Travelling Novel Post Orientalism and the postmodern Narrative

Travelling Novel Post Orientalism and the postmodern Narrative

dc.contributor.advisor	Mohan, Anupama
dc.creator.researcher	Sankar, Dhee
dc.date.accessioned	2024-07-29T08:20:33Z
dc.date.available	2024-07-29T08:20:33Z
dc.description.abstract	The Foucauldian framework he deployed in Orientalism (1978) led Edward Said to argue that a “systematic discipline” ideologically buttressed, and subsumed, the imperialist “discourse” of Western supremacy. Some literary manifestations of postmodernism and postcolonialism, however, have continued to be implicated in an imaginative reworking of space that can be traced back to Orientalism, signalling the possibility of deploying Orientalist tropes contrapuntally. Postmodern place-making creates unique topoi that can be studied as comprising a topology, one that is structured by a systematic array of tropes, thus also necessitating a tropology, or a systematic study of the recurrent images in a particular tradition. In my thesis, I use the phrase “post-Orientalism” to follow and examine the t(r)opology of select postmodern and postcolonial narratives. Post-Orientalism allows one, I argue, to pursue, assemble, and then closely examine the richly cross-connected itineraries of specific tropes such as domes, labyrinths, libraries, and museums, among others, in tandem with the formal frames of the social realist novel, the mystery story, and the uncanny narrative in ways that are creatively generative of interpretive possibilities, an effect we lose out on if we were not to look beyond the porous surfaces of “East” and “West,” “Orient” and “Occident.” In my thesis, I use “post-Orientalist” as a way to understand a particular network of intertexts that appears in several works of fiction, metafiction, as well as nonfiction that reference the Orient to define their setting. For this network, two bodies of writings are key: the first text, the One Thousand and One Nights, itself becomes a trope through repeated citation and referentiality, serving as both a narratological model of intertextuality and an inexhaustible reservoir of Oriental imagery. The second component of this network is the corpus of writings of Jorge Luis Borges, whose unique metatextual self-reflexivity has influenced postmodern and metafictional literature throughout the world since the late twentieth century. The first three chapters of my project examine the afterlife of the above network of intertexts in the works of a few major novelists that have been vitally shaped by the East-West binary: Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, and Umberto Eco. I inquire how the post-Orientalist t(r)opology travels – between continents, authors, genres, and gender(s). Hence, my fourth chapter is devoted to its occurrence in genres other than postmodern metafiction: the travel narratives of William Dalrymple and Amitav Ghosh, and the works of two non-European female authors who occupy a contrapuntal position in the history of contemporary Orientalist literature: Hanan al-Shaykh and Elif Shafak.	en_US
dc.description.searchVisibility	true	en_US
dc.format.mimetype	application/pdf	en_US
dc.identifier.uri	https://www.presiuniv.ac.in	en_US
dc.identifier.uri	http://www.presiuniv.ndl.iitkgp.ac.in/handle/123456789/2432
dc.language.iso	epo	en_US
dc.rights.accessRights	authorized	en_US
dc.source	Presidency University	en_US
dc.source.uri	https://www.presiuniv.ac.in	en_US
dc.subject	Post-Orientalism	en_US
dc.subject	t(r)opology	en_US
dc.subject	postmodernism	en_US
dc.subject	metafiction	en_US
dc.subject	One Thousand and One Nights	en_US
dc.subject	Borges	en_US
dc.title	Travelling Novel Post Orientalism and the postmodern Narrative	en_US
dc.type	text	en_US