Intersectional literary analysis: reading between, behind, and beyond the lines

Abstract

This thesis undertakes the creation of a literary paradigm for intersectional analysis, rethinking identity and social theory in literature and developing a framework for productive analysis. It develops the notion of literary intersectionality that considers the ‘in-betweens’ of literary texts. This thesis lays out a framework for intersectional analysis that highlights three major elements for examination in literary texts: close reading, power dynamics, and knowledge production and dissemination. It considers how various manners of storytelling by intersectional authors and communities present spaces ripe with productive potential for social transformation. Engaging in the analysis of contemporary texts by intersectional authors that intersect genres, such as Black American life writing, postcolonial science fiction and Native American ecofiction, this thesis considers how Western methods of analysis, that have historically perpetuated the dehumanisation and socially mandated inferiority of non- white, western, heterosexual, middle-class individuals, can be deconstructed and destabilised to make way for apparatuses of critical thought based in non-Western epistemologies. It seeks to understand the various authors’ use of narrative strategies and adopts the perspective of critical theories as historical contexts and documents that influence the writing of texts that reveal intersectional experiences leading to better understandings of dynamics of power around the world and cultivating a new conception of being and the individual. Finally, this thesis considers the present as historical context to question how, for example, the global pandemic, recent racial violence, challenges to female autonomy, territorial insecurity, and the personal context of the researcher may affect the produced analysis.