Wilson Harris's Mythic Vision in The Guyana Quartet

• Název práce v češtině: Wilson Harris a jeho mýtická vize v The Guyana Quartet
• Název v anglickém jazyce: Wilson Harris's Mythic Vision in The Guyana Quartet
• Klíčová slova: Wilson Harris|The Guyana Quartet|postkolonialismus|karibská literatura|mýtus
• Klíčová slova anglicky: Wilson Harris|The Guyana Quartet|postcolonialism|Caribbean literature|myth
• Akademický rok vypsání: 2019/2020
• Typ práce: diplomová práce
• Jazyk práce: angličtina
• Ústav: Ústav anglofonních literatur a kultur (21-UALK)
• Vedoucí / školitel: PhDr. Soňa Nováková, CSc.
• Řešitel: skrytý - zadáno a potvrzeno stud. odd.
• Datum přihlášení: 18.02.2020
• Datum zadání: 19.02.2020
• Schválení administrátorem: zatím neschvalováno
• Datum potvrzení stud. oddělením: 21.02.2020
• Datum a čas obhajoby: 09.09.2021 00:00
• Datum odevzdání elektronické podoby: 15.08.2021
• Datum proběhlé obhajoby: 09.09.2021
• Odevzdaná/finalizovaná: odevzdaná studentem a finalizovaná
• Oponenti: Mgr. Petra Johana Poncarová, Ph.D.

Zásady pro vypracování

Postcolonial literature grapples with the tensions between coloniser and colonised, where the constant lack of stable identity has led to – be it unwitting, undesired or purposefully so – the focus on postcolonial writers as constructors of their respective nations’ identities. This has raised questions of historicity, myth, and the possibility of representation within literature. It is no longer sufficient to paint a postcolonial subject and claim its authenticity without engaging with the very forces that have removed the writer’s own access to non-colonial history.
As a former Dutch and English settler colony, Guyana’s history is marked by the colonising mission that attempted to reterritorialise its land for the profit of European settlers, leading to the introduction of non-native racial groups and fluctuating power relations between the oppressed indigenous population, the settlers seeking to build their own space on the foreign land, and the slaves trafficked onto the territory; the similarities between Guyana’s past and that of the Caribbean have led to their respective literatures being examined in closer relation to each other than in respect to Hispanic South America, and at the same time, Guyana’s interior had also provided space for the sustenance of the myth of El Dorado.
History and myth have created a Guyana based on loss and fragmentation, in similar instances producing texts proclaiming cultural nationalism or a retreating into indigeneity. Harris, however, seeks to use The Guyana Quartet in order to bring forth something entirely new in order to deal with the traumatic discordance of Guyana’s past. This thesis will focus on the possibility of Harris’s Quartet as an inventive myth that creates itself through the four novels.
My analysis will lean upon Deleuze and Derrida to establish the manner by which The Guyana Quartet transcends the limitations of representation and un-grounds itself from spatiotemporal fixity, refusing to depict Guyana in a closed and rigid manner. It will also explore the applicability of Harris’s notions of quantum fiction and active myth in relation to the quartet as a whole, taking into account the role of the reader and the level of engagement that Harris demands from them. Palace of the Peacock has been lauded extensively as a reinventive text, and this thesis seeks to widen the scope to the quartet, demonstrating that the mystical and oneiric qualities of the first novel are tampered by the subsequent ones; I will also situate Wilson Harris within contemporary postcolonial literature and the genre of magical realism, exploring the extent to which Harris’s imaginative vision can be shared by his readership and the role that it plays in deconstructing the relationship between the postcolonial world and its colonial history.

Seznam odborné literatury

Primary Literature
Harris, Wilson. The Guyana Quartet. London: Faber and Faber, 1985.

Secondary Literature
Durix, Jean–Pierre. "The Legacy of the Imagination: Reading Wilson Harris after Hena Maes–Jelinek". The Legacy of the Imagination: Reading Wilson Harris after Hena Maes–Jelinek. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill | Rodopi, 2017.https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004338081_012 Web.
Maes-Jelinek, Hena. The Labyrinth of Universality: Wilson Harris’s Visionary Art of Fiction. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill | Rodopi, 2006.
Maes-Jelinek, Hena and Ledent, Benedicte. Theatre of the Arts: Wilson Harris and the Caribbean. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill | Rodopi, 2002.
Gilkes, Michael. The Literate Imagination: Essays on the Novels of Wilson Harris. London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1989.
Chowdhury, Aniruddha. Postcolonial Irony: Time, Subject, and History in the Critical Writings of Wilson Harris. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2014.
Durix, Jean-Pierre. Mimesis, Genres and Post-Colonial Discourse. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998.

Islam, Syed Manzu. ‘Postcolonial Shamanism: Wilson Harris's Quantum Poetics and Ethics’. Journal of West Indian Literature 16, no. 1 (2007). pp. 59-82.www.jstor.org/stable/23019723.

Mackey, Nathaniel. ’Limbo, Dislocation, Phantom Limb: Wilson Harris and the Caribbean Occasion’.Criticism 22, no. 1 (1980). pp. 57-76.www.jstor.org/stable/23103186.

Ogbaa, Kalu, and Wilson Harris. ‘Exile, Philosophic Myth, Creative Truth, Thrust and Necessity: An Interview with Wilson Harris.’ Caribbean Quarterly 29, no. 2 (1983). pp 54-62.www.jstor.org/stable/40793445.

Olubas, Brigitta. “The Mind Of Fiction': Questions Of Theory And Reading In Wilson Harris's Essays". Journal of Caribbean Literatures 2, no. 1/2/3 (2000). pp. 187-197.www.jstor.org/stable/40986095.

Possi, Monica, and Wilson Harris. ‘A Conversation With Wilson Harris’. Journal of Caribbean Literatures 2, no. 1/2/3 (2000). pp. 260-270.www.jstor.org/stable/40986103.

Sharrad, Paul. ‘The Art of Memory and the Liberation of History: Wilson Harris's Witnessing of Time’. Callaloo 18, no. 1 (1995). pp 94-108.www.jstor.org/stable/3299230.

Ashcroft, Bill et al. The Empire Writes Back. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Harris, Wilson. Tradition: The Writer & Society. London: New Beacon Publications, 1967.

Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Laura Chrisman and Patrick Williams. Longman 1994, pp. 392-403.

Harris, Wilson. Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination. Edited by A.J.M. Bundy. Routledge, 1999.

James, Louis. "The Empathy of Genius: Hena Maes–Jelinek and Wilson Harris". The Empathy of Genius: Hena Maes–Jelinek and Wilson Harris. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill | Rodopi, 2017.https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004338081_010 Web.