English and Linguistics
http://hdl.handle.net/10523/297
2024-03-16T17:03:17ZHope in the Anthropocene: Eco-collectivism and twenty-first century South Asian novels in English
http://hdl.handle.net/10523/16507
Hope in the Anthropocene: Eco-collectivism and twenty-first century South Asian novels in English
2023
Khan, Md Rakibul Hasan
In this thesis, I examine a selection of twenty-first-century South Asian novels in English to argue that these works bring forth the idea of a new form of multispecies collectivism, which I term “eco-collectivism,” as a basis for hope in the Anthropocene. I define eco-collectivism as the way humans attempt to survive collectively with nonhumans in the face of the climate crisis, adopting an alternative mode of existence. I develop this concept through my study of the selected novels which highlight the need for multispecies collective ways of surviving the climate crisis, underlining the importance of multispecies environmental justice. The five novels I study are (i) Animal’s People (2007) by Indra Sinha (India), (ii) The White Tiger (2008) by Aravind Adiga (India), (iii) The Bones of Grace (2016) by Tahmima Anam (Bangladesh), (iv) The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) by Arundhati Roy (India), and (v) Gun Island (2019) by Amitav Ghosh (India). I do not claim that each novel offers hope or yields the idea of eco-collectivism, but each of them, in their unique ways, contributes to my formulation of the concept. While The White Tiger and The Bones of Grace show the need for eco-collectivism, Animal’s People, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and Gun Island demonstrate its characteristics. I postulate that eco-collectivism combines the ethos of ecological and social justice and calls for a collective effort and mutually caring co-existence of humans and nonhumans to survive the climate crisis and to create a better future together. Drawing on theories of postcolonial ecocriticism, emotions (particularly hope), and multispecies connectivity, my study evinces how the novels, written against the backdrop of societies ruptured by environmental violence, interrogate neoliberal ideologies of individualism, consumerism, and anti-environmental development, foregrounding the struggles of those at the margins victimized by environmental injustice. I maintain that the local environmental damage that the novels foreground is inseparable from the global climate crisis, shedding light on how historical and ongoing exploitation and injustice, caused by both colonialism and neoliberalism, increase the climatic vulnerabilities of the postcolonial countries represented by my selected texts. In this study, therefore, I identify and explore the novels’ insights into the complex connection between the history of colonization, neoliberal globalization, and the Anthropocene. In the process, I examine environmentally-inspired emotions like despair, grief, sadness, anxiety, anger, and solastalgia, while arguing for the possibility of hope through eco-collectivism. The study underlines how the works envisage an alternative mode of existence, reformulating the “human” (Anthropos) of the Anthropocene as custodians rather than masters of the nonhuman world, at the same time recentring nonhumans in our ecological thinking.
2024-01-10T03:45:54ZChinese spatial poetics and global space from Liang Qichao to Gary Snyder
http://hdl.handle.net/10523/15467
Chinese spatial poetics and global space from Liang Qichao to Gary Snyder
2023
Zhang, Yu
My thesis examines the two-way travels of space-related poetic ideas between Chinese and English-language poetry and explores the contact zones and new spaces created when ideas from different cultures encounter each other both in global space and in the world of poetry. On the one hand, the thesis explores how the Chinese poets Huang Zunxian黃遵憲 (1848–1905) and Bian Zhilin卞之琳 (1910–2000) adapt traditional Chinese spatial poetics to new geopolitical realities and in response to European poetics and literature; on the other hand, it traces how traditional Chinese spatial poetics and aesthetic concepts enter the English-language world and how the English-language authors Ezra Pound (1885–1972), Lytton Strachey (1880–1932), and Gary Snyder (1930– ) draw on these imported ideas in developing their own spatial poetics. The thesis begins by exploring the modern spatial poetics that emerges in the essays of Liang Qichao 梁啓超 (1873–1929) on establishing China’s new poetry and in Huang’s poems of overseas travel and cosmopolitan life. Huang adapts traditional Chinese spatial poetics to address modern understandings of geography, geopolitics, distance and intimacy, speed, and global interconnectedness. The thesis goes on to analyse how in the early twentieth century Strachey and Pound drew on traditional Chinese aesthetic thought about poetic space, including the concepts of “meaning beyond words” and “rhythmic vitality.” It then examines how Bian’s poems and translations in the 1930s, as well as his theories of modern Chinese poetic form, extend the adaptation of traditional Chinese spatial poetics. Bian’s poetics of space addresses the shifting perspectives and scales engendered by geopolitical upheaval, modern media, maps, and translation. Finally, the thesis traces the further adaptation of traditional Chinese spatial aesthetics in Snyder’s “Cold Mountain” poems, in his translations of Tang poems, and in his forty-year-long poem Mountains and Rivers without End. The thesis complicates existing accounts of the modern Western appropriation of traditional Chinese aesthetics by exploring the differing but interconnected circulations of classical Chinese poetic ideas about space in both modern Chinese and English-language poetries. It shows how these circulations of Chinese spatial poetics are intimately related to the complex geopolitics of global modernity.
2023-07-03T03:09:37ZMaleldil in his Sphere: Nature as Order and Paradise in C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy
http://hdl.handle.net/10523/15411
Maleldil in his Sphere: Nature as Order and Paradise in C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy
2023
Cook, Charlotte Jane Kelso
The fictional works of C. S. Lewis have long been admired for their depictions of the natural world. However, the bucolic landscapes and interspecies communication in The Chronicles of Narnia and The Space Trilogy hold deeper significance to Lewis than as imaginative backdrops to the narratives he creates.
I will be focusing on five areas – the symbolic geography of the planets and universe within The Space Trilogy, the ecology and relations between species, the destruction of nature and the natural world, the physical and figurative portals Lewis creates in nature, and the interpretation of the natural world as an ideal paradise.
2023-06-08T03:38:39ZThe Otago Society of Gentlemen Amateurs: Extracts From A Crime Novel
http://hdl.handle.net/10523/15144
The Otago Society of Gentlemen Amateurs: Extracts From A Crime Novel
2023
Kidd, Kerry
This thesis presents extracts from a crime novel entitled The Otago Society of
Gentleman Amateurs, with explanatory interludes and accompanying
exegesis.
The novel centres on the exploits of a young postgraduate member of the
eponymous Society, who discovers that one of the international student members
has been murdered in exceptionally horrible circumstances, and volunteers to go
to the victim’s home country of Myanmar in search of information. In what
appears an unrelated incident, a body from precolonial times is discovered in a
cave north of Dunedin on the same morning: the day after the Jewish files at the
Hocken archive receive an unexpected nocturnal visitor. These events are
interwoven with the story of a young mathematician’s trip to Nazi Germany in
the 1930s. All these strands interweave to form a novel that considers the
relationship between genocides of different eras and the inherent artificialities in
the project of writing crime fiction. The text draws thematically on the basic
concept of fractal systems as well as Buddhist and other theologies of hell.
The exegesis examines some aspects of the relationship between fiction and
authorial experience, and the problematics for Westerners of writing fiction set in
Asia in the postcolonial era. It also examines some aspects of gender and sexual
politics, and the philosophical diversity of cosmological perspectives depicted in
2023-04-03T03:42:51ZThree pilgrims searching for home: the Itinerary of Archbishop Sigeric, the Navigatio Sancti Brendani
Abbatis and the Wanderer
http://hdl.handle.net/10523/15109
Three pilgrims searching for home: the Itinerary of Archbishop Sigeric, the Navigatio Sancti Brendani
Abbatis and the Wanderer
2023
Jones, Sandra Anne
The second half of the tenth century saw the production of many texts in England and Ireland that reflected early medieval views of Christian pilgrimage. In this thesis I have identified three important and recurring characteristics in the pilgrimage literature of that time which help to reveal the historical context in which they were written: identity, time and space, and the importance of memory. Three texts in particular demonstrate these overarching characteristics: the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis (Voyage of Saint Brendan), the Itinerary of Archbishop Sigeric, and the Old English poem The Wanderer. Further titles, including early medieval charters and their boundary clauses, poetry and prose writings also provide specific insights into how pilgrims connected with the wider world. All three texts have characters who must find their way home across the sea: Sigeric direct to Canterbury from Rome, Brendan back to his monastery, his earthly home, and then to the Promised Land of Saints. The Wanderer will find his home only after death, in his hopes for heaven. Their journeys reflect the growing sense of nationhood in England and Ireland as the tenth century drew to a close.
2023-03-20T00:01:54ZInaugural lecture delivered in the University Library, May 1st, 1882
http://hdl.handle.net/10523/15104
Inaugural lecture delivered in the University Library, May 1st, 1882
1882
Brown, Mainwaring
2023-03-16T00:06:08ZThe temporalities of ruinscapes in twenty-first century South African fiction
http://hdl.handle.net/10523/15088
The temporalities of ruinscapes in twenty-first century South African fiction
2023
Dorter, Sevket Sarper
As a nation of the global South, with its history of imperialism and apartheid intersecting in
the present moment with neoliberal globalization, South Africa constitutes something of a
‘crucible’ of entangled spatio-temporalities along with manifestations of psycho-social
ruination. Positing that conceptions of time are integral to socio-economic structures within
history, and that colonial temporal frameworks mystify racialized power relations and
imperial forms of exploitation, I argue that repositioning empire within the politics of the
present would enable the conception of time to be reshaped. This thesis examines a selection
of twenty-first-century South African fiction to analyze temporal dimensions of the processes
that sustain, govern, and justify systemic injustices that cheapen both human and nonhuman
lives. My corpus consists of four novels and a short story collection: Phaswane Mpe’s
Welcome to Our Hillbrow (Mpe 2001), Kgebetli Moele’s Room 207 (Moele 2006), Ivan
Vladislavić’s The Exploded View (Vladislavić 2004), Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City (Beukes
2010), and Karen Jayes’s For the Mercy of Water (Jayes 2012). Analyzing how the present is
constituted under late capitalism in South Africa, I examine how these works bring to light the
temporal quality of empire, which reflects and reproduces social, economic, and
environmental damage. This damage, both material and epistemological, underlies the
structural inequalities that govern the imperial formations persisting under globalism today,
both in South Africa and beyond.
My work proposes the notion of “ruinscape” for literary and cultural analysis, as
referring not simply to damaged space, but as the spatial representation of negative social,
economic, and environmental processes across historical periods that interpenetrate each
other. This negative temporalization of space is marked by the socio-environmental erasure of
peripheral spaces, the displacement of vulnerable individuals and classes, and the distancing
of these spaces from public awareness. Ruinscapes are physical settings and structural
formations that are both the outcome and the ongoing processes of ruination. The suffix “-
scape” highlights ruination’s relation to physical or cultural materialities, so that ruinscapes
exemplify both physical and mental ruination processes and durations. How time is
understood shapes how ruination is perceived, and illuminates how ruination escapes the
public consciousness. With reference to this selection of twenty-first-century South African
fiction, I argue that ruinscapes provide temporal vantage points to unpack imperial persistence
and its material consequences. They render the palimpsestic quality of post-apartheid time
apprehensible.
2023-03-08T21:20:22Z“Let’s Do a Gertrude Stein on It”: Caroline Bergvall and Iterative Poetics
http://hdl.handle.net/10523/14824
“Let’s Do a Gertrude Stein on It”: Caroline Bergvall and Iterative Poetics
2011
Edmond, Jacob
2023-02-07T22:12:23Z