- Title
- Detecting the transnational space: metaphysical detecting in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When we were orphans, Michiel Heyns’s Lost ground, and Amitav Gosh’s The Calcutta chromosome
- Creator
- Botes, Niki
- Subject
- Literature and transnationalism
- Subject
- Detective and mystery stories -- History and criticism
- Subject
- Ishiguro, Kazuo, 1954-
- Subject
- Ishiguro, Kazuo, 1954- -- When we were orpahns
- Subject
- Heyns, Michiel
- Subject
- Heyns, Michiel -- Lost ground
- Subject
- Ghosh, Amitav, 1956-
- Subject
- Ghosh, Amitav, 1956- -- The Calcutta chromosome
- Date Issued
- 2020
- Date
- 2020
- Type
- Thesis
- Type
- Masters
- Type
- MA
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/140971
- Identifier
- vital:37933
- Description
- The transnational detectives in the three primary texts under scrutiny—Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, Michiel Heyns’s Lost Ground, and Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome—are regarded as metaphysical detectives in this thesis. As transnational figures, they criss-cross physical and national borders, but their investigations also often require the crossing of epistemological and ontological borders, as well as thinking outside of binaries. The fictional transnational, postcolonial worlds presented in these texts all feature a lack of change and the persistence of the socio-economic inequalities and discriminations of the colonial or, in the case of Lost Ground, the apartheid past. This thesis will argue that the three texts foreground the inability to break free from conceptual frameworks and a lack in human relationships as two possible reasons why the communities and societies in question have not been able to affect change. To solve the various mysteries in the texts, the transnational detectives need to find new ways of knowing and being. The lessons that these detectives learn and the personal changes they experience serve as synecdoche for how a better tomorrow for the transnational, postcolonial world could possibly be achieved. The methodology employed in this thesis involves a comparative reading of the three primary texts. To analyse and interpret these texts, this thesis draws on the philosophies of postmodern philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Emmanuel Levinas, as well as postcolonial theorists like Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi K. Bhabha. The thesis will contend that especially Derrida’s work on deconstruction, which forms the conceptual basis for Bhabha’s notion of the ‘third space,’ as well as Levinas’s anti-totalitarian approach with regard to the ethical relationship between the self and the other, are viable better ways of knowing and being in the transnational, postcolonial worlds presented in the texts. Derrida’s notion of différance and the trace, as well as Bhabha’s third space, this thesis contends, completely destabilises binary thinking and offers ways to think outside of the limited frameworks of ideological discourse. This thesis also posits that Levinas’s metaphysical and pluralistic interpretation of how the self should, and can, relate to the other, presents a better way of forming human relationships and has the potential to affect positive change.
- Format
- 127 pages
- Format
- Publisher
- Rhodes University
- Publisher
- Faculty of Humanities, English
- Language
- English
- Rights
- Botes, Niki
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RU Department of Literary Studies in English
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