Hoydis, Julia
"Tackling the Morality of History"

Ethics and Storytelling in the Works of Amitav Ghosh.

Amitav Ghosh's narrative covering of a wide array of themes, times, and places as well as his interest in science, anthropology, historiography, and the travelling of people and ideas suggest an approach which highlights the concern with border-crossings and the excavation of 'other' histories. Encompassing all of Ghosh's fictions from the early experimental novels like "The Circle of Reason" and "The Calcutta Chromosome" to the later epics like "The Glass Palace" and "Sea of Poppies", this study offers a reading focusing on the intrinsic link between ethics and storytelling. Positioning itself in relation to the ethical turn within postcolonial and postmodern criticism, it employs K. A. Appiah's cosmopolitanism and Levinas' ethics of alterity in a framework revealing the syncretic (hi)stories which potentially undo the partition of peoples, nations, or faiths while seeking a neo-humanist, global outlook. 375 Seiten, gebunden (Anglistische Forschungen; Vol. 414/Universitätsverlag Winter 2011)