It’s not clear if it’s a man or a woman, and there is something with that directness and the strong colours and lines, all of it suggesting the figure and the landscape fusing into a very strong symbol. “Anyone could see themselves in that character,” said the museum’s curator Trine Otte Bak Nielsen.” Since Munch’s death in 1944 the image had replicated countless time in pop culture, on T-shirts, an as inflatable and latterly as an emoji. AAI9988761.A new museum dedicated to the art of Norwegian modernist painter Edvard Munch opens in Oslo. Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. Literature|African literature|Comparative literature|Asian literature Recommended CitationĪguiar, Marian Ida, "Tracking modernity: Writing the rails of empire" (2000). I present Hikmet's view of modernity as an ambivalent one, representing the altered modes of perception brought by modern technology at the same time underscoring, through his portrayal of the Turkish peasantry, the fact that modernity has not fulfilled its promise of emancipation. Chapter Five analyzes Turkish poet Nâzim Hikmet's epic poem Human Landscapes (1950), written during a period of intense national modernization. I argue that these Indian and Pakistani writers represent the railway as a contradictory space traversing a geography fragmented by communal allegiances. My fourth chapter brings the discussion to the context of South Asia and the literature of partition, including Khushwant Singh's novel Train to Pakistan (1956). Chapter Three focuses on Sembène Ousmane's God's Bits of Wood (1960), and demonstrates how the novel's conflict between generations during the colonial period reveals two relationships to modernity that coexist in the colonial setting. Looking specifically at spaces of the railway, I consider how modernity is realized through material and imaginative practices. Chapter Two introduces contemporary theories of space as a way to explore how modernity travels.
My discussion brings together those critics who theorize modernity primarily within the Western context and those who have opened a discussion of alternative modernities.
Chapter One provides an overview of theories of modernity. I argue that all these authors contribute to a genre that might be called postcolonial modernism, literature from the Third World that is both creating and responding to the advent of modernity. Using literary works by Senegalese writer Sembène Ousmane, Turkish poet Nâzim Hikmet, and selected South Asian writers, I consider the place of aesthetics and representation in this process. I examine what I see as a mutually constitutive process: the way subjectivity is constructed within modernity, and the way modernity, in turn, transforms as it travels to the “periphery.” My dissertation explores these transformations by looking at the way people inhabit, resist and remake the spaces in and around the railway. This dissertation explores the experience of modernity outside of Europe by considering the portrayal of the railway in selected literature of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Marian Ida Aguiar, University of Massachusetts Amherst Tracking modernity: Writing the rails of empire