1.1 A Postcolonial Aesthetic?
This thesis seeks to contribute to the dialogue on the postcolonial aesthetic, by using concepts raised in Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text (1975) as a frame, through which to interrogate the ostensibly thorny issue of aesthetics in postcolonial writing. The idea behind this thesis stems from a reading of Elleke Boehmer’s essay “A Postcolonial Aesthetic” (2010), in which she questions the viability of approaching postcolonial fiction through its “aesthetic, or its literariness” (170), as opposed to reading such works via their thematic references to historical or socio-political events. According to Boehmer, the fundamental difficulty in theorising a postcolonial aesthetic lies in “the irrefutable fact [that] the postcolonial entails a definition drawn not from the work but from the world; that it first and foremost denotes history, not aesthetic form” (Boehmer 176). The ontology of postcolonial writing – itself as a response to socio-historical events – problematises an aesthetics-based appraisal of postcolonial literature, as neglecting to consider the socio-historical and political ontology of postcolonial writing would be to miss the fundamental …show more content…
Consequentially, the grounding of postcolonial writing’s ontology in history and socio-politics leads to postcolonial literature being primarily read as historical or socio-political artefact, and less (if even) as
This thesis seeks to contribute to the dialogue on the postcolonial aesthetic, by using concepts raised in Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text (1975) as a frame, through which to interrogate the ostensibly thorny issue of aesthetics in postcolonial writing. The idea behind this thesis stems from a reading of Elleke Boehmer’s essay “A Postcolonial Aesthetic” (2010), in which she questions the viability of approaching postcolonial fiction through its “aesthetic, or its literariness” (170), as opposed to reading such works via their thematic references to historical or socio-political events. According to Boehmer, the fundamental difficulty in theorising a postcolonial aesthetic lies in “the irrefutable fact [that] the postcolonial entails a definition drawn not from the work but from the world; that it first and foremost denotes history, not aesthetic form” (Boehmer 176). The ontology of postcolonial writing – itself as a response to socio-historical events – problematises an aesthetics-based appraisal of postcolonial literature, as neglecting to consider the socio-historical and political ontology of postcolonial writing would be to miss the fundamental …show more content…
Consequentially, the grounding of postcolonial writing’s ontology in history and socio-politics leads to postcolonial literature being primarily read as historical or socio-political artefact, and less (if even) as