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Item A Paracolonial Comparative Exegesis of Post 911 Pakistani and Indian Anglophone Diaspora Fiction(UMT, Lahore, 2021) Ayesha PerveenThis thesis compares post 9/11 Pakistani and Indian diaspora Anglophone fiction by excavating the fictional response to ever-changing international political scenario and its impact on both the countries after 9/11. Pakistan and India, who are neighbours with a troubled history, have been evolving as nation-states in different directions since independence, which also paved way for different literary trajectories for their literature written in English. Whereas early post-partition writings are replete with the fictional representation of the 1947 partition and assertion of unique national identities confronting British legacy; post 9/11 fiction explores issues like the impact of war on terror on identity and ethnicity, individuality and hybridity, religion and culture, challenges faced by the contemporary diaspora, and the problematization of a sense of belonging in a transnational globalized world. This thesis aims to compare the identity formation of the characters as presented in Indian and Pakistani post 9/11 diaspora Anglophone fiction by employing James Marcia’s theory of identity development. The impact of post 9/11 terror on Indian and Pakistani diaspora in a globalized and transnational world is discussed by highlighting their evolution from directionless ambivalent subjectivities to decisive individuals.Item Deconstruction of American Dream in Edward Albee’s The American Dream(UMT, Lahore, 2021) Faiza ZaheerThis dissertation is an attempt to apply Jacques Derrida’s Theory of Deconstruction to the American Dream and its linguistic treatment by Edward Albee in his play The American Dream (1961). Different deconstructive terms such as Différance, Erasure and Aporia have been applied to understand and analyze the language of Albee’s The American Dream. While applying these terms to the philosophical tropes of the American Dream, the selected play has been discursively analyzed within the context of both old American Dream, as envisaged by its founding fathers, and the new American Dream as defined by James Truslow Adams (1931). These deconstructive terms will help the readers to understand the themes and discourse of modern and postmodern American drama in general and those of Albee’s in particular. This in turn makes the reader realize that American dream as depicted and projected in Albee’s play is based on materialism, illogicality, futility and absurdity.Item Colonial Encounters Revisited(UMT, Lahore, 2021) Hafiz Muhammad Zahid IqbalThis is a study of colonial encounters as articulated in the novels Bengal Nights: A Novel and It Does Not Die: A Romance written by Mircea Eliade and Maitreyi Devi respectively. By revisiting these texts through Nirmala Menon’s critical insights on Bhabha’s hybridity discourse and Elisabeth Jackson’s conceptual parameters of Indian feminism, the aim is to reinterpret the novels as emancipatory praxis that both the writers long for in their (post)colonial narratives. Besides, this rereading of the novels is garnered from Bhabha and Spivak’s respective postcolonial theories, to contribute to the existing scholarship on postcolonial studies.