| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中山大學 === 外國語文學系研究所 === 88 === Sara Suleri�s Meatless Days problematizes the notions of writing, home and memory through a style of alterity that resists an easy translation. It not only teases the reader�s anticipation of the inevitable arrival of a conclusion, but also elucidates and negotiates the aporia in the production of meanings. Suleri�s speculation on the aporia of interpretation inspires mine while predicating my failure in approximating a definite answer to the questions she has posed�home, self/writing, women, and nation.
Writing that �[l]eaving Pakistan [is] tantamount to giving up the company of women,?Suleri yet arrives at an imaginary homeland in Meatless Days. (1). So doing, Suleri immediately signifies upon the aporetic ambivalence between departure and arrival. In other words, and in an aporetically productive sense, this departure vehicles the inception of writing and initiates a �different?beginning elsewhere. The notion of aporia thus resists easy definition and becomes a productive point of departure to set into motion a movement of open-ended diff廨ance.
Entitled �The Poetics of Alterity,?this project is not tantamount to residing in a clear-cut dichotomy between a discourse and its antagonistic relationship to others. Neither is it my intent to celebrate, and, by thus doing, reconsolidate the binary structure with which we tend to settle issues. Instead, something of a reading like mine situates its vitality, and presumably its weakness, at a discursive border that insists on the irreducible congruence between the self and its putative other, home and an elsewhere, nation and narration, writing and interpretation.
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