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Affective Insurgencies: Circular Narratives of Conflict in Contemporary South Asian Novels 1

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Affective Insurgencies: Circular Narratives of Conflict in Contemporary South Asian Novels 1 THESIS APPROVED BY May 22, 2020 Date Surbhi Malik, Ph.D., Committee Chair Robert Dornsife, Ph.D. Gail M. Jensen, Ph.D., Dean AFFECTIVE INSURGENCIES: CIRCULAR NARRATIVES OF CONFLICT IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIAN NOVELS ___________________________________ By RYAN WEBBER ___________________________________ A THESIS Submitted to the faculty of the Graduate School of the Creighton University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of English _________________________________ Omaha, NE 22 May 2020 iii ABSTRACT My thesis will explore how our everyday discourses and notions of truth and epistemic validity which we use in a variety of academic disciplines and other contexts can be deconstructed within the textual space of contemporary literature on terrorism. In chapter one, I analyze nineteenth- and twentieth-century theoretical texts in which linguists, philosophers of language, and literary and rhetorical scholars discuss both the functions of language and literature and the relationship between metaphorical discourse and literal discourse. In the following two chapters, I shift my focus to contemporary novels on violent local and transnational conflicts and their devastating effects, focusing specifically on how the circular narrative structures often undermine literal discourses and popular cultural values which stigmatize Muslim, Arab, and South Asian insurgents and terrorists as monsters or subhuman. Analyzing Mahasweta Devi’s contemporary Bengali novel Mother of 1084, I will argue in chapter two that the middle-class protagonist’s thoughts and feelings may help us contemplate how violent conflicts can cause people to suffer from depression, providing us an opportunity to propose a biocultural model of depression from the perspective of an insurgent’s mother. I will connect this notion that the protagonist provides readers a biocultural model as the story unfolds to the nonlinear narrative structure. Likewise, chapter three will also be an argument I make that the circular narrative structures of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows appear to disrupt the legitimacy of popular American narratives of terrorists. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I first want to give my utmost gratitude to my advisor and chair of my thesis Surbhi Malik. Without your words of encouragement, informative feedback, and recommendations for primary and secondary sources in my areas of research, I would have cringed and ran away from my thesis like Victor Frankenstein did from his creation. The skills you taught me in all stages of the research and writing process I will take with me no matter where I go or what I do in life. Thank you Dr. Malik! I also want to thank the other members of my thesis committee for all of their help and support. Robert Dornsife—thank you not only for lecturing on challenging linguistic and literary theories with so much enthusiasm that I now feel like I read such texts for fun now but also for your humor and compassion, which made even stressful days enjoyable. Kathleen Rettig—thank you for showing me firsthand how to combine my love for literature with social justice. But there are many other professors who helped me improve as a researcher and craft my thesis. Joshua Prenosil—your class on the rhetoric of health and medicine helped me write my second chapter, and you designed class activities which made me think critically about my perceptions of the world and social relations. Matthew Reznicek—thank you for sitting for hours in coffee shops with my classmates and I discussing literature, philosophy, and anything else that allowed us excuses for being caffeinated and for helping us gain confidence as scholars. To the rest of the faculty and staff in the Creighton English Department, Creighton Hall, and Reinert-Alumni Memorial Library, I thank you all and will miss being with all of you. I want to also thank all of my classmates for making these past two years memorable, and I am glad for the friendships we made, the discussions we had, the car accidents which we survived, the dinners we ate, and so much more. AnnClaire, Jackie, and Maranda—thank you for entering this program with me and graduating together, even if it was only a virtual graduation. Lauren, Lorna, and Steven—thank you for our conversations and our sweet drinks at the Tiki Bar. Anas, Joanna, Mary, Natalie, and Robyn—thank you for listening, studying and chatting together over breakfasts and dinners, and for giving me much needed advice. This program was not only exceptional because of our staff and faculty but also because of y’all! I’m also deeply grateful to all of my friends and roommates, especially Zack Brown, Tim Cook, Phillip Etheridge, Matt Hendrix, Joe Iannazzone, Armin Mortazavi, Jordan Qualls, Rasim Shah, Shareif Shelton, Jeremy Sprinkle, Stanley Sparks and Mike Thornton for the goofiness and support throughout our friendships. My family has also been the best source of support that I could have asked for. Dad—thank you for pushing me further in the many career paths which I considered pursuing and providing me more love than I could have ever asked for. Megan—thank v you for providing me emotional support as my stepmom, hours of late night wine binges to discuss what kind of research I want to pursue, and insightful feedback on my essays. Papaw—thank you for showing me how to be humorous and wise and for giving me a love for campfires and gardening. Matthew, Brent, and Amber—thank you for always being a phone call away whenever I needed brotherly and sisterly advice on life. Finally, I want to give thanks to my partner Bishan Yang and my cat Callie for never seeming annoyed anytime I rambled on and on about my ideas. I could not have asked for more patient and supportive human and non-human animals to live with as I wrote this thesis. vi In memory of my mom and grandmommie vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction to AFFECTIVE INSURGENCIES: CIRCULAR NARRATIVES OF CONFLICT IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIAN NOVELS 1 CHAPTER ONE Nothing but the Truth: Metaphorical and Literal Discourses of Critical Theory 18 CHAPTER TWO Beyond Clinical Depression: Curing Body Politics in Mahasweta Devi’s Mother 1084 41 CHAPTER 3 Rethinking Terrorism: South Asian Diasporic Narratives of Violence in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows 67 Works Cited 93 1 INTRODUCTION Affective Insurgencies: Circular Narratives of Conflict in Contemporary South Asian Novels Studying languages, discourses, and narratives clearly entails much more than studying speeches and texts: whether a linguistic scholar, a rhetorical scholar, or a literary scholar, our tasks are more than just studying linguistic signs, types of speech, and literary genres. Or as reader-response theorist Wolfgang Iser claimed in his phenomenological theory of literature, The work is more than the text, for the text only takes on life when it is realized, and furthermore the realization is by no means independent of the individual disposition of the reader—though this in turn is acted upon by the different patterns of the text. The convergence of text and readers bring the literary work into existence. (1002) Iser considers texts “literally” unborn until reading occurs. Is the reader the doctor attending to the birth of a literary work out of a text, or was he thinking of the relationship in opposite terms? Either way, this places the focus of literary analyses on the process of reading. And how does reading occur? Peter Rabinowitz tells us that “to read” means often to do so “in a particular socially constituted way that is shared by the author and his or her expected readers” (1044). Not only is reading done within specific discursive and literary communities but also in relation to specific expectations of values and morals what might reading literature about violent social and transnational conflicts achieve? Referring to writers of realistic historical novels who seem to be limited to portraying “brute facts,” Rabinowitz 2 claims that they “shackle themselves to events that are independent of their imaginations” (1045). With this introduction, I hope to demonstrate my overall argument that ties these three chapters together. Rabinowitz’s prior seems like the perfect statement to do that. My thesis will explore how our everyday discourses and notions of truth and epistemic validity which we use in a variety of academic disciplines can be deconstructed within the textual space of contemporary literature on terrorism. In chapter one, I analyze nineteenth- and twentieth-century theoretical texts in which linguists, philosophers of language, and literary and rhetorical scholars discuss both the functions of language and literature and the relationship between metaphorical discourse and literal discourse. In the two following chapters, I shift my focus to contemporary novels on violent local and transnational conflicts and their devastating effects, focusing specifically on how the circular narrative structures often undermine literal discourses and popular cultural values which stigmatize Muslim, Arab, and South Asian insurgents and terrorists as monsters or subhuman. Analyzing Mahasweta Devi’s contemporary Bengali novel Mother of 1084, I will argue in chapter two that the middle-class protagonist’s thoughts and feelings may help us contemplate how violent conflicts can cause people to suffer from depression, providing us an opportunity to propose a biocultural model of depression from the perspective of an insurgent’s mother. I will
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