Tagore's The Home And The World

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Tagore’s popular and (to date) globally celebrated novel The Home and the World is frequently read as a denunciation of coercive languages of nationalism, which develop as an indigenous modality/ideology of violence in the context of the anti-colonial struggle and decolonization. Do you agree that this novel is an “allegory” of post-colonial violence and a discovery of an independent “self” that transcends such violence? To answer, consider how the novel accords with, or otherwise subverts, Fredric Jameson’s notion of Third World Allegory. That is, how does the novel help you advance or critique Jameson’s thesis – does it testify to the power of Jameson’s ostensibly generalizing or stereotyping claim in Third World Allegory in the Era of Multinational Capitalism, or does it subvert/ contradict its thesis? In Third World Allegory, Jameson makes the all-encompassing, almost over-simplistic claim that all texts originating from the countries he specifies as Third World are 'necessarily allegorical'(Jameson) and 'that the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society'(Jameson). In this paper, we will examine how far Tagore's The Home and the World may attest to or detract from his claim, and how far the novel in and of itself may be seen as an “allegory” of post-colonial violence. Toward that end, we will also examine the possible implications of Tagore's supposed allegory and what they might tell us about the author's view of nationalism. First of all, we must question our notion of what constitutes the allegory in the consideration of whether we should assume The Home and the World to be a 'third-world allegory' as specified by Jameson. Allegories in the literary context may be simply defined as stories that attempt, through the use of their characters and events, to

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