“Naipaulexity”: critical convention, “Theory Renaissance” and V. S. Naipaul

Abstract

AbstractThe works of the Nobel laureate Sir Vidiadhar Surajparasad Naipaul, generally known as V. S. Naipaul, have been more criticized than critiqued. This tends to put his creative aspiration in oblivion and initiate a discourse that is quite personal, subjective, and degenerative in nature. This paper using the idea of “Naipaulexity’ and “Theory Renaissance” as elaborated below and adopting a deconstructive model of analysis of four of his fictions as examples, contends that a prolific writer like Naipaul has suffered the offense of a judgmental, critical fallacy, in its conventional readership and therefore it needs a serious scrutiny. It aims to arrive at this contention through the analysis of four of his fictions, demonstrating how there evolves a counter-discourse from his texts that virtually underscores the myopic conventional criticism. Naipaulian texts are dense and thick, and accordingly demand a similar approach to their understanding.

Keywords

• Theory
• renaissance
• theory renaissance
• studies
• complexity
• discourse