(I)
Tentative Topic
“Interiority, Alienation and Migration in the Works of Women Writers”
(II)
Research problem
One of the contributions of recent feminist literary scholarship has been to question the absence of female authorial representation from the widely acknowledged canon of disporic literature. This canon has been established and upheld by substantial and well known critical studies Meena Alexander’s The House of thousand Doors, Bharti Mukherjee’s Jasmine and Kamala Markandeya’s The Nowhere Man etc.
The implication is that the ‘classic’ writers of the diasporic literature not only male but women too whose contributions has largely been ignored or dismissed
In this thesis, I will analyze selected works of three major writers of the 21st century-Kiran Desai, Monica Ali and third women writer will be from Sikh community that will be explored during the course- which thematize and are set against the background of diasporic literature; Desai’s novels The Inheritance of Loss and Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard; Ali’s novels Brick Lane, Alentejo’s Blue and the Painters of Signs.
The chief questions I will investigate are; why have female writers been excluded from the canon of diaspora? How did the migration enable her to articulate the problem of being female, of being a female artist? How did they contribute to explore nostalgic feelings of migrants? How the female artist’s feeling different from the male artist? How do the selected works illuminate her work as a whole? Is there a feminine response to migration and exclusion?
Why male authored diasporic texts are marked by states of alienation despair fragmented and disjointed- in other words lamentation of the obsolescence of individual male agency, I hypothesize that the female authored text in this study are marked by a sense of female power. This is evidenced by the appropriation of a masculinist tradition and by the emergence of some common themes- the effect of migration on the community, the...