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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:cuhk.edu.hk/oai:cuhk-dr:cuhk_343582 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Contributors | Zhu, Ying., Chinese University of Hong Kong Graduate School. Division of English. |
| Source Sets | The Chinese University of Hong Kong |
| Language | English, Chinese |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, theses |
| Format | electronic resource, microform, microfiche, 1 online resource (vi, 233 p.) |
| Coverage | 20th century |
| Rights | Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International” License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) |
Page generated in 0.002 seconds