| This thesis seeks to investigate prevailing critical attitudes toward postcolonial feminism and postcolonial feminist texts. Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker, Toni Morrison's A Mercy, and Arundhati's Roy's The God of Small Things are the primary texts of concern here. Drawing on the theories of Anne McClintock, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, this project engages the work of Russian Formalism and New Criticism, and ultimately argues for a focus on form---albeit with an eye to the relationship of a particular form to political and social institutions. Furthermore, this thesis seeks to answer the question of whether a feminine form exists, and if so, to what extent gender affects literary form. Thus the latter part draws upon and challenges the scholarship of Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Annette Kolodny, Toril Moi, and Elaine Showalter. Finally, the project seeks to appropriate aesthetics for postcolonial feminism, and ultimately suggests that it is in the interstices of feminism, postcolonialism, and narratology that the ethical critic finds her beginning. |
