Anthropology and the literature of political exile: A consideration of the works of Czeslaw Milosz, Salman Rushdie, and Anton Shammas
Issue Date
1991Keywords
Literature, Comparative.Literature, Modern.
Literature, Asian.
Literature, Slavic and East European.
Literature, Middle Eastern.
Anthropology, Cultural.
Advisor
Basso, Ellen B.Metadata
Show full item recordPublisher
The University of Arizona.Rights
Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.Abstract
The effort of this thesis is to use an anthropologically non-traditional subject, written literature, to comparatively explore a cross-cultural condition, exile. In justifying the use of written literature in anthropological enterprises, I contend that we are unnecessarily constrained by assumptions we have inherited regarding the concept of culture, the consequence of which has been the denial to literature of a constitutive role in the making of social life and history. Literary narrative can be culturally constitutive, as is exemplified by the three authors considered here.Type
textThesis-Reproduction (electronic)
Degree Name
M.A.Degree Level
mastersDegree Program
Graduate CollegeAnthropology
Degree Grantor
University of ArizonaCollections
Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
Jens Walther’s Abstieg vom Zauberberg (1997): A Literary Reflection on the World of Publishing in the Postmodern WorldThe world of book publishing is currently undergoing a major paradigm shift, but this was already fully under way in the 1990s. In the German novel Abstieg vom Zauberberg, published in 1997 by an anonymous author under the pseudonym Jens Walther, we are given an excellent insider view of the concrete situation within literary publishing houses and how they operate behind the scene and in public to secure the best possible titles and to fend off manuscripts that appear to be trivial literature. The author proves to be highly educated in the history of German and western literature at large and also demonstrates great expertise regarding book fairs, book reviews, and book prizes, framing all this by a somewhat twisted love story involving a young author, Anna Becker, and two men, first the young Johannes Rieger, then his father Helmut Rieger, both representing the fictional publishing house Engsfeld.
-
Uncivilized women and erotic strategies of border zones or demythologizing the romance of conquest.The contact of two different cultures in the colonization process produces a zone of cultural mingling that resembles Victor Turner's concept of "liminality" referring to states or persons that elude classification. This study considers the repercussions of colonization on the lives of women characters in novels about four different "post-colonial" contexts--Native American, Jamaican, Irish and Mexican American. These novels reflect both the unique historical circumstances of each context and common themes that occur due to colonization and transcend the specific cultures such as the mourning of personal and collective loss, liminal states of consciousness and mingling of cultures. The introductory chapter examines the particular historical contexts of each novel and the theories of Abdul JanMohamed and Frantz Fanon on colonization. This study also applies the work of Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, Julia Kristeva, Gloria Anzaldua, Homi Bhaba and others to an examination of the subversive cultural formations that evolve through the boundary dissolution of colonization. Chapter two considers Louise Erdrich's novel Tracks in which the decimation of the Anishinabe people is the context for the three primary characters who have experienced personal and collective loss and respond by resisting or adapting to colonization. Chapter three examines Erna Brodber's Myal and the impact of the manichean colonial ideology on a Jamaican woman who is literally half-black and half-white. Chapter four addresses Julia O'Faolain's No Country for Young Men, a novel about two women, one who lived through the early twentieth century movement for Irish independence and the other who is her great niece, that have both been silenced and sexually controlled by colonialism and Irish Catholicism. The fifth and final chapter examines Lucha Corpi's Delia's Song about a young Chicana activist who has suffered losses on several levels and recovers by writing an autobiographical novel that weaves the personal and political issues of her life. All four novels are concerned with the liminal states of consciousness in these women characters and their efforts to both find love and tell their stories, thus counteracting the colonizer's version of history.
-
A place to see: Ecological literary theory and practice."A Place to See: Ecological Literary Theory and Practice" approaches "American" literature with an inclusive interdisciplinarity that necessarily complicates traditional notions of both "earliness" and canon. In order to examine how "Nature" has been socially constructed since the seventeenth century to support colonialist objectives, I set American literature into a context which includes ancient Mayan almanacs, the Popol Vuh, early seventeenth and eighteenth century American farmer's almanacs, 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu's autobiography, the 1994 Zapatista National Liberation army uprising in Mexico, and Leslie Silko's Almanac of the Dead. Drawing on the feminist, literary and cultural theories of Donna Haraway, Carolyn Merchant, and Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Edward Said, Annette Kolodny, and Joseph Meeker, I argue that contemporary Native American writers insist that readers question all previous assumptions about "Nature" as uninhabited wilderness and "nature writing" as realistic, non-fiction prose recorded in Waldenesque tranquility. Instead the work of writers such as Silko, Louise Erdrich, Simon Ortiz, and Joy Harjo is a "nature writing" which explores the interconnections among forms and systems of domination, exploitation, and oppression across their different racial, sexual, and ecological manifestations. I posit that literary critics and teachers who wish to work for a more ecologically and socially balanced world should draw on the work of all members of our discourse community in cooperative rather than competitive ways and seek to transform literary theory and practice by bringing it back into dynamic interconnection with the worlds we all live in--inescapably social and material worlds in which issues of race, class, and gender inevitably intersect in complex and multi-faceted ways with issues of natural resource exploitation and conservation.
