The evolution of the writing artist : from a portrait of the artist as A Young Man to Midnight’s Children and in the Light of What We Know

Abstract

The dissertation seeks to examine the artist as a sentient entity whose evolution might be traced through structural argumentations that set a work of literary work apart. It is also about the transition from the modern to the postmodern stylistics of writing. The changes mark a growing sense of disillusionment in tandem with a decentered state of being. Hence the central idea is to understand the structural acquiescence and departure in somewhat confessional and semi-autobiographical novels which encapsulate the awareness of selfhood. An attempt to decipher signification in A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man to Midnight’s Children and In the Light of What We Know are important considerations for the dissertation. To this end, the dissertation makes use of the theoretical frameworks provided by René Descartes, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes and Homi Bhabha. Finally, the dissertation seeks to reflect upon the substantiation of identity in relation to writing from the margins and evidences that might be found in the primary texts.