Date of Award
2025
Document Type
M.A. Essay
First Advisor
David LaGuardia
Second Advisor
Edward Miller
Abstract
Much scholarship has discussed the prevalence of the first-person pronoun tôi (‘I’) in the New Poetry movement in 1930s Vietnam during the French colonization and the nature of the individual agency that accompanies the word. Yet, despite bearing visible marks of the Cartesian self, the Vietnamese subjectivity portrayed in Lưu Trọng Lư’s poetry resists essentialist categorization, engendering what Bhabha calls mimicry. But what does the colonial subject mimic? This essay looks closely at arguably the most canonical French author that precedes the rise of the New Poetry movement in Vietnam, Marcel Proust, whose La Recherche reveals the elusive ideal of the self even within the French subject. Tracing the oscillation between metaphor and metonymy in both Proust’s prose and Lưu’s poetry as deconstructed by Paul de Man, the essay drifts from textual literariness to ontological questions on subjectivity. It further examines the intricacies of the colonial subject who dwells in the space of ambivalence along the axis of metonymy of presence.
Recommended Citation
Do, Hoang Van Anh, "Tôi and Moi: The Ambivalence of the Self in Lưu Trọng Lư and Proust" (2025). Comparative Literature M.A. Essays. 197.
https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/complit_essays/197
Included in
Comparative Literature Commons, East Asian Languages and Societies Commons, French and Francophone Language and Literature Commons
