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Item Ethically valuable failure? : confession, sacrifice, and ethical responsibility in three novels by J.M. Coetzee : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English, Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand(Massey University, 2024) Murdoch, AlbanyThis thesis explores impulses and resistances to confession in three novels by J.M. Coetzee: Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Disgrace (1999), and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016). Specifically, it takes as its point of departure the apparent tension between confession and ethics in these novels, and in Coetzee’s oeuvre generally. I find that, despite his repeated return in fiction to the ethically valuable experience of being impinged upon by the other, and his repeated representation of flawed and sexually violent male characters, Coetzee seems, in both his fictional and critical work, to rule out the possibility that confession might possess any ethical valences. I analyse Coetzee’s apparent disregard for confession’s ethical value by reference to Michel Foucault, who from the mid-1970s developed a thoroughgoing critique of the role of confession in the power-knowledge nexus so central to his genealogies. I suggest that both rue confession’s role in maintaining established power dynamics, particularly in judicial settings, as well as its potential to encourage a harmful relationship of the self to itself. This latter concern is explored by way of the sacrifice Foucault claims is entailed in confession, a concern I argue is borne out in Disgrace and The Schooldays of Jesus. Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) provides a useful intervention into Coetzee’s and Foucault’s concerns. Drawing extensively from Foucault’s account of subjectivation, and yet departing from his almost wholesale condemnation of the role played by confession in Western society, Butler finds in the inevitable failure of accounting for one’s actions and who one is – and the experience of dispossession therein – grounds for the establishment of ethical responsibility. The dispossessing experience of giving an account, challenging as it does the idea of a sovereign subject, is thus seemingly intolerable to Foucault, but generative and foundational for Butler. In applying Butler’s work on giving an account to the three novels under consideration, I suggest that not only is failure inevitable when one attempts to confess, but that, far from constituting a reason to resist the interminable process of secular confession – interminability being a key concern in Waiting for the Barbarians – it may well be a source of ethical responsibility.Item Precarious citizens : a comparative analysis of the representation of Muslims and radicalisation in post-9/11 fiction : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand(Massey University, 2024-09-23) Ghaffari, SomayyehThe initial understandings and perceptions of the 9/11 attacks were heavily influenced by media coverage of the events and by the early literary responses published in prominent newspapers and magazines. The first wave of fictional writing about 9/11 was largely penned by Anglo-American writers such as Martin Amis, John Updike and Don DeLillo, who rarely challenged the dominant media narrative of American trauma and victimisation and reconfirmed stereotypes about Muslims and extremism. I contend that the election of Barack Obama helped inaugurate a second wave of writing about 9/11 in which non-European and immigrant American characters appear. This shifted the singular focus on American trauma to wider multicultural concerns. I discuss Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Amy Waldman’s The Submission as representative. However, it was not until Muslim immigrant authors themselves began to write about their experiences after the attacks that a third wave of more nuanced portrayal of both Muslims and Muslim extremism started to occur. In close analyses of Laleh Khadivi’s A Good Country and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire I discuss how such works offer complex depictions of cultural/ethnic “strangers/others” (including radicalised ones) who have made western nations their home. Both A Good Country and Home Fire offer insights into the difficulties faced by second-generation immigrants in everyday life in a county in which they desperately seek to belong but cannot, despite their citizenship. I argue that Shamsie’s keen (and informed) eye surveys a broader canvas than Khadivi’s. She counters stereotypes with researched psychological acuity and narratological skill. In our contemporary world, so fraught with tensions arising from misunderstandings of difference – religious, national, gendered, etc. – reading fiction about “strange others” and the ways they negotiate the difficult terrain of immigration, may have considerable social value.Item Encounters with time : arrested time in contemporary maternal grief narratives : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand(Massey University, 2023) Dainty, Gretchen EmmaDespite a ‘boom’ in the publication of grief literature since the late 1990s stories addressing the ongoing impacts of a child’s passing for a mother or maternal figure have been difficult to tell and rare to find. However, in recent times, such narratives have become more prolific, resonating with developments in grief psychology that perceive grief as adaptive and enduring. Additionally, narrative theory has expanded the boundaries of storytelling, allowing for ‘unnatural’ representations of time and temporal progression to express subjective experiences of loss. This thesis examines the representation of maternal grief in three narratives published during the 2010s, focusing on maternal subjective experiences of the passage of time. The selected narratives are: Blue Nights (2011) by Joan Didion, a memoir about the death of her daughter Quintana; Wave (2013) by Sonali Deraniyagala, an autobiographical account of the trauma following the deaths of her sons and family members in the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami; and Where Reasons End (2019) by Yiyun Li, a novel expressing an enduring relationship between a mother narrator and her deceased son. These narratives share a sense of disrupted temporality, as the narrators experience a stalling of linear time caused by the loss of their children. The immobilisation of temporal progression challenges Freudian-influenced stage models of grief that prevailed in the twentieth century and marginalised maternal grief stories. The writers analysed create differing impressions of ‘kinds of time’ that undo aspects of ‘real-world’ knowledge of temporality. Didion’s framing metaphor of twilight represents the stalling of time, where the narrator resists the reality of her daughter’s demise and the inevitability of death by dwelling in a liminal site, the ‘blue’ moments between day and night. The rupturing effect of the tsunami plunges Deraniyagala into a suspended state at the site of trauma. Between the wave and the outgoing tide, the present is extended until her loss is eventually claimed. However, Yiyun Li does away with time altogether, resulting in the detemporalisation of its protagonist through a fictional narrative method, where language becomes an ‘invisible landscape’. The ethereal animated conversation between the mother narrator and her deceased son transcends time. This topic holds significance for feminist interests and predicts broader societal incorporation of diverse cultural understandings of grief and perceptions of relationships between the living and the dead. Analysis of selected narrative and linguistic features of the texts will show how absence is felt, and how it is made meaningful in and by language.Item Patriarchal trauma and (the limits of) psychoanalysis across time, place and race : female suffering in Washington Square, Wide Sargasso Sea and The joys of motherhood : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, School of Humanities, Media and Creative Communication, Massey University, New Zealand(Massey University, 2022) Gonouya, CarolineIf, as is widely claimed, literature reflects social norms, cultural values, class struggles and 'social facts' about, and (scientific) knowledge available at the time in which it was written, Shoshana Felman’s claim in Writing and Madness also seems valid: "Historically, literary knowledge mirrors psychiatric knowledge and in many ways competes with it" (3). This provides a frame for my discussion of three novels in this thesis: Henry James's Washington Square, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, and Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood. These novels, written by authors living in very different times and places, all portray the suffering of women as a result of patriarchal trauma in three distinct historical and geographical settings: early Victorian New York, early Victorian West Indies and colonial Nigeria, respectively. These texts all reflect socio-cultural practices that subordinated women (at the time of writing and/or the time in which they are set), and all "mirror" or "compete with" psychological and psychiatric knowledge dominant at the time of writing. They are linked by a common thread of trauma that affects the mental well-being of the female protagonist(s), whether this be depression, suicidal ideation or 'hysteria.' I argue that in each of the three texts I discuss, we can find clues about the author's intellectual and cultural milieu – dominant ideas that were being discussed and debated at the time – and this can tell us something about developments in psychology and psychoanalysis in the (almost) century traversed by their publication dates. It is my claim that the scientific discoveries and psychological theories of the time in which the authors wrote similarly left their mark on the novels and the ways in which the (female) protagonists are portrayed. My discussions of the novels thus traverse patriarchal Darwinism and its influence on the nascent 'science' of psychology and Freudian psycho-sexual theories of development; it also considers the challenges to these scientific and medical forms of knowing (women) raised by second-wave feminism and object relations theory, and African womanism. I discuss how these novels reflect changing understandings of trauma, patriarchy and womanhood and the relationship between them; I also argue that they are open to reinterpretation via developments in trauma theory over the past century, as the reader views them through differing 'apertures' (in James's term): from theories of female 'hysteria' to broader understandings of intergenerational and postcolonial trauma.Item Imposed silences, subversive voices : (re)reading selected Pakistani Anglophone writing through the bodies of Pakistani-Muslim women : a dissertation presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand(Massey University, 2019) Salam, ShazrahThis dissertation is a personal and political act of resistance. Through a centralisation of the female body as an analytical construct, my research offers a feminist intervention to discussions about contemporary Pakistani Anglophone writing thereby challenging the often overtly political and nation-driven attention these texts have received. My analysis focuses on the inscription and framing of the bodies of Pakistani-Muslim women in Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke (2000), Kamila Shamsie’s Broken Verses (2005) and Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004). A central claim in this dissertation is that these novels complicate and challenge (if not always deconstruct) popular discourses which define Pakistani-Muslim women in essentialist terms as a homogenous group of passive and voiceless victims of male oppression or of a misogynist religion. Instead, I argue that the female bodies represented in the novels occupy a broader range of positions. While some are “silent” victims, others are highly subversive civic subjects and individuals. The novels portray historically and culturally-specific materialisations of womanhood, born out of a complex interplay between the discourses of religion, politics, desire and sexuality. I also claim that these novels address and write back to both indigenous and global actors. They engage and disrupt neo-Orientalist discourses of Muslim and feminist exceptionalism. At the same time, these novels question the privatisation and domestication of Pakistani-Muslim female bodies in local nationalist and religious discourses. While many of the female characters in these novels resist appropriation in (masculine) discourses of nationhood and religion, I nonetheless observe a problematic tendency to portray motherhood, and the maternal body, in ambivalent or even negative terms. I note, too that the implied audience of these novels is a global readership and/or a globalised elite, English-reading audience within Pakistan. In addressing this readership, these novels risk ignoring or even silencing the voices, issues, concerns and aspirations of a local population that is non-cosmopolitan, non-transnational and regional. Despite their challenges to monolithic assumptions about Pakistani women, then, the notion of agency attributed to the female subjectivities in the texts I have considered seems to be refracted through a neo-liberal lens which equates modernity/progress with individualism and secularism.Item Infantile informers : the child narrator as mitigator of sentiment in sentimental political fiction : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University, Distance, New Zealand(Massey University, 2019) O'Donovan, Anne MayFrom Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tim’s Cabin to Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, the genre of sentimental political fiction—fiction that tugs on our heartstrings for socio-political end—is often circumscribed to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This thesis, however, traces the extension of this tradition, widely condemned for its manipulative, moralistic and mawkish character, into contemporary literary culture. Through close analysis of a series of politically- charged twentieth- and twenty-first century literary novels that feature a child narrator—Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Lloyd Jones’ Mr Pip, and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names—the thesis argues that the device of the child narrator has helped these novels evade the accusations of “mawkish sentimentality” that tarnished their nineteenth-century kin. As it will show, our western understanding of childhood as naïve and unschooled enables the child narrator to disguise sensationalism, subjectivism and didacticism, ensuring that, unlike their historical counterparts, these novels tug on our heartstrings in the pursuit of a socio-political agenda without foregoing critical acclaim. Method: Other than close reading, the primary method employed to substantiate this claim is reader response theory. Thus, reviews of the novels, both reader and scholarly, feature strongly as evidence that these novels escape aspersions of sentimentality. Methodology: Though there are no studies directly addressing the work of the child narrator in fiction, the two main bodies of work in which this thesis intervenes are the literature on sentimental political fiction and the literature on the depiction of children in fiction. In addition, this thesis draws on two areas of study that inform the research. The first is the field of childhood studies, focussing specifically on the child narrator, rather than just the child. This field provided the framework for interpretation of the various models of childhood which inform the way that each novel constructs their child narrator. The second is affect theory, which helped ground speculations about the way tonal nuances in both the primary and secondary texts can affect our response to the message these texts impart. This thesis, then, not only fills a critical gap, but also suggests that the very fact that critics have ignored the device testifies to its efficient subterfuge and, in this sense as the child narrator has the capacity to foment genuine social awareness, they should no longer be overlooked.Item Brand Pakistan : a reception-oriented study of Pakistani Anglophone fiction : a dissertation presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature at Massey University, Palmerston North, Manawatu, New Zealand(Massey University, 2019) Nazir, BarirahMy research considers the reception of (selected) contemporary Pakistani Anglophone fiction in the current global literary marketplace. It argues that these texts are embedded in transnational networks and structures in ways that significantly impact on their reception both in South Asia (Pakistan and India) and in “the West” (the UK and the US). The theoretical framework employed is that of literary reception studies: I argue that how fictional texts are received (as evidenced in initial book reviews) tells us a great deal about the ideological assumptions of the “interpretive communities” (in Stanley Fish’s term) that consume and promote them. I draw on the work of literary critics such as Graham Huggan, Sarah Brouillette, Sandra Ponzanesi, Ana Cristina Mendes and Lisa Lau, who consider the ways in which “Third world” or “postcolonial” literature has been commodified as a result of global publishing and consumption trends. Via the comparative analysis of initial reviews of selected Pakistani novels, I discuss the commonalities and differences between their reception in various locations. I discuss The Wandering Falcon (2011), The Golden Legend (2017) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and the reviews of these novels published in leading literary magazines/supplements and newspapers in Pakistan, India, the UK and the US. My work involves a discussion of how Pakistani literature is branded for an international market and how this impact on “local” (South Asian) reception. I address the frequently cited concern that globally-focused Pakistani authors “sell-out” or even betray the nation and its people in their literary representations, pandering to international market demands in search of commercial success and literary recognition.