'In this kingdom of passing fiction': Memory and imagination in David Malouf's 'An Imaginary Life' and Wilma Stockenstroem's 'The Expedition to the Baobab Tree'.

摘要

Memory and imagination play an important part in the novels of David Malouf and Wilma Stockenstrom and they do so in the form of an extreme consciousness of what language may or may not do. Their novels deal with the removal of highly symbolized protagonists from the containment of historical and cultural narratives that most societies, through ideological and ordering necessity, generate as self-explanation. Both protagonists walk out of 'history' through acts of remembering and re-creating, by playing questions of language and private identities, through the filter of memory and imagination.; Both Stockenstrom and Malouf are writers with a strong sense of marginality and exile; both of them are conscious of the parts they have to play within a script--historical and contemporary--of empire and colony. But they are also writers carrying a full consciousness of the uncertainties of language in the postmodern world, in which language has become destabilized and the project of modernism--to reconcile selves, words and the world--rejected.; Critical commentary of Seamus Heaney, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Witold Gombrowicz are brought to bear on these two writers and the text of this thesis.