Janus Bifrons: Postcolonial Criticism of Around the World in Eighty Days
Colonialism, dating back to the discovery of the American continent, appears as both economic and cultural domination. Cultural domination is realized by orien- talist discourse that legitimates the Occident’s activities of civilization in colonies. The orientalist point of view, enclosing the...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Cyprus International University
2020-05-01
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| Series: | Folklor/Edebiyat |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.folkloredebiyat.org/Makaleler/1619443592_8-Janus.pdf |
| Summary: | Colonialism, dating back to the discovery of the American continent, appears as
both economic and cultural domination. Cultural domination is realized by orien-
talist discourse that legitimates the Occident’s activities of civilization in colonies.
The orientalist point of view, enclosing the Orient in a time behind the moment
when the Occident live in a place far from himself, reaches the current era by repe-
ating itself for hundreds of years; and this knowledge produced about the Orient is
used as a fiction material in literary works. These literary works describe the Orient
as bizarre and mysterious. At this point, just as postmodernism is the critique of
modernism, the postcolonial approach involves the criticism of orientalism and
colonial order.
This study examined Jules Verne’s narrative of Around the World in Eighty Days in
the framework of postcolonial theory as a critical theory. In this novel, the subject-
object, power-other, master-slave and masculine-feminine dialectics are fictionali-
zed with an Orientalist point of view. When viewed from postcolonial theory, it can
be seen that the Orient is represented as an object of desire in which the Occident
can fulfill the subconsciously repressed feelings. No matter how far the East is, the
world is round and the voyager will return to his starting point, the Occident. The-
refore, the study emphasized that the Orient is the lower-self/Other of the Occident. |
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| ISSN: | 1300-7491 1300-7491 |