Negotiating With History:on Naipaul’s Half A Life And Magic Seeds

Half a Life and Magic Seeds are V. S. Naipaul’s most important works in recent years and the latest novels as well. This thesis is going to analyze these two texts from perspective of New Historicism and to explore the relationship among writer, text and social and historical background through the studying of the relationship between historical context and literary text.Stephen Greenblatt, a famous new historicist, applies the terms like "social energy,""negotiation,""circulation," and "exchange" to express the movement of social energy in the relation between text and history. As literary work occupies a significant position in circulation of social energy, writer receives influences from other forms of social energy inevitably. Meanwhile, writer also exerts personal impact, say personal characteristics and concepts, on literary creation to negotiate dynamically with historical context and, thus, influence historical progress. In all, literary works are the products of negotiation between writer and historical context, and writer plays multiple roles in this process:submissive to historical context, dynamic in negotiation and constructive in historical progress.This thesis analyzes the historical influence on text and textual influence on history. Through close reading, this thesis points out that Half a Life and Magic Seeds, set on the background of global colonization and decolonization in20th century, reflect some specific social problems and historical events. Meanwhile, the intertextuality with other classic texts demonstrates Naipaul’s submissive role in negotiation.Besides, Naipaul, a dynamic negotiator, exhibits distinctive personal characteristics. He puts forward with personal opinions on some important historical problems, such as historical narration, racism and sexual relationship, to negotiate with historical context.According to the relationship between text and history, literary texts play constructive roles in historical progress. Through the analysis of problems in the process of colonization and decolonization, this thesis reveals the literary influences and historical power of these two novels. From literary aspect, these two novels, embodying Naipaul’s distinctive literary creation style, provide a model for the contemporary ethnic literature in both creation technique and notion. Besides, these two texts, like a tocsin, awake reader to reconsider the relationship among countries and between country and people, the problems of the backward situation and true independence in Third World in facing with challenges and opportunities in contemporary world.