| |
| author |
Nicole Sydor
| | title |
Exporting and Reconstructing Imagined Communities: Global Literature, Translation, and Kazuo Ishiguro : A Thesis in English Literature and French
| | abstract |
Kazuo Ishiguro, Nobel Prize winning novelist, is considered to be a global author who
introduces his audience to characters who exist within nations struggling to reconstruct their
national identities after periods of crisis. His works are widely translated and have become a part
of an international literary discourse, making these novels accessible to a wider audience.
However, the global success of Ishiguro’s novels which focus on highly specific and stereotyped
cultures raises questions about how his writing makes imagining the nations about which he
writes more exportable. In his novels A Pale View of Hills and The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro
presents his readers with the nations of Japan and England respectively through the eyes of his
narrators Etsuko and Stevens, who have deeply flawed and deliberately constructed
representations of the nations they inhabit, or think they inhabit. Despite the fact that Ishiguro is
presenting incredibly nuanced nations with deep histories and traditions to the world, he manages
to create nations that are easily accessible and exportable to an international audience. Analyzing
his novels A Pale View of Hills and The Remains of the Day, and their translated French
counterparts Lumière pâle sur les collines and Les Vestiges du jour respectively, reveals that
Ishiguro uses stereotypes and mythic constructions of the nation via language, text, and imagined
landscapes to make the notion of the nation migratory for his readership via translation. In this
thesis, the construction of the French texts, in conjunction with discourse regarding translation
and histories of linguistic colonialism, is analyzed to evaluate how Ishiguro’s constructions of
Japan and England in English migrate into another language deeply connected to a history of
colonialism and imperialism: French. This thesis aims to understand how Ishiguro deconstructs
national stereotypes and myths to render the nations he focuses on exportable for his readers, so
they may in turn then reconstruct the nation he portrays to them.
| | school |
The College of Liberal Arts, Drew University
| | degree |
B.A. (2024)
|
| advisor |
Marie-Pascale Pieretti
Jacob Soule
|
| full text | NSydor.pdf |
| |
