Year: 2013
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Through the critical discourse analysis of Anglophone Caribbean literature as a\npolyrhythmic performance, this research sets out to examine the claim that, in a\nworld in a state of constant flux, emerging Caribbean voices are offering a\nchallenging perspective on how to negotiate identity away from the binary constructs\nof centre and margin. It argues that the Caribbean writer, as a self-conscious\nproducer of alternative discourses, offers an innovative and transcultural vision of the\nself.\nThis research consists of three stages which integrate critical discourse and literary\nanalysis with colonial/postcolonial and socio-cultural theories. Firstly, it investigates\nthe power of language as an operation of discourse through which to apprehend\nreality within a binary system of representation. It then examines how the concept of\ndiscourse, as a site of contestation and meaning, enables the elaboration of a\nCaribbean counter-discourse. Finally, it explores the role, within the Caribbean text,\nof literary techniques such as narrative fragmentation, irony, dialogism,\nintertextuality, ambivalence and the carnivalesque to challenge, disrupt the\nestablished order and offer new perspectives of being.\nMy study of Anglophone Caribbean texts highlights the power of language and the\nauthority of the ‘book’ as subtle, insidious tools of domination and colonisation. It\nalso demonstrates how, by allowing hitherto marginalised voices to write themselves\ninto being, Caribbean writers enable linear narratives and monolithic visions of\nreality to be contested and other perspectives of understanding and of meaning to be\nuncovered. It exposes the plurality and the interweaving of discourses in the\nCaribbean text as a liberating, dynamic force which enables new subject positions\nand realities to emerge along the lines of similarity and difference. \nAt a time when the issue of identity is one of the central problems in the world today,\nthe research argues that this celebration of the plural, the fluid and the ambivalent offers new ways of being away from the stultifying perspective of essentialist forms.
Author: Marie-France Faulkner
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W201178203