Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 257-265).

Tesis para optar al grado de Doctor en Literatura

Omeros, le long poème du Saint-lucien Derek Walcott, est mis en relation avec le recueil Moi, laminaire... du Martiniquais Aimé Césaire et avec le roman Otra vez el mar du Cubain Reinaldo Arenas. Dans ces trois oeuvres, la focalisation sur la Grèce antique permet aux trois auteurs de réinvestir les paysages antillais. Cette pratique du détour constitue une esthétique antillaise commune : le passage par des motifs grecs donne lieu à des constructions textuelles originales de ces paysages antillais. Dans une première partie, nous étudions les stratégies mises en place pour montrer le paysage à partir de sculptures grecques et de personnages grecs incorporés aux paysages. Dans une seconde partie, nous montrons comment l'imaginaire grec nourrit l'art de la métaphore chez Walcott. Dans Omeros, l’artisanat de la pêche [coupe et fabrication des gommiers, sciage et évidage des troncs, navigation, pêche à la nasse] constitue une mise en abîme de la technique walcottienne. La fonction de la mer dans le roman Otra vez el mar confirme l'antillanité de la composition d’Omeros. Dans la troisième partie, nous étudions les relations entre discours et paysages. Chez Walcott, la mangrove permet le renouvellement de la mémoire antillaise de la traite. Chez Césaire, ce milieu lagunaire constitue une réponse métaphorique au contexte politique martiniquais. Enfin, dans Omeros, la représentation de l'oralité créole est associée au motif de la cendre et de la forêt saint-lucienne. Finalement, nous affirmons que la variété des procédés esthétiques chez Walcott se fonde sur la diversité des paysages antillais. / Omeros, the long poem written by the Saint-Lucian Derek Walcott is analyzed in relation with the poetic collection Moi, laminaire… by the Martiniquan Aimé Césaire and with the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas’s novel Otra Vez el mar. In their works, the focus on Ancient Greece enables the authors to reinvest the West Indian landscape. This common practice of the detour creates a common West Indian aesthetics: the use of Greek motifs gives birth to original textual constructions of Caribbean landscapes. In the first part, we are studying the strategies set up to portray the landscape through Greek sculptures and characters involved in the landscapes. In the second part, we are showing how the Greek imagination nurtures the art of the metaphor in Walcott’s work. In Omeros, the fishing craft [the cutting of the gommier trees, the sawing and the hollowing out of their trunks, for the building of the canoes, navigation and net fishing] reveals the techniques at work in Walcott’s writings. The function of the sea in Arenas’s novel confirms the West Indian aspect in the aesthetic process of Omeros. In the third part, the relations between discourse and landscapes are brought into light. In Walcott’s work the mangrove allows the renewal of the Caribbean memory of the slave trade. In Césaire’s work, this lagoon environment constitutes a metaphoric response to the Martiniquan political background. Then, in Omeros, the representation of creole orality is linked with the motif of the ashes and the Saint Lucian forest. Finally, we assert that the diversity of Caribbean landscape sets in motion Walcott’s poetics.

<p>ABSTRACT</p><p>This study is concerned with the process of the making of a postcolonial poet persona where the poet is addressing multiple audiences and is trying to speak for, and speak to, multiple constituencies through poetry. The poets examined here, Rabindranath Tagore, Derek Walcott, and Mahmoud Darwish--arguably among the best-known poets of the modern world--sought to be heard by various sensibilities and succeeded in reaching them. Outside the fold of the Western Metropolitan world, they as a trio have much to teach us about how poets living under three different phases of colonial hegemony (colonial India, postcolonial West Indies, and neocolonial Palestine/Israel) manage to speak. Their presence in their poetry, or the pressure their life stories and their poet personae, becomes an essential part of reading their work. Desiring to speak themselves, the poets chosen here have necessarily had to speak for their regions, peoples and cultures, alternately celebrating and resisting the burden of representation, imposed on them by both their own people and by the outsiders who receive them. How does a postcolonial poet address changing contingencies--personal, social and political-- while continuing to hold the attention of a global readership? How have their formal and esthetic approaches shifted as they responded to contingencies and as they attempted intervene in local and global conversations regarding the fate and future of their societies? An examination of the genre of poetry and postcolonial agency, this study addresses these and other related questions as it looks at the emergence and evolution of Tagore, Walcott, and Darwish as postcolonial world poets.</p> / Dissertation

A stunning poem that draws the attention of the reading public, Omeros is often regarded as the most famous and most successful of Derek Walcott¡¦s works. In one sense, Omeros is the Greek name for Homer, and Walcott chose it for the title of the poem to show his ambition to be a Caribbean Homer, a poet developing an epic from a West Indian perspective. With the epic form and resonant mythic Greek namesakes, Omeros is built upon Walcott¡¦s innate love for St. Lucia. Structurally, the epic form provides the vast framework he needs to describe the multicultural Creole society. However, after a close reading of the text, we can actually find that it does not follow so much the conventions of a classical tradition, since it is not actually a heroic poem. Unlike the superhuman characters in Homeric epics, the male protagonists in Omeros are common people who endure the suffering of individual in exile and try to put down roots in a place where they think they belong. One famous critic, Robert D. Hamner, reads Omeros as an epic of the dispossessed, one in which each of its protagonists is a castaway in one sense or another. In this respect, the male characters are injured (either spiritually or physically). In contrast, the female characters in Omeros, though few in number, play the important roles of heroines to heal the wounds of the male protagonists and to help them trace their roots. This thesis will, therefore, analyze three female characters in the poem. Chapter 1 will focus on Ma Kilman, a black obeah woman. She embodies the memories of the past as well as the connection between African experience and West Indian culture. Through the practice of obeah, a holistic healing method different from Western diagnosis, she is capable of soothing wounds caused by past sufferings. Chapter 2 will examine Maud Plunkett, a white Irish housewife. She represents the physical link between Ireland and St. Lucia due to their inherent similarities ¡Vboth are being colonized with St. Lucia being divided by race and class, while Ireland is split along religious and class lines. Maud¡¦s existence symbolizes the alienation gap on the island; her death, at the end, bridges the gap and relieves historical traumas. Chapter 3 will deals with Helen, an ebony local woman. Appropriating mythical as well as historical allusions, Walcott gives new voice to this Caribbean Helen. She demonstrates her autonomy to male characters and becomes an unapproachable goddess that they attempt to possess. She reestablishes peace and achieves a new harmony in St. Lucia as a way of cross-cultural healing.

This thesis aims to interpret the construction of cultural identity of the Caribbean islands in Derek Walcott¡¦s The Haitian Trilogy: Henri Christophe, Drums and Colours, and The Haitian Earth. To rely on the postcolonial and cultural critics¡¦ study on mimicry, multiple voices and identity construction, I take the construction of cultural identity as a transitional process to fabricate a way to identify with the land that people live on. The colonial background and the postcolonial exploration in the Caribbean islands combined with its diverse racial components, the Caribbeans always experience the predicament in identity construction. Derek Walcott composes his writings from this complex environment and represents the identity formation through continuing observation and exploration. In Introduction, the historical context and the literary development in the Caribbean islands introduce the theme of history and cultural as the common consideration of Caribbean writers; therefore, among their writings, the construction of cultural identity situates a significant position in their writings. The Haitian Revolution plays a significant role in the cultural identity formation in the Caribbean literary writings, since it is the turning point to lead this area from colonization to postcolonial situation, and it inspires writers to review the historical incident and to rewrite the history that they, at this time, write by themselves. Derek Walcott¡¦s The Haitian Trilogy comes not from a planned writing sequel, but from spontaneously reiterative consideration of the Haitian Revolution as a means to write the history of one¡¦s own land and to construct the cultural identity from the self-articulation. Chapter Two¡XHenri Christophe examines the means of mimicry to loosen the colonial control over the colonized and furthermore subvert the colonial power. Chapter Three¡XDrums and Colours portrays the colonial and postcolonial subject relation by way of writing the colonial history and juxtaposing multiple voices of the different classes of characters. Chapter Four¡XThe Haitian Earth aims to demonstrate the struggle to free from the colonization in order to construct the cultural identity from the identification with the land rather than with the remorse of the suffering past. The conclusion collocates the above discussion about the trilogy for the transitional process of the cultural identity formation and illuminates Walcott¡¦s position on the construction of the cultural identity in the Caribbean islands and other similar areas.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2004. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains v, 151 p. Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 139-148).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Supervisors: John P. Farrell and Adam Zachary Newton. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

51 f. (Pré-textuais; Introdução; Considerações finais e referências) / Submitted by Cynthia Nascimento (cyngabe@ufba.br) on 2013-05-06T16:23:20Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Isaias Francisco de Carvalho - Parte dissertação.pdf: 346974 bytes, checksum: cd7947fbfb950276551b3b27ff953a1e (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Alda Lima da Silva(sivalda@ufba.br) on 2013-05-07T17:04:28Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Isaias Francisco de Carvalho - Parte dissertação.pdf: 346974 bytes, checksum: cd7947fbfb950276551b3b27ff953a1e (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2013-05-07T17:04:28Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Isaias Francisco de Carvalho - Parte dissertação.pdf: 346974 bytes, checksum: cd7947fbfb950276551b3b27ff953a1e (MD5) / Proponho a reflexão sobre literatura, cultura e, especialmente, o Outro. O Outro da política da representação e da representação política e cultural na produção literária, em companhia do Outro linguístico, abordado sob a denominação de ―chulice‖ ou ―cânone grosseiro‖. Trata-se de um estudo de viés duplo, portanto. Nos textos literários que constituem o corpus deste trabalho – Omeros, do poeta caribenho Derek Walcott (1994), e Viva o povo brasileiro, de João Ubaldo Ribeiro (1984) -, ausculto essa linguagem ―baixa‖ no mesmo patamar do Outro social, étnico, sexual e mais: estão ali e aí, em toda parte, mas o discurso hegemônico de que participo (e do qual também participa o leitor implícito-explícito desta tese-ensaio) os torna recalcados e invisibilizados no imaginário dominante. Essa escrutação ou perscrutação do Outro cultural e linguístico se faz com o fio condutor da ―outrização produtiva‖, conceito-atitude que tem seu primeiro significante advindo do inglês othering, que foi modulado inicialmente por Gayatri Spivak (1985). ―Outrização‖, como neologismo e significante único, implica um procedimento intersociocultural que se constitui de práticas discursivas de enaltecimento de uma identidade positivada de certo grupo e a estigmatização e o rebaixamento, com violência, de outro. Por seu turno, ―outrização produtiva‖ funciona como contraponto a essa atitude reificante, já que propõe uma abordagem ressignificada da memória recalcada nas relações de trocas simbólicas do colonialismo e dos neocolonialismos de hoje entre culturas de diversos territórios geográficos e imaginados, como é o caso do Caribe Estendido (WALLERSTEIN, 1974), que compreende a costa sul dos Estados Unidos até o Recôncavo Baiano. A proximidade do conceito de outrização produtiva com outras teorizações do campo dos estudos da cultura, a exemplo de mestiçagem, é conveniente para se analisar a mistura cultural, em sentido lato, e linguística, em sentido estrito, nas obras sob análise. Conceitos de outros pensadores fora desse campo também são acionados, a exemplo de Roland Barthes, com sua noção de ―Texto‖ (1998), Northrop Frye, com seu ―modo ficcional irônico‖ e Linda Hutcheon, com ―metaficção historiográfica‖ (1988), entre outros. Trata-se, portanto, de uma discussão que aborda questões de subalternidade, língua, gênero e possibilidade de fala, como uma forma de unir os dois vieses da tese: o político-cultural e o linguístico, ambos tomados para análise numa postura de outrização produtiva, no desrecalque de vozes historicamente silenciadas. / Universidade Federal da Bahia. Instituto de Letras.Salvador-Ba, 2012.

Cette thèse propose une lecture croisée des épopées traditionnelles et postcoloniales dans un cadre transculturel. Une analyse comparée de Moby Dick de Herman Melville, Omeros de Derek Walcott et la trilogie de l’Ibis d’Amitav Ghosh nous permet de cerner spécificités de l’épopée moderne postcoloniale. Celle-ci s’inscrit dans la lignée des épopées traditionnelles d’Homère, Virgile, Arioste, Camões et Milton, tout en rivalisant avec elles. Les épopées traditionnelles et modernes ont recours à des conventions qui esthétisent l’expérience collective comme les comparaisons épiques, la généalogie présentée sous forme de prophétie et la mise en abyme ekphrastique. L’épopée traditionnelle met en avant la vision d’une société unifiée grâce à des conjonctions harmonieuses entre le trope et la diégèse, des continuités généalogiques entre l’ancêtre et le descendant ainsi que des associations autoréflexives ekphrastiques entre l’histoire impériale et le texte qui la glorifie. Dans cette perspective, la spécificité de l’épopée postcoloniale semble résider dans l’articulation ambivalente de la condition postcoloniale. Ainsi, chez Melville, Walcott et Ghosh, le style héroï-comique contrebalance les comparaisons épiques opérant des transfigurations héroïques. De même, de nouvelles affiliations hybrides forgées par les personnages coexistent avec des généalogies discontinues, sans en combler toutes les lacunes créées par le déracinement et la violence coloniale. Cette vision équivoque trouve son expression la plus franche dans les séquences ekphrastiques où les textes sont confrontés au choix impossible entre commémoration de l’expérience et regard critique vis-à-vis d’elle. / This thesis offers collocational readings of traditional and postcolonial epics in transcultural frameworks. It investigates the specificities of modern postcolonial epic through a comparative analysis of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, and Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy. It explores how these works emulate, but also rival, the traditional epics of Homer, Virgil, Ariosto, Camões, and Milton. Both traditional and postcolonial epic rely on generic conventions in order to aestheticize collective experience, setting it against the natural world (via epic similes), against history and imperial destiny (via genealogy and prophecy), and against the epic work itself (via ekphrasis). However, traditional epic emphasizes a unified worldview, characterized by harmonious conjunctions between trope and diegesis, genealogical continuities between ancestor and descendant, and self-reflexive ekphrastic associations between imperial history and the epic text commissioned to glorify it. From this perspective, the specificity of postcolonial epic can be formulated in terms of its ambivalent articulation of the postcolonial condition. In the works of Melville, Walcott, and Ghosh, tropes of heroic transfiguration are held in check by the mock-heroic, while empowering self-adopted hybrid affiliations co-exist, but cannot entirely compensate for, discontinuous genealogies marked by displacement, deracination, and colonial violence. This ambivalence finds its most powerful expression in the ekphrastic sequences where the postcolonial texts are most directly confronted with the impossible choice between commemorating experience and being critical of such commemoration.