The Working Group on Novel
Speaker(s): Radhika Koul (PhD candidate, DLCL)
Radhika Koul (PhD candidate, DLCL) will present a chapter from her article draft titled “Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and Milton: A Study of Miltonic Chiaroscuro in a Postcolonial Novel.” Roanne Kantor, Assistant Professor of English, will serve as Radhika’s respondent. Radhika’s article is attached.
Here is what Radhika has to say about her work:
Recent studies on Aravind Adiga’s debut novel, The White Tiger, have emphasized the double-edged nature of the narrator’s rhetoric and consequently of the novel as a whole. The narrator’s subaltern voice lays bare the dirty realities of class, money, and power in postcolonial India even as the narrator himself becomes part of the same old narrative by the end of the novel. On the other hand, his is a re-Orientalizing voice: critics have accused the narrator of Adiga’s novel of Eurocentrism and “inauthenticity.” Few, however, read the novel as participating in a definitively European discourse. This paper reveals how Adiga’s postcolonial novel incorporates in great detail some of the prototypical moves of Western epic, especially Milton’s Paradise Lost, the defining epic of the English (and colonizing) tradition. Adiga weaves in the prosaic symbols of light and darkness in the texture of his novel to create an effect of chiaroscuro that is unmistakably Miltonic. One therefore finds in the novel a deliberately and self consciously re-Orientalizing narrative, if only to subvert even more profoundly the Eurocentrism of both the epic and the novel forms.
IN SUMMARY:
WHO: Radhika Koul and Roanne Kantor
WHAT: “Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and Milton: A Study of Miltonic Chiaroscuro in a Postcolonial Novel”
WHEN: 6:00-8:00pm
WHERE: Pigott 216