博士 / 淡江大學 / 英文學系博士班 / 100 / It is all known that Tasmania is very often stereotyped as a primeval land without history and culture. In Death of a River Guide, Flanagan notes Tasmania has long been represented as a “grotesque Gothic horrorland” (132) where darkness and evil are rampant. This negative stereotype can be traced back to the period of British colonial rule in which the colonial narrative used some simple binary logic to categorize Tasmania as the inferior Other and then stereotyped it as backward and uncivilized. What makes it sad is this negative stereotype constantly serves to justify any attempts to exploit Tasmania in the name of civilizing it. As a writer who was born and grew up in Tasmania, Flanagan attempts to reverse this negative stereotype, and that can be seen in Flanagan’s books which clearly show his concern over the silenced voice of Tasmania. They are: Death of a River Guide (1997), The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1998), Gould’s Book of Fish (2001), and Wanting (2008). This dissertation tries to explore how Flanagan uses these books to serve as a great resource to create an alternative interpretation of history and open up new possibilities for social justice and equality.
In Chapter One I use the nineteenth century colonial discourse as an example to explain how dominant narrative misrepresents and devalues Tasmanian culture. I indicate that, through a total control of the means of representation, this colonial narrative categorized Tasmania as essentially inferior in a hierarchical and imbalanced power structure and represented Tasmania as an inferior other who was morally and culturally degenerated. I will be discussing how the colonial narrative used the Enlightenment ideas, especially the taxonomic hierarchies and the linear historiography, to impose a universal and unified worldview so as to strip out the particularity of the Tasmanian culture. With the great help of the taxonomic hierarchies and the linear worldview, the colonial powers constructed a biased understanding of Tasmania, and it has repressed and distorted Tasmania’s identity even until today.
Chapter Two will be centered on Flanagan’s anti-historical and resistance attempts against the dominant discourse. I will take a close look at Flanagan’s questioning of the purity of European cultures and his efforts to develop a perspective outside the Western interpretation: an alternative historiography to contrast the linear worldview constructed by the mainstream discourse. My focus is on how Flanagan challenges the linear Western worldview and its authorial interpretation of reality by using a circular mode of narrative to retell and redefine the long-lost stories of the peripheral people whose voices are repressed and silenced by their imposed inferiority in unbalanced power relations. Flanagan later juxtaposes the two contradictory cultures, Western and Tasmanian, to create a dialogic re-reading of Tasmanian identity and a more comprehensive understanding of history. Here I use Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism to explain the co-existence of various communities and groups and the incessant interaction and exchange between them. This chapter emphasizes that there is no unitary identity in the force field of history, but a variety of identities which coexist and interact with each other as if in a dialogue.
Chapter Three explores the possibility of negotiating a space to reverse the existing power relations. Instead of a closed power system that shuts down any communication with the other cultures, a space for a dialogue between the two opposites in the power hierarchy is a must to create newness and changes. I will discuss how Flanagan uses transnational, transracial and transcultural interactions, especially the diasporic experience, to illustrate the concept of cultural plurality. Concepts like contact zone and Third Space will be applied to explain the construction of diverse identities in Flanagan’s novels. These concepts are helpful in explaining the process of dialogic interaction in which different influences interact and compete with each other to create a new and hybrid form of culture.
This dissertation concludes that the myth of a unified identity is incapable of explaining the complex realities of the real world in Tasmania, and the quest of a unified identity would inevitably lead to the suppression of the minority voice. Actually, identity is never static. It is always in the process of becoming and tends to be unpredictable and uncertain because it is subject to continual and never-ending negotiation, struggle, and contestation that underlie human history.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TW/100TKU05154008 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Huei-Jiun Huang, 黃惠君 |
| Contributors | Meihwa Sung, 宋美璍 |
| Source Sets | National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations in Taiwan |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | 學位論文 ; thesis |
| Format | 151 |
Page generated in 0.0093 seconds