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.

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Esta dissertação mapeia a rede de relações intertextuais em Half a Life (2001) e sua continuação Magic Seeds (2004), os romances mais recentes do Prêmio Nobel de Literatura de 2001, V. S. Naipaul, como contribuição para o estudo da obra do autor. A noção de intertextualidade permeia os estudos literários, e o termo tem sido largamente empregado desde que foi cunhado por Julia Kristeva nos anos sessenta. Desde então as mais variadas, e muitas vezes divergentes, teorias sobre intertextualidade compartilham a idéia de que um texto só adquire significado pleno na interação com outros textos. A abordagem metodológica proposta é baseada na teoria da transtextualidade de Gérard Genette. Esta escolha implica o estudo de intertextos, paratextos, metatextos, arquitextos e hipertextos que constituem a interface entre os dois romances e outros escritos. O nome do protagonista "William Somerset Chandran" constitui o fio que guia o estudo das várias relações transtextuais nos dois romances. A partir do prenome do protagonista – William – este estudo situa os romances no contexto da tradição do Bildungsroman, e argumenta que estes estabelecem uma paródia arquitextual do gênero na medida em que subvertem seu cerne, ou seja, a formação do caráter do protagonista. O nome do meio do protagonista – Somerset – remete à ficcionalização do escritor Somerset Maugham na narrativa, ao mesmo tempo em que esta desmistifica a ótica ocidental sobre o hinduísmo popularizada por Maugham em The Razor's Edge. O sobrenome do protagonista – Chandran – leva ao estudo do conjunto de referências à origem indiana de Naipaul e o papel desta na produção do autor. Este nome se reporta ao romance de Narayan The Bachelor of Arts, cujo protagonista também é nomeado Chandran. Narayan é um escritor de destaque na literatura anglo-indiana e referência recorrente na obra de Naipaul. Os temas de migração e choque cultural apresentados nos dois romances têm sido presença constante na obra de Naipaul. Esta pesquisa mapeia a relação de continuidade entre os dois romances em questão e o conjunto da obra de Naipaul, salientando o papel da ambientação geográfica da narrativa, marcada pela jornada do protagonista através de três continentes. A teoria da transtextualidade é uma ferramenta operacional para a pesquisa, a qual examina a densidade das referências geográficas, históricas e literárias em Half a Life e Magic Seeds, visando aportar elementos para o estudo da produção literária de Naipaul, na medida em que estes romances recentes condensam e revisitam a visão de mundo deste autor. / This thesis traces the network of intertextual relations in the two latest novels by the 2001 Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul: Half a Life (2001) and its sequel Magic Seeds (2004) as a means of contribution to the study of the author's work. The notion of intertextuality is a pervasive one within literary studies, the word itself started to be widely used in the sixties, following the definition of Julia Kristeva. Nuanced and even conflicting as the varied theories of intertextuality may be, they all share the idea that a text is not isolated or self-sufficient, but acquires full meaning in the interplay with other texts. A methodological approach based on Gerard Genette's theory of transtextuality is proposed for the analysis. This choice implies the study of intertexts, paratexts, metatexts, architexts and hypertexts that constitute the interface between the two novels at hand and other texts. The protagonist's name "William Somerset Chandran" sets the thread of several transtextual instances pervading the two novels. Taking the cue of the protagonist's first name – William – this thesis places the novels within the context of the Bildungsroman tradition and argues that these novels establish an architextual parody of this genre, subverting its core meaning of character formation. The protagonist's middle name – Somerset – leads to the discussion of the way the writer Somerset Maugham is fictionalized in the narrative and how it undermines the metropolitan ethos towards Hinduism as exposed in Maugham's novel The Razor's Edge. The protagonist's last name – Chandran – spawns a set of references to Naipaul's Indian ancestry and the role it plays in his fictional and non-fictional production; this name alludes to Narayan's novel The Bachelor of Arts, whose main character is also called Chandran. Narayan is a leading figure in Anglo-Indian Literature and a recurrent reference in Naipaul's writings. The themes of displacement and culture clash tackled by these novels have haunted the author throughout his career. The research maps out the two novels' relationship with the realm of Naipaul's previous writings; as well as brings to the fore the role of setting in the narratives, marked by the protagonist's dislocations in three continents. The theory of transtextuality provides the operational tool for the research, which examines the density of geographical, historical and literary references in Half a Life and Magic Seeds with the purpose of shedding light into Naipaul's literary production, inasmuch as these two recent novels condense and revisit the author's worldview.

Esta dissertação mapeia a rede de relações intertextuais em Half a Life (2001) e sua continuação Magic Seeds (2004), os romances mais recentes do Prêmio Nobel de Literatura de 2001, V. S. Naipaul, como contribuição para o estudo da obra do autor. A noção de intertextualidade permeia os estudos literários, e o termo tem sido largamente empregado desde que foi cunhado por Julia Kristeva nos anos sessenta. Desde então as mais variadas, e muitas vezes divergentes, teorias sobre intertextualidade compartilham a idéia de que um texto só adquire significado pleno na interação com outros textos. A abordagem metodológica proposta é baseada na teoria da transtextualidade de Gérard Genette. Esta escolha implica o estudo de intertextos, paratextos, metatextos, arquitextos e hipertextos que constituem a interface entre os dois romances e outros escritos. O nome do protagonista "William Somerset Chandran" constitui o fio que guia o estudo das várias relações transtextuais nos dois romances. A partir do prenome do protagonista – William – este estudo situa os romances no contexto da tradição do Bildungsroman, e argumenta que estes estabelecem uma paródia arquitextual do gênero na medida em que subvertem seu cerne, ou seja, a formação do caráter do protagonista. O nome do meio do protagonista – Somerset – remete à ficcionalização do escritor Somerset Maugham na narrativa, ao mesmo tempo em que esta desmistifica a ótica ocidental sobre o hinduísmo popularizada por Maugham em The Razor's Edge. O sobrenome do protagonista – Chandran – leva ao estudo do conjunto de referências à origem indiana de Naipaul e o papel desta na produção do autor. Este nome se reporta ao romance de Narayan The Bachelor of Arts, cujo protagonista também é nomeado Chandran. Narayan é um escritor de destaque na literatura anglo-indiana e referência recorrente na obra de Naipaul. Os temas de migração e choque cultural apresentados nos dois romances têm sido presença constante na obra de Naipaul. Esta pesquisa mapeia a relação de continuidade entre os dois romances em questão e o conjunto da obra de Naipaul, salientando o papel da ambientação geográfica da narrativa, marcada pela jornada do protagonista através de três continentes. A teoria da transtextualidade é uma ferramenta operacional para a pesquisa, a qual examina a densidade das referências geográficas, históricas e literárias em Half a Life e Magic Seeds, visando aportar elementos para o estudo da produção literária de Naipaul, na medida em que estes romances recentes condensam e revisitam a visão de mundo deste autor. / This thesis traces the network of intertextual relations in the two latest novels by the 2001 Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul: Half a Life (2001) and its sequel Magic Seeds (2004) as a means of contribution to the study of the author's work. The notion of intertextuality is a pervasive one within literary studies, the word itself started to be widely used in the sixties, following the definition of Julia Kristeva. Nuanced and even conflicting as the varied theories of intertextuality may be, they all share the idea that a text is not isolated or self-sufficient, but acquires full meaning in the interplay with other texts. A methodological approach based on Gerard Genette's theory of transtextuality is proposed for the analysis. This choice implies the study of intertexts, paratexts, metatexts, architexts and hypertexts that constitute the interface between the two novels at hand and other texts. The protagonist's name "William Somerset Chandran" sets the thread of several transtextual instances pervading the two novels. Taking the cue of the protagonist's first name – William – this thesis places the novels within the context of the Bildungsroman tradition and argues that these novels establish an architextual parody of this genre, subverting its core meaning of character formation. The protagonist's middle name – Somerset – leads to the discussion of the way the writer Somerset Maugham is fictionalized in the narrative and how it undermines the metropolitan ethos towards Hinduism as exposed in Maugham's novel The Razor's Edge. The protagonist's last name – Chandran – spawns a set of references to Naipaul's Indian ancestry and the role it plays in his fictional and non-fictional production; this name alludes to Narayan's novel The Bachelor of Arts, whose main character is also called Chandran. Narayan is a leading figure in Anglo-Indian Literature and a recurrent reference in Naipaul's writings. The themes of displacement and culture clash tackled by these novels have haunted the author throughout his career. The research maps out the two novels' relationship with the realm of Naipaul's previous writings; as well as brings to the fore the role of setting in the narratives, marked by the protagonist's dislocations in three continents. The theory of transtextuality provides the operational tool for the research, which examines the density of geographical, historical and literary references in Half a Life and Magic Seeds with the purpose of shedding light into Naipaul's literary production, inasmuch as these two recent novels condense and revisit the author's worldview.

Esta dissertação mapeia a rede de relações intertextuais em Half a Life (2001) e sua continuação Magic Seeds (2004), os romances mais recentes do Prêmio Nobel de Literatura de 2001, V. S. Naipaul, como contribuição para o estudo da obra do autor. A noção de intertextualidade permeia os estudos literários, e o termo tem sido largamente empregado desde que foi cunhado por Julia Kristeva nos anos sessenta. Desde então as mais variadas, e muitas vezes divergentes, teorias sobre intertextualidade compartilham a idéia de que um texto só adquire significado pleno na interação com outros textos. A abordagem metodológica proposta é baseada na teoria da transtextualidade de Gérard Genette. Esta escolha implica o estudo de intertextos, paratextos, metatextos, arquitextos e hipertextos que constituem a interface entre os dois romances e outros escritos. O nome do protagonista "William Somerset Chandran" constitui o fio que guia o estudo das várias relações transtextuais nos dois romances. A partir do prenome do protagonista – William – este estudo situa os romances no contexto da tradição do Bildungsroman, e argumenta que estes estabelecem uma paródia arquitextual do gênero na medida em que subvertem seu cerne, ou seja, a formação do caráter do protagonista. O nome do meio do protagonista – Somerset – remete à ficcionalização do escritor Somerset Maugham na narrativa, ao mesmo tempo em que esta desmistifica a ótica ocidental sobre o hinduísmo popularizada por Maugham em The Razor's Edge. O sobrenome do protagonista – Chandran – leva ao estudo do conjunto de referências à origem indiana de Naipaul e o papel desta na produção do autor. Este nome se reporta ao romance de Narayan The Bachelor of Arts, cujo protagonista também é nomeado Chandran. Narayan é um escritor de destaque na literatura anglo-indiana e referência recorrente na obra de Naipaul. Os temas de migração e choque cultural apresentados nos dois romances têm sido presença constante na obra de Naipaul. Esta pesquisa mapeia a relação de continuidade entre os dois romances em questão e o conjunto da obra de Naipaul, salientando o papel da ambientação geográfica da narrativa, marcada pela jornada do protagonista através de três continentes. A teoria da transtextualidade é uma ferramenta operacional para a pesquisa, a qual examina a densidade das referências geográficas, históricas e literárias em Half a Life e Magic Seeds, visando aportar elementos para o estudo da produção literária de Naipaul, na medida em que estes romances recentes condensam e revisitam a visão de mundo deste autor. / This thesis traces the network of intertextual relations in the two latest novels by the 2001 Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul: Half a Life (2001) and its sequel Magic Seeds (2004) as a means of contribution to the study of the author's work. The notion of intertextuality is a pervasive one within literary studies, the word itself started to be widely used in the sixties, following the definition of Julia Kristeva. Nuanced and even conflicting as the varied theories of intertextuality may be, they all share the idea that a text is not isolated or self-sufficient, but acquires full meaning in the interplay with other texts. A methodological approach based on Gerard Genette's theory of transtextuality is proposed for the analysis. This choice implies the study of intertexts, paratexts, metatexts, architexts and hypertexts that constitute the interface between the two novels at hand and other texts. The protagonist's name "William Somerset Chandran" sets the thread of several transtextual instances pervading the two novels. Taking the cue of the protagonist's first name – William – this thesis places the novels within the context of the Bildungsroman tradition and argues that these novels establish an architextual parody of this genre, subverting its core meaning of character formation. The protagonist's middle name – Somerset – leads to the discussion of the way the writer Somerset Maugham is fictionalized in the narrative and how it undermines the metropolitan ethos towards Hinduism as exposed in Maugham's novel The Razor's Edge. The protagonist's last name – Chandran – spawns a set of references to Naipaul's Indian ancestry and the role it plays in his fictional and non-fictional production; this name alludes to Narayan's novel The Bachelor of Arts, whose main character is also called Chandran. Narayan is a leading figure in Anglo-Indian Literature and a recurrent reference in Naipaul's writings. The themes of displacement and culture clash tackled by these novels have haunted the author throughout his career. The research maps out the two novels' relationship with the realm of Naipaul's previous writings; as well as brings to the fore the role of setting in the narratives, marked by the protagonist's dislocations in three continents. The theory of transtextuality provides the operational tool for the research, which examines the density of geographical, historical and literary references in Half a Life and Magic Seeds with the purpose of shedding light into Naipaul's literary production, inasmuch as these two recent novels condense and revisit the author's worldview.

Despite radical differences in their political commentary, Amiri Baraka and V.S. Naipaul’s literary careers have obsessively centered on the divided Self of the colonized artist. Esther Jackson argues that Baraka’s “search for form” becomes “symbolic of a continuing effort to mediate between warring factions within the perceiving mind” (38). Similarly, many critics have interpreted Naipaul’s grave manifestos as the outpourings of a writer disenchanted with his own past and national identity. For Selwyn Cudjoe, Naipaul’s work is “reflective of a man who failed to discover any psychological balance in his life” (172-173). This thesis analyzes how Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman and V.S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas engage with various fairy tale conventions in order to narrate the colonized victim’s divided Self. These narratives ultimately function as anti-fairy tales, revealing the black protagonist’s accursed position in the symbolic order. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2014. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Specifically, in her novel Beloved Morrison redefines the slave-narrative tradition and reveals the discredited history of slavery by unveiling the "interior life" of African American ancestors and rendering memories heretofore unacknowledged and unspoken in classic slave autobiographical narratives. Through a hybrid prose that mixes fiction with history in the novels The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World , Naipaul illuminates "areas of darkness" in the diasporic world of East Indian Trinidadian peoples and provides new ways of transforming the English literary and cultural history. Focusing on West African identity and community, especially the poorest and the most powerless, in the novel The Famished Road Okri brings a mythic and fantastic dimension to postcolonial fiction as a way of finding images to portray what the public media and the outside world fail to record and comprehend, and gives voice to people who are generally without power and almost without any place in a world of inequality and injustice. Probing into specific representations of incompleteness in the historical novels of Toni Morrison, V. S. Naipaul, and Ben Okri, this thesis underscores the indispensable role of fiction in representing life, rewriting history and enlarging reality. / With reference to Paul Ricoeur's conception of the interconnectedness between history and fiction, in particular his analyses in The Reality of the Historical Past, this comparative literary study examines narrative strategies that three contemporary writers of fiction---Toni Morrison, V. S. Naipaul, and Ben Okri---have devised to counteract incompleteness of historical representation. This thesis argues that history as a mode of rendering the past and a way of representing reality is essentially incomplete. In other words, history is incomplete as a systematic written account comprising a chronological record of past events, circumstances, and facts, and as a story or a narrative of events connected with a real or imaginary object or person. Fiction, however, with its underlying capacity to transform and transfigure reality, imagines as well as repatterns unrecognized or misrepresented aspects of individual and cultural histories. In their works of fiction, Morrison, Naipaul, and Okri purposefully address various kinds of historical negation, absence, and incompleteness. / Zhu Ying. / "May 2005." / Adviser: Timothy Weiss. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-01, Section: A, page: 0180. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 219-233). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

Écrites dans le vague souvenir des romans d’apprentissage du début de l’ère industrielle, les œuvres de Marcel Proust, Osman Lins, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, Joyce Carol Oates et Roberto Bolaño reviennent avec mélancolie à une question qui marque la modernité : comment tracer l’histoire de l’arrivée dans une grande ville ? À la Recherche du temps perdu et Blonde examinent des rituels mondains au sein des capitales transformées par la guerre. L’absence d’ordre produit des fils énigmatiques, à l’image du kaléidoscope, de la spirale, du labyrinthe et de la cité de sable, ces dispositions s’appliquant à l’écriture de l’espace urbain et du récit qui y conduit. L’Énigme de l’arrivée les relie aux problématiques de la migration, de la langue mondiale et de l’empire multiculturel qui se consolide dans la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle. L’œuvre de Lins fait converger l’urbanité, l’ésotérisme et des mondanités intellectuelles : l’imitation, la citation, la bibliographie. L’urbain devient une satire chez Bolaño : ses arrivistes et ses carriéristes, qui sont des poètes et des professeurs de littérature, appartiennent à la famille des meurtriers de masse. La nostalgie du roman d’apprentissage urbain, désormais sous le signe du regret, demande une réévaluation intégrale. Alors que la métaphore végétale indique des processus stylistiques de décomposition qui joignent la désurbanisation et l’émergence de la vie de l’esprit, l’écriture des plantes peut conduire plus largement à de nouvelles possibilités d’individuation, moins motivées par la pulsion mondaine qui caractérise les récits capitalistes, et plus discrètement marquées par l’inscription non instrumentale et involontaire, autrement violente, dans la nature. / Written with the vague memory of the novels of formation of the beginning of the industrial era, the novels of Marcel Proust, Osman Lins, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, Joyce Carol Oates and Roberto Bolaño return with melancholy to a question that has marked modernity: how do we record the story of the arrival in a big city? In Search of Lost Time and Blonde examine the worldly rituals at the heart of the capitals transformed by war. The absence of order produces enigmatic forms: in the image of the kaleidoscope, the spiral, the labyrinth and the city of sand, these forms arrange the writing of the urban space and the narrative that leads into it. The Enigma of Arrival links those processes to the problematics of migration, global language and the multicultural empire that has taken shape during the second half of the twentieth century. The work of Lins brings together urbanity, esoterism and elements of intellectual worldliness: imitation, quotation, bibliography. The urban becomes a satire in Bolaño: his arrivistes and his careerists, who are poets and teachers of literature, belong to the family of mass murderers. The novel of urban formation, now available only as a lost object, a target for nostalgia under the sign of regret, merits thorough reevaluation. Seeing that the vegetal metaphor points to stylistic processes of decomposition that bring together de-urbanization and the emergence of the life of the mind, the writing of plants may lead to new possibilities of individuation, less motivated by the worldly pulsion that characterizes capitalistic narratives, and bearing more discreet traces of the non-instrumental and involuntary, more violent inscription into nature.

“In Between Places” is a study in literary geography at the end of empire. It begins from the premise that decolonization itself is a question of place and the relationship of people to places. From this premise, the dissertation explores the narrative techniques that emerge from this moment of historical transformation, in which decolonization was inevitable but not yet fully achieved. The formal elements of decolonial fiction—an emphasis on the individual transformation of place, the incorporation of narrative settings both temporary and fragile—express the ways that spatial relations were central to the political aims of late colonial and early postcolonial writers from across the globe and who express a range of complicated cultural politics. This dissertation begins with an introduction that situates British decolonial fiction in terms of theories of space and place, the transition between modernism and postcolonialism, and current critical debates surrounding forms of anticolonial critique in the twentieth century. In the subsequent four chapters, the dissertation provides case studies of the narrative fiction of Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul, George Lamming, and Doris Lessing. Combining formal analysis, archival research, and literary and political history, this dissertation reconstructs the ways that colonial and postcolonial subjects respond to the places they inhabit—at the level of the room, the house, and the city. To tell this story, the chapters move from the abstract space of geopolitics to different sites within urban environments and domestic households. “In Between Places” explains how place functions aesthetically and politically; how Caribbean, African, and English sites were physically marked by colonialism; and how midcentury writers of decolonization used literary setting to resist myths of imperial belonging as well as to uphold them.