonial theory, modernist literary poetics, and aspects of critical and postmodern theory, this study illuminates the position of the migrant figure in a liminal space, a space that unsettles the authorising claims of Enlightenment thought and disrupts teleological narrative structures and coherent, homogenous constructions of the self. What emerges is the contiguity of the postcolonial, the modern and the modernist subject. This study engages with the concepts of “double consciousness” and “entanglements” to foreground the complex web and often conflicting temporalities, discourses and cultural assemblages affecting postcolonial subjectivities and unsettling narratives of origin and authenticity. While Naipaul seeks to address questions of postcolonial identity, his oeuvre is simultaneously entangled within the Anglophone literary tradition. The texts in this study foreground the convergence of the politics of writing and the politics of subjectivity. Through continuous re-writing of the self, the past and history, Naipaul focuses on the fragmentary, the partiality of knowledge and the obscurity of the present to evince the continuous renewal of subjectivities. His narratives enact deep feelings of despair and melancholy that attend the migrant position in the current age of mass migrations, technological advancement, militarism, and essentialised ethnocentrisms and cultural constructions. In his poetics of exile, he endorses the particular over the universal. His commitment to a “politics of difference” underscores the texts in this study and serves to foreground Naipaul’s position of otherness.