Narrating a Nation into Being: On Michael Ondaatje's Deviant Narrative Strategy in Running in the Family
學年 113
學期 2
出版（發表）日期 2025-06-15
作品名稱 Narrating a Nation into Being: On Michael Ondaatje's Deviant Narrative Strategy in Running in the Family
作品名稱（其他語言） 敘述一個國家的存在：論麥可．翁達傑在《世代相傳》中的特異敘事策略
著者 Kai-su Wu
單位
出版者
著錄名稱、卷期、頁數 The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture 18(2) ,p.119-153
摘要 Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family (1982) is often regarded as a fictionalized memoir or auto/biographical fiction that transcends generic conventions. The narrative voice in the book engages the reader by weaving together diverse stories related to Ondaatje’s family history in Ceylon/Sri Lanka. The book records the life (“bios”) of his people as much as it is invested in his gesture of fragmentary writing (“graphy”). As argued in the article, this latter effort by Ondaatje, embodied in his employment of episodic and sometimes incomplete narrative to reproduce the transient and meandering nature of recollection on both parts of himself and the others, questions the imperative of foregrounding manifest historical accounts in an immigrant writer’s text, such as the British divide-and-rule policy in colonial Ceylon and the 1971 insurrection in postcolonial Sri Lanka. Ondaatje calls for a collective self-storytelling that coordinates the seemingly bifurcated personal and political aspects in a way that the convergence of scandals, gossips, familial archives, and oneiric accounts enacts a dialogic performance. Ondaatje is both conscious of the unreachability of the truth from the outset and is conscientious about presenting the book as expressive of the Burgher people’s communal achievement, which counterbalances the nationalist narrative of history dominated by the Sinhalese and the Tamil. Drawing on Homi Bhabha’s discussion of nation and narration, this article suggests reading the memoir as inscribing an aesthetic creation of the narrative process on the histories of the multi-ethnic people in the writer’s imaginary homeland.
關鍵字 Running in the Family;the Burgher people;Homi Bhabha;nation-building;narrative;poetics/politics debate
語言 en
ISSN
期刊性質 國內
收錄於 THCI Core
產學合作
通訊作者
審稿制度 否
國別 TWN
公開徵稿
出版型式 ,電子版,紙本
相關連結

機構典藏連結 ( http://tkuir.lib.tku.edu.tw:8080/dspace/handle/987654321/128243 )