History, horror, reality: The idea of the marvelous in postcolonial fiction.

摘要

This dissertation examined the use of anti-realist aesthetics in the representation of history in postcolonial fiction produced in Latin America, the Caribbean, South India and Africa. More specifically, it focused on how postcolonial writers engage the issue of history, outside of the dominant realist literary expression.;This work explored the issue of history, with particular focus on the writings of Alejo Carpentier, Sony Labou Tansi, Salman Rushdie and Ben Okri. These writers' works were situated within the framework of the marvelous real, which regarded history as a phenomenon that was in itself, supernatural. Therefore, the histriographical discourse fore grounded in the selected texts was sensitive to the nightmare of history on the one hand and the vagaries of the production of historical knowledge on the other.;The dissertation found out that the marvelous dimension of the postcolonial novel derived from the horrific characteristic of historical events. Rather than generating the marvelous by evoking the supernatural as external to history, postcolonial fiction produced the marvelous by narrativizing imperialism as an experience of horror, which constituted an alteration, and amplification, of the scale of reality. This magical aesthetic provided the writers the opportunity to continue in the tradition of political commitment, which was no longer possible in the realist convention.;This study observed that the violence of history during the colonial era and in post-independence period in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America manifested as horror of infinite proportions, which was represented through the notion of the marvelous. This thematization of horror, as a unique characteristic of history, was an effort on the part of these writers to capture the contradictions of social and historical experience. The dissertation concluded that by centralizing horror as a distinctive source of the marvelous, by highlighting the limitations of the process of producing historical knowledge, and by undermining mimetic representation, these writers attempt to re-imagine new social systems and create new political vision devoid of the contemporary regime of violence.