Return to search

Beyond Words: Allegorizing History and Memory in Sara Suleri's Meatless Days

This thesis sets out to explore Sara Suleri¡¦s memoir Meatless Days in terms of trauma, memory and writing. The first chapter traces the historical background and Pakistanis¡¦ trauma framed in nostalgia. The second chapter probes into the teaching of Suleri¡¦s mother: the performance, the unplot and the identity, in which I resort to Julia Kristeva¡¦s critique essays to replace Suleri¡¦s mother¡¦s position in Pakistani society since she exists there with ¡§heterogeneous¡¨ cultural and national identity. The third chapter, focusing on Benjamin¡¦s theory on history and memory, deals with Sara Suleri unique writing style.
Suleri¡¦s Meatless Days uses her allegorical writing to open herself to the possibilities of silence, introspection, isolation and loneliness in the memoir. Suleri¡¦s writing shares some of the single-minded self-absorption with her mother and has somehow been channeled in to her memorized and lost beloved. The memoir then develops into a story that seems to involve synchronicity, but actually involves our need for synchronicity when synchronicity is simply the way coincidence indulges itself in wish-fulfillment.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0726105-003801
Date26 July 2005
CreatorsLin, Ying-chun
ContributorsShu-li Chang, Hsin-ya Huang, Tee-kim Tong
PublisherNSYSU
Source SetsNSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0726105-003801
Rightsrestricted, Copyright information available at source archive

Page generated in 0.0031 seconds