In my dissertation I argue that the trope of translation helps us understand how diasporic and transnational writers dissolve the opposition between postcolonial localism, on the one hand, and globalism, on the other. Whether the novel form loses or gains in its circulation outside of national origins is a point of contention in postcolonial studies. The debate has largely been described along lines of translation and resistance to translatability—what kinds of knowledge travels legibly, and what is inscrutable outside of a novel’s particular context. Therefore, postcolonial critiques tend to be judged in terms of their sensitivity to historical/cultural particularity. In contrast, methodologies for reading world literature tend to focus on the mutability of literary forms that broach linguistic and cultural boundaries. I examine this problem of reading as a problem for translation— not in its functional, linguistic sense, but as a metaphorical, formal process. The project thus argues for translation as a series of forms within a single novel, shuttling cultural knowledge back and forth between the singular and the general, between locality and circulation. Thus understood, translation avoids the tautological function of assimilating the foreign (postcolonial) into the known (the West) and instead imagines an unfinished line of negotiation between points of contact. With its comparative approach to transnational novelists, my dissertation joins a growing body of studies of contemporary literature that address the need the move beyond the limited categories of national and global literatures. My response to this insufficiency in the criticism has two major implications. The first asserts a future for the postcolonial as a form and subject within the transnational novel; its form, as such, disturbs world literature’s claim to knowledge that transcends the nation. The second argues for translation as a series of forms, which offer a way of reading a novel in dialogue with itself— circulating singular cultural knowledge across a multiplicity of formal registers. To build this argument, I read novels by the South African writers J.M. Coetzee and Ivan Vladislavic, the Australian Peter Carey, the British Kazuo Ishiguro, and the Sri-Lankan-Canadian Michael Ondaatje.
Holmes, Christopher,
"Translation, the Hoax, and the Postcolonial Novel in a Global Age."
(2012).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0CF9NDM
