The women of apartness re-thinking the post at a global moment.

摘要

My doctoral thesis, entitled The Women of Apartness " Outside/In" Western Imperialism, is an interdisciplinary study of three "canonical" classical Greek texts with three modern texts---Sophocles' Antigone with Ama Ata Aidoo's Anowa, Euripides' Medea with Toni Morrison's Beloved and Euripides' Iphigenia in Avlis with Henry James' Portrait of a Lady. By wrenching these texts out of the discursive regimes that have hitherto controlled their interpretations, I am putting them in an agonistic dialogue with each other. I do not only intend to precipitate provocatively original readings of these texts but also reveal the polyvalent significance of the relationship between these texts and their socio-political and historical contexts. The re-constellation of these otherwise unlikely pairs is pertinent to and productively disclosive of a novel solicitation of the Western canon and canon formation in view of the neo-imperial practices of the current global politics employed in the Western world. In locating these readings within the framework of Western tradition, my dissertation promises to contribute significantly to a re-thinking of the post in the context of the contemporary global politics by focusing on the political, social and psychological predicament of the female figures discussed in this project. The exploration of their speaking silence and their spectral existence aims at the unconcealment of the problematic of those peripheral constituencies who do not and cannot belong. For, especially in our contemporary world deluged with unwelcome constituencies like those refugees who have been bereaved of the possibility of retrieving their homes or returning to their homelands, we need to re-think the question of belonging, the question of identity, the question of being-in-the-world.