Metaphorizing Migrancy: V. S. Naipaul''s Fiction and Diaspora Poetics

• Main Authors: Yu-yan, 劉于雁
• Other Authors: Wei-hsin Tein
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2003
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/96852284246484500113

博士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語研究所 === 91 === Metaphorizing Migrancy:V. S. Naipaul’s fiction and Diaspora Poetics Abstract This dissertation explores the representation of diaspora experience in V. S. Naipaul’s four major novels─The Mimic Men, A Bend in the River, The Enigma of Arrival, and A Way in the World. The introductory chapter builds up the theoretical framework and highlights significant aspects concerning Naipaul: his controversial position, diaspora poetics specific to his works, and his locating in the shifting topology, the metaphor of migrancy. Chapter Two reads The Mimic Men in relation to the reconceptualization of cultural roots/routes and identity prompted particularly by Stuart Hall and James Clifford, centering mainly on the metaphor of migrancy, which functions to dispense with the crisis of cultural identity and the void of re-imagination of cultural origins. Chapter Three, which discusses A Bend in the River, elucidates how Naipaul elaborates the social dynamic in a re-mapping cultural and national domain and how he addresses and redresses the shifting milieus in both the Third and the First World in a global sphere that changes. Chapter Four examines The Enigma of Arrival in relation to the configuration of diaspora identification and syncretic vision, mapping out Naipaul’s inscription of a nomadic self, an Indo-Trinidadian novelist, in the English landscape and his launching of an implicated cultural critique of the metropolitan center. The attempts to delve into the possibilities of creating new cultural hybrids and to arrive at a substantial truth about the complexity of cultural syncreticism are foregrounded, whereby the received ideas of home, exile are critically re-envisioned and redefined. Chapter Five reads A Way in the World as a postcolonial historiography that presents a way of entry into histories as tension and mutation rather than beatitude and stability. In A Way in the World, a novel that dramatizes a mobile sense of histories, an anti-teleological diasporic vision is installed; the account of migrancy is substantiated as a contributive determinant of historiography. The concluding chapter affirms Naipaul’s achievement, reiterating the metaphorization of migrancy in Naipaul’s novels as a strategy of cultural negotiation in a re-orienting world.