SURVEILLANCE, SPECTATORSHIP AND SPACE IN THE 20TH CENTURY NOVEL

FELISE ANDERSON

My dissertation examines acts of seeing and looking in the late colonial and newly postcolonial societies of twentieth-century South Asia and Ireland. It argues that such acts are instrumental for maintaining, resisting, and destabilizing the dynamics of power existing between representatives of British imperial power and colonized populations. Fictional representations of these dynamics of power and the contested spaces wherein these power dynamics are at play abound within the twentieth-century novel. By presenting readers with the complete, albeit distanced, gazes of third-person omniscient narrators or the more immediate and personal gazes of first-person narrators, the form of the novel encourages readers to perform the role of spectator. This project focuses upon two specific acts of looking--acts of surveillance and acts of spectatorship--as they are fictionalized in selected Irish and South Asian novels. My hypothesis is that the necessity for engaging in surveillance and spectatorship is heightened in the contested spaces of late colonial and newly postcolonial societies because resistance and challenges to the established order--either that of the imperial ruler or that of the post-imperial political regime--is also heightened. The form of the novel is especially useful for an analysis of how acts of surveillance and spectatorship impact existing dynamics of power because narrative mirrors the practice of surveillance by encouraging readers to engage in acts of seeing and looking. Ultimately, what is at stake is determining the ways in which acts of seeing and looking along with the form of the novel identify methods by which individuals or groups of individuals in fictionalized colonial and postcolonial societies mount resistance to the political, social, or cultural power with which surveilling entities are endowed and in so doing resist and dismantle oppressive political and social institutions and regimes. The primary texts that are discussed in this project are The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen, A Passage to India by E. M. Forster, A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle, Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane, and Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa.

SURVEILLANCE, SPECTATORSHIP AND SPACE IN THE 20TH CENTURY NOVEL

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