Structures of negation

C. Kanaganayakam

Despite almost three decades of sustained literary activity and a body of work that includes eleven novels and five volumes of poetry, Zulfikar Ghose remains a relatively obscure writer. Partly responsible is the difficulty of placing Ghose in any one literary tradition as a result of his experimental approach to language and narrative. This much-needed analysis traces continuities in Ghose's work and illustrates the relation between his changing narrative forms and the experience of marginalization. Ghose who now lives and works in the United States, spent his first seventeen years in India and his next seventeen in England. Chelva Kanaganayakam argues that his quest for new narrative modes is characteristic of the 'native-alien' experience and the search for identity. In the first chapter the formal changes in Ghose's books of verse are used to set up a paradigm for the study as a...

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