| In this dissertation I suggest that the modernist novel and Bakhtin's novel of the second stylistic line are equally borne out of the crises and aporias of the onset of capitalist modernization, that Bakhtin's privileged genre is, in fact, modernist. I argue that in the latter twentieth century the usefulness (and necessity) of the novel genre follows the erratic patterns of capitalist modernization and, therefore, that the modernist novel's ambivalent double-voiced response to and articulation of the necessarily unstable state of modernization emerges in the literatures of the so-called Third World. Rather than read this emergence in terms of modernization or developmental theory, however, I deploy Immanuel Wallerstein's notion of capitalism as an economic world system to contextualize and, in some regards, temper the theories of modernity advanced by thinkers including Perry Anderson, Fredric Jameson, S. N. Eisenstadt, Andrew Feenberg, and others. My central focus here is upon the literatures of former European colonies, including works from Ireland, India, Trinidad, and South Africa. Beginning with James Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses, I suggest that Joyce's ambivalent aesthetic response to modernization in an epoch of Irish decolonization and reactionary nationalism becomes the paradigm for subsequent postcolonial modernist texts. Thus, with G. V. Desani's All About H. Hatterr (1948), we have the appearance of what Gary Saul Morson designates the crucial genre-formative second work, a critical reauthoring that crystallizes the basic shape this new genre will take in its current manifestation. While maintaining this uneasy correlation with its predecessors, however, the postcolonial modernist novel never simply rehearses the structure and content of its founding texts. Rather, each manifestation of the genre concerns itself with the social, ethical, and epistemological exigencies of its own unique present. Therefore, Robert Antoni's Divina Trace can critically explore ethnic diversity in a modernizing Trinidad, while Bessie Head contemplates the conundrums of ethics, race, gender, and exile in A Question of Power. In this way, the novels selected here concern themselves with a series of issues both specific to their various unique global/historical contexts and, simultaneously, shared within the broader context of capitalist modernization following decolonization. |
