Dharmic-ethics: The ethical sociality of the self in postmodernism and post-colonialism (South Africa, India, Mahasweta Devi, J. M. Coetzee).

摘要

My dissertation, entitled Dharmic-ethics: the Ethical Sociality of the Self in Postmodernism and Post-colonialism, dynamizes the concepts from the Indian philosophical tradition to engage a discussion of ethical action in twentieth-century literatures. I use the Bhagvada Gita as my primary Hindu text to start investigating the determination of ethical action and motivation in a universe in which death does not exist. This ontological conception is fundamental to Indian darshana, and has its all-important corollary in the fact that Indian ethics is not premised on the Other. This provides a striking contrast with Western post-structuralist philosophies which essentialize the experience of the Other as well as the singularity conferred by the experience of death. I attempt to synthesize a comprehensive ethics for the purpose of literary criticism. Having set-up some of my philosophical and theoretical concerns in the first-two chapters, I analyze four contemporary texts for their ethical contours: Draupadi, a short story by Mahasweta Devi, Waiting for the Barbarians, by J. M. Coetzee, The Moor's Last Sigh, by Salman Rushdie, and Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon.; In Draupadi, my analysis attempts to explain the culminating moment of the story, in which there is a breakdown of signification as a naked, raped and bleeding Draupadi confronts the police chief, who for the first time in his life feels an unnamable fear. I suggest that Draupadi's actions represent a state of trigunatita. Similarly, the magistrate in J. M. Coetzee's novel finally rises to the challenge of finding an ethical vindication for his life in the face of the recent and barbaric onslaught by the Third Bureau of the Empire, of which he, too, is an official. His actions can be understood as those of self-sacrifice in the Gandhian philosophy. Rushdie's latest novel allows me to crystallize the secret of his creative genius, one that is caught between two competing ontologies, the Western and the Indian. Finally, I explore the dimensions of Pynchon's Zone in Gravity's Rainbow from a dharmic-ethical perspective, arguing that events conform to the ethical expectations of an Indian universe.