A case for minor literature in selected works by V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Romesh Gunesekera

This thesis will use Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's discussion of minor literature (1986) to explore several discursive modes that produce "minor" texts that subsequently acquire "major" status (1986: 19). Selected works by V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Ramesh Gunesekera will be evaluated in relation to the "minor" category advanced by Deleuze and Guattari. Within this category, novels participate in a radical destabilization of linguistic hegemonies, reveal their affinity with multiple literary traditions, engage in intertextual practices that subvert the authority of the literary canon and thoroughly question the purity of myths and origins. The thesis analyses how a "minor" text affects Homi Bhabha' s theory of a discursive, "third space" (1988), in which the advancement of a forceful interstitial position enables the negotiation of hybridity and cultural difference by blurring the division between cultural hierarchies. I shall use Bhabha' s "third space" as well as several theoretical premises about what is variously called ~mongrel", "minor", "ethnic minority" and "postcolonial" literature to analyse a powerful corpus of literary works that interrogate hegemonic, canonical practices. Minor literature has also been defined as a literature of "nomads, immigrants and minorities", ideas appropriate to the primary authors that will be discussed in this thesis. The three primary authors have all migrated from their original homelands to Western metropolitan centers; thus they share the complex double bind of occupying geographical spaces that crucially inform the content of their work. The currency of their work, particularly within the literary establishment and the publishing industry, testifies to the growing significance of literatures that mediate disparate literary and cultural traditions. Minor literature demonstrates a complex commerce between colonial and postcolonial literary legacies through which hybrid novels emerge as a dominant, contemporary manifestation of the "minor" category.