碩士 / 淡江大學 / 英文學系碩士班 / 104 / This thesis takes Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide as the text to develop the postcolonial concept by the setting of characters and plots. Structurally, this thesis is divided into three chapters. Chapter One introduces the traces of history. In this chapter, I use Benjamin’s “historical materialism”to flesh out the meanings of history with a particular emphasis on his seminal essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Chapter Two, I regard “translating history” as my focal point. For me, translating history refers to everyone’s own stand because each part of memory will be saved by people with different emotions, status, or ages and so on. Different ways to look at the same thing will construct distinct outcomes and perspectives ultimately. In The Hungry Tide, Kanai has managed to link the content of the diary to his past image of Uncle Nirmal and Kusum while he was reading Nirmal’s diary in order to understand Nirmal’s mental state at that time. From reading, Kanai will have his own attitude toward events written down in the diary. If it wasn’t read by Kanai, readers would read another version of the story probably. The translation of facts is extremely important here. On the other hand, the interpretation of historical facts can retrieve the flaw of faded memory. In Chapter Three, I look into the relationship between history and its afterlife. This chapter is rooted in Benjamin’s conception of redemption. Why do we need to emphasize the significance of parts omitted by historians? The answer is redemption. No matter whether Ghosh’s view or Benjamin’s argument, both of them show one idea: history will shoulder the task of redemption which is a way to see history in the past and to connect to its future. In conclusion, the chief discourse of this paper is to propose in The Hungry Tide the historical dilemmas and conflicts mentioned by Ghosh in Benjamin’s approach. Instead of the methodology of dichotomies, I argue that the power of redemption highlights the refusal of cultural differences in historical performance and the citation of fragmented history. The completeness of history should be stemmed from its incomplete parts. Incompleteness also has the oppressed hold the position of voicing within history in order to prove its historical situation in the flood of history in which the oppressed plays a key role.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TW/104TKU05154014 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Yi-Ting Kuo, 郭怡廷 |
| Contributors | 蔡振興 |
| Source Sets | National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations in Taiwan |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | 學位論文 ; thesis |
| Format | 88 |
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