Mak, Wing Haang (2018) Kinaesthetic bodies in contemporary literature. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

This thesis examines contemporary literary texts in English from the Caribbean, South Korea, Nigeria, Japan, the U.S., the U.K., and India, and their representations of the embodied resistance practices of people who are marginalised under contemporary globalisation. It also draws upon a play, a film, and an art installation to support these readings. The thesis goes about this through four chapters, considering in sequence how, in these texts, these people enact their own agency and resistance through their bodies in the globalised contexts of new sexual politics, mediatised war, technology, and neo-colonial development. It is attentive to how in each of these contexts and texts, the lived experiences of marginalised peoples are suppressed in various ways: by silencing, making invisible, technologically instrumentalising, and energetically exploiting their bodies.

The thesis reads these literary texts as registering bodies that are actively resisting their marginalisation. These texts represent these resistance practices through bodily kinaesthesia, which refers to a body which is sentient and which moves and engages with the world through a form of corporeal consciousness—the lived body. The thesis uses a methodology that takes the lived body as its starting point, which means that the literary text is analysed as a kind of testimony—taking the form of performance and event—that bears witness to marginalisation. Ultimately, by attending to literary representations of bodily kinaesthesia, we can understand how marginalised subjects account for their own particular lived experiences of a globalising world and begin to effect change in embodied ways.

Item Type:	Thesis or Dissertation (PhD)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman J Political Science > JZ International relations P Language and Literature > PK Indo-Iranian P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) P Language and Literature > PR English literature P Language and Literature > PS American literature
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Muscular sense, Globalization, Colonization, Third-wave feminism, British literature -- Criticism and interpretation, Indic literature (English) -- Criticism and interpretation, Japan -- Literatures -- Criticism and interpretation, Korea (South) -- Literatures -- Criticism and interpretation, Caribbean literature -- Criticism and interpretation, Nigerian literature -- Criticism and interpretation, United States -- Literature -- Criticism and interpretation
Official Date:	October 2018
Dates:	Date Event October 2018 Published
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Varma, Rashmi ; Docherty, Thomas
Format of File:	pdf
Extent:	vii, 278 leaves
Language:	eng

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