Yale University

Graduate Student, Comparative Literature

Thesis Title: Close to Home: Forms of Isolation in the Postcolonial Province

About

How might we arrive at a comparative model for world fiction that attends to the formative stakes of local context? My dissertation charts the afterlives of nineteenth-century Russian literature in late- and post-apartheid South Africa to forge far-reaching connections that resist the denaturalizing logic of a global paradigm. It begins with South African writers’ invocations of Russian realist prose and works toward deeper formal and epistemological affinities between archetypal moments in these traditions. The literary-historical intensity of Russia’s “Golden Age” in the nineteenth century stems from the convergence of narrative innovation and philosophical speculation—roughly, form and content—amidst an unusual degree of social unrest. This yields a productive tension between historical contingency and “timeless” expression that, when transposed to the “timely” South African context, is manifest as a retreat to the realm of immediate encounter. By reading South African texts with the canonical Russian works whose universalism they strive toward, this dissertation posits a disjuncture between meaning’s generation through confinement and its globalization. Ultimately, it gets beyond the local as a place on a map to see it as a property of narrativity.