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Popular Images and Cosmopolitan Mediation: Mass Media and Western Pop Culture in the Anglophone South Asian Novel

Sirkin, Elizabeth Taryn
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1175776213

Abstract Details

2007, Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, English.
In this dissertation, I examine how R. K. Narayan, Bharati Mukherjee, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi and Arundhati Roy situate contemporary Euro-American popular culture within their novels to focus a spotlight on the neo-colonial strategies that still operate within the landscapes of Western media—print-based, televisiual, and celluloid. I also examine how these authors engage contemporary Western media from the perspective of Anglophone South Asian communities. What is distinctive about the novels that I discuss in this project is that they treat this cultural exchange in a critically cosmopolitan mode, one that balances the tension between celebrating its newness and warning about its potential resemblance to older forms of imperialism. That the postcolonial novels addressed in these pages engage with mass-mediated Western texts and images from a hybrid, cosmopolitan perspective is of great significance, because such a phenomenon works against what Rudyard Kipling, that towering figure of imperialist literature, famously wrote: “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet” (6). In contrast to Kipling’s lyric, the novels I examine in this dissertation do not suggest a simple convergence of East and West through a kind of mass-mediated confluence of images. Rather, the authors researched and discussed within these pages—as a result of history, travel, and education—dissolve the boundaries between East and West. All of the texts discussed in this project are hybrid and intertextual. Their characters stand between two world and the texts themselves resonate with allusions to Western texts that have recognizable and sometimes rival meanings in the East and in the West. Each novelist refuses to represent the world in definitive terms, in which “East is East,” for example. The Anglophone novel in India, is, I argue, one significant agent of revision of received wisdom about South Asia’s relation to dominant English-language media from Britain and the U.S. In the course of their novelistic “revisions,” Narayan, Mukherjee, Rushdie, Roy, and Kureishi, each represent the world as impure and interrupted, at times complicated with uncertainty and tyranny, and at other times triumphantly full of hope and possibility.
Kurt Koenigsberger (Advisor)
199 p.
Literature, English
the Anglophone South Asian Novel; mass media; Western popular culture; Postcolonial; cosmopolitanism; Inidan novels in English

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Sirkin, E. T. (2007). Popular Images and Cosmopolitan Mediation: Mass Media and Western Pop Culture in the Anglophone South Asian Novel [Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1175776213

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Sirkin, Elizabeth. Popular Images and Cosmopolitan Mediation: Mass Media and Western Pop Culture in the Anglophone South Asian Novel. 2007. Case Western Reserve University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1175776213.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Sirkin, Elizabeth. "Popular Images and Cosmopolitan Mediation: Mass Media and Western Pop Culture in the Anglophone South Asian Novel." Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 2007. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1175776213

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

case1175776213
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This open access ETD is published by Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies and OhioLINK.