This thesis provides a reading of Anita Rau Badami’s novels The Hero’s Walk and Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? The interpretive frame constructs a theory of affect to explore the human experience of beauty through a reading of Badami’s texts. This work’s approach to beauty is derived largely from Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just and from musings on beauty by Simone Weil. Following Weil, I understand beauty as the ascription of value or worth to various things, actions, or ideas, and I position beauty as an undergirding affective experience that is always present in the human encounter of the world. This thesis examines how Badami’s novels depict the ways in which a Weilian sense of beauty leads characters to develop affectual attachments to various ideologies and discourses represented in the diasporic landscape of the texts. Through a critical consideration of the depicted effects of such attachments on Badami’s characters’ lives, this study also locates potential instances of what Lauren Berlant calls cruel optimism. I contend that the novels often portray instances of cruel optimism to critique traditional practices and perspectives while ever working towards building their own pronouncement of what constitutes a more genuine, higher sense of the beautiful. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/16779 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Apong, Andrew |
| Contributors | Chakraborty, Chandrima, Goellnicht, Donald, Hyman, Roger, English and Cultural Studies |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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