Subaltern modernisms: The poetics and politics of banality in transnational fictions.

摘要

This dissertation argues that one of the lasting legacies of modernism, a concern with the motifs of banality and boredom, has characterized not only certain traditions of British literature but also those of Anglophone literatures in colonial and postcolonial contexts. The banal, and the related motifs of boredom, the quotidian and the everyday, have not only been aesthetic categories, but they have also carried with it a specific set of political implications, often linked to the power structures and conflicts involved in colonialism and its aftermath. Reading novels and short stories produced in British colonial contexts, namely Ireland (James Joyce), New Zealand (Katherine Mansfield), South Africa (Zoe Wicomb) and India (Shashi Deshpande and Amit Chaudhuri), I seek to show how local conceptualizations of banality and boredom have embodied critiques of colonial domination and markers of hybrid postcolonial identities within 20th century Anglophone fictional traditions across the globe.