Tennessee Research And Creative Exchange Summary
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative
Exchange
Doctoral Dissertations
Graduate School
12-2009
Critical Distance: The Postcolonial Novel and the
Dilemma of Exile
David S. Morgan
University of Tennessee - Knoxville
Recommended Citation
Morgan, David S., "Critical Distance: The Postcolonial Novel and the Dilemma of Exile. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2009. http://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/624 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more
information, …show more content…
Morgan
December 2009
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the numerous friends and colleagues who have offered me support and guidance while I wrote this dissertation.
This dissertation would have been impossible without the direction of Dr. Allen
Dunn. Not only did he help me to secure funding for the final years of my graduate study, his guidance allowed me to find a project that fit both my interests and my personality.
Because of that guidance, I have begun to understand who I am, and who I want to be, as a scholar. He proved, time and again, to be a patient and thoughtful reader of my work who took my ideas seriously even when I felt they were not yet worthy of such attention.
I am deeply indebted to him for his encouragement and his criticisms which pushed me to refine my thinking and my writing in ways that have made me a more thoughtful scholar and teacher. It has been a special privilege to work with him in this capacity, and I am grateful to be able to continue to work with him as a colleague and fellow editor.
I am also grateful to the other members of my dissertation committee: Dr. Amy …show more content…
It singularizes the ‗totality‘ of authority by suggesting that agency requires a grounding, but it does not require a totalization of those grounds; it requires movement and manoeuvre, but it does not require a temporality of continuity or accumulation; it requires direction and contingent closure but no teleology or holism. (185)
The power of postcolonial agency, as Bhabha describes it, lies in its inability and refusal to be recognized by colonial authority, its liminal presence ―outside of the sentence‖ of modern teleological history (182). As the manifestation of an agency whose only presence is ―outside the sentence,‖ Bhabha‘s notion of an ambivalently hybrid postcolonial subject marks the absence of postcolonial agency as much as it can be said to illustrate its existence. The mimic, as a prime example of Bhabha‘s postcolonial agent, has no clear course of action that would allow speech or action to resist the power of colonial authority or any potential to imagine such an agency. His theory of
Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative
Exchange
Doctoral Dissertations
Graduate School
12-2009
Critical Distance: The Postcolonial Novel and the
Dilemma of Exile
David S. Morgan
University of Tennessee - Knoxville
Recommended Citation
Morgan, David S., "Critical Distance: The Postcolonial Novel and the Dilemma of Exile. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2009. http://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/624 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more
information, …show more content…
Morgan
December 2009
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the numerous friends and colleagues who have offered me support and guidance while I wrote this dissertation.
This dissertation would have been impossible without the direction of Dr. Allen
Dunn. Not only did he help me to secure funding for the final years of my graduate study, his guidance allowed me to find a project that fit both my interests and my personality.
Because of that guidance, I have begun to understand who I am, and who I want to be, as a scholar. He proved, time and again, to be a patient and thoughtful reader of my work who took my ideas seriously even when I felt they were not yet worthy of such attention.
I am deeply indebted to him for his encouragement and his criticisms which pushed me to refine my thinking and my writing in ways that have made me a more thoughtful scholar and teacher. It has been a special privilege to work with him in this capacity, and I am grateful to be able to continue to work with him as a colleague and fellow editor.
I am also grateful to the other members of my dissertation committee: Dr. Amy …show more content…
It singularizes the ‗totality‘ of authority by suggesting that agency requires a grounding, but it does not require a totalization of those grounds; it requires movement and manoeuvre, but it does not require a temporality of continuity or accumulation; it requires direction and contingent closure but no teleology or holism. (185)
The power of postcolonial agency, as Bhabha describes it, lies in its inability and refusal to be recognized by colonial authority, its liminal presence ―outside of the sentence‖ of modern teleological history (182). As the manifestation of an agency whose only presence is ―outside the sentence,‖ Bhabha‘s notion of an ambivalently hybrid postcolonial subject marks the absence of postcolonial agency as much as it can be said to illustrate its existence. The mimic, as a prime example of Bhabha‘s postcolonial agent, has no clear course of action that would allow speech or action to resist the power of colonial authority or any potential to imagine such an agency. His theory of