Illusory dialogue and the colonization of dissent in the anglophone novel
Abstract
This dissertation begins by exploring the current deployment of a certain regulatory form of social dialogue in public and political arenas in the United Kingdom that seeks to co-opt the emergence of disagreement while establishing the illusion that citizens can indeed voice their dissent. Instead of fostering critical dialogue, the contemporary neoliberal government has systematically put in place iterations of what I call illusory dialogue, open public forums that eliminate dissent and prevent citizens from intervening in State affairs, thus undermining their role as political agents. Numerous twentieth and twenty-first century British and Anglophone novels, I argue, explore and fruitfully challenge the imposition of illusory dialogue as a key apparatus for the colonization of individual agency. The dissertation, thus, traces literary responses to this phenomenon as it manifests in the modern, postmodern, and contemporary historical occasions in order to foreground the power of fiction to configure alternative forms of critical dialogue. ^
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Robert P. Marzec, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Literature, Modern|Literature, African|Literature, English
Off-Campus Purdue Users:
To access this dissertation, please log in to our
proxy server.