Abstract
Kincaid’s fiction focused on the Caribbean dislocation and displacement which relates to racism, colonialism, and trans-culturality with little or no consideration of the role of the autotelic self in contesting these cultural forces. This study examines the extent to which the Julia Kristeva’s principles of language and subject formation and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s principles of autotelic personality could intersect with this autotelic self. Using the postcolonial feminist literary theory and the Csikszentmihalyi’s principles of autotelic personality, it seeks to ascertain the degree to which Jamaica Kincaid’s selected fiction violate or adhere to Kristeva’s principles of language and subject formation and Csikszentmihalyi’s principles of autotelic personality. It applied the cultural and novel of the Julia Kristeva’s principles and the Csikszentmihalyi’s principles to Kincaid’s selected poetic novella. The study depicts that Kincaid in the selected novella violates the Kristeva’s principles as well both in the same cadre.
Highlights
What does it mean to be autotelic? Is autotelic an attribute of the individual, or do certain environmental factors facilitate or inhibit the enactment of the autotelic self? This study proposes that autotelic behavior is the idiosyncratic perception that one is behaving in a way that is in accordance with his or her core being
The expedition for autotelic self is a ubiquitous concern in the literature of the postcolonial feminism and culturally evicted people of the America precisely the Caribbean people
A postcolonial writer like Jamaica Kincaid is profusely obsessed with the plight of the evicted Caribbean people and this obsession is deeply inoculated into her works
Summary
What does it mean to be autotelic? Is autotelic an attribute of the individual, or do certain environmental factors facilitate or inhibit the enactment of the autotelic self? This study proposes that autotelic behavior is the idiosyncratic perception that one is behaving in a way that is in accordance with his or her core being. This study analyzes and describes the autotelic self involving the protagonist in Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River The protagonist in her fiction struggles to form a coherent sense of self while living within the inhibiting culture and colonial ideology that objectify them and deny them identities as subjectivity. Jamaica Kincaid’s re- negotiation with the politics of selfrelations in her novels conveys the concept of autotelic self-referential Caribbean fiction By attaining this literary image, her novels depict the strategic deployment of ‘autotelic self’ writing and redress the personality dimension in the notions of the autotelic self and history. The fact that Kincaid frames the field of self relations within the thematic recurrence of mother-daughter relations structures her novels in a way that conflates her personal stories with her group history Such a structure emphatically registers the self-positioning act of Kincaid’s writing as a strategy for self survival. This brings us to investigate the aesthetics of subjectivity in the self-positioning act of Kincaid’s writing as textual resistance
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
