Consciousness in literature

Despite radical differences in their political commentary, Amiri Baraka and V.S.
Naipaul’s literary careers have obsessively centered on the divided Self of the colonized
artist. Esther Jackson argues that Baraka’s “search for form” becomes “symbolic of a
continuing effort to mediate between warring factions within the perceiving mind” (38).
Similarly, many critics have interpreted Naipaul’s grave manifestos as the outpourings of a writer disenchanted with his own past and national identity. For Selwyn Cudjoe,
Naipaul’s work is “reflective of a man who failed to discover any psychological balance
in his life” (172-173). This thesis analyzes how Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman and V.S.
Naipaul’s Guerrillas engage with various fairy tale conventions in order to narrate the
colonized victim’s divided Self. These narratives ultimately function as anti-fairy tales,
revealing the black protagonist’s accursed position in the symbolic order.

In Chapter Five of his Autobiography, John Stuart Mill discusses a "mental crisis" which struck in 1826 and lingered for some time. Mill addresses one causative element of this crisis, a perception of himself at twenty as a "mechanical man." Yet these much-quoted words understate a greater point. I shall argue that Mill's crisis was the destruction of an almost purely mechanical consciousness, or at least a strike at his foundations of a breadth and severity that has not been fully addressed by Mill scholarship. I shall consider various aspects of Mill's life and thought before and after the crisis as a means of identifying the nature of this fundamental change in Mill. These aspects of Mill's thought include philosophy, economics, epistemology, poetry, and politics, and these aspects of Mill's life include education, his relationship with his father and Bentham, his early activism, his influences, and his perceptions of man and society.