Otherworldliness: Uncanny Literary Devices in the Liminal Spaces Created by Transnational Authors
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Date
2021-04-20
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Authors
Lemus, Wendy
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Publisher
East Carolina University
Abstract
This thesis will argue that contemporary transnational authors, by virtue of their often complex, multicultural identities, have a unique ability to create "otherworldly" stories of global significance through their use of literary devices I will describe as uncanny. I define otherworldly as used in this thesis along common definitional guidelines: a place both familiar but at the same time unrecognizable - a reframing of the world the reader knows. In effect, these other worlds resemble ours, but they are not ours whether by a paradigm shift or because the windows into these worlds are different from our own. The otherworldliness in the stories of Mohsin Hamid, Kazuo Ishiguro, Elif Shafak, and Akwaeke Emezi moves beyond the fantastical, so often depicted in the magical realism of transnational literature, to plausible places that have a basis in social, political, scientific, or even spiritual reality. Collectively, these worlds are dreamt up through perceptions influenced by the authors' transnationality, with deep intuition and a foreboding sense of what the world really looks like if readers take time to look through the author's lens.