Bachelor of Arts

This Academic Exercise attempts to draw out a feminist poetics of oppression from the work of contemporary Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat, who writes about the suffering of the post-colonial society of Haiti under the rule of dictators and the forces of American imperialism. I apply the theory of Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, as well as that of Helene Cixous in terms of their discussion of feminist poetics, i.e. how to read women's writing in terms of identifying a feminist language, mythology and perspective. My study found that Danticat offers a new, humanistic look at oppression in politically unstable countries by, among other strategies, offering a feminist re-visioning of Haitian history, one that highlights the devastating effects of national political violence on women's bodies and their lives. I also identify her representation of trauma caused by political massacres and military coups as being of interest. Danticat uses the literary mode of Magic Realism to represent the 'otherness' of Haitian experience. As a woman writer, she also employs Magic Realism to construct a feminist perspective of national politics, allowing her thereby to escape from conventional patriarchal modes of thought. An essential part of Danticat's poetics of oppression is the ideal alternative female world that always haunts the text as a representation of liberation. She appropriates the figure of the Christian Virgin Mary, hybridising her with the Haitian native goddess, Erzulie, as a trope to signal a post-colonial female spirituality that has emerged in response to male patriarchal and imperialistic violence. My work tries to grasp the dynamics through which Danticat manages to turn readers' gaze from Haiti back onto themselves, their lives, their nations, and to disturb their understanding of what is 'normal'.

The quest for ontological meaning has been a mainstay of literature throughout history but never as prominent and urgent as in the modem age. The modern world has engendered disassociation and we feel estranged from a world that is alien to us, which precipitates the compromising of quest because the world, the arena in which quest is carried out, is now indifferent and strange. As a result, ontological uncertainty plagues us and leads us to question the validity of our lives. It is this questioning that is of utmost concern and we see how quest must now encompass inquest-a condition that reflects the inability of hitherto accepted values and meanings to sustain us. The ontological concerns of the 'making of self are pertinent because we create ourselves by narrating our existence. This narration is a dialectic between self and the world and strives to articulate a being and existence that is 'real' to us, thereby providing meaning. The American experience, with its emphasis on the making of the individual is a microcosm of the narrations of self that take place on a larger scale. As such, it is also in American texts that we can observe the phenomenon of quest and inquest unfolding. But the surfacing of inquest does not mean that quest is now dead. Inquest is part of the quest to discover and expose meaning that can potentially be more valid and real to the person-a necessity if we are to continue living and becoming.

This thesis is not concerned with an emotional response to the controversy that is war. The primary novels examined-Kurt Vonnegurt's Slaughterhouse Five, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato-are all critically acclaimed works on war. They must all be read, however, in the larger context of the unavoidable absurdity of life, that which defies any logical imposition. It is widely acknowledged that World War I catalyzed, in the West, a shift in sentiment about war. This in turn coloured the perspectives on other facets of life. Having come out from the war, a youthful generation of artists went on to express in their art what most of their cohort in the West also shared-a cynicism and rejection of values that had allowed the war to occur at all. Ths thesis explores some common strategies in post-WWII novels that were written in a climate that increasingly treated war and its corollary as fixtures of human society. I shall examine the three primary texts in terms of how they compare with some prominent Lost Generation texts. By so doing, I pose the question, "Are we still a lost generation?"