NAVEL-GAZING SINGAPORE IN VERSE

Abstract

This dissertation argues for the importance of examining the psychosocial dimension of Singapore’s early Anglophone literature and explores its potential functions for mediation. A rehabilitated concept of navel-gazing is deployed as a reading heuristic to trace the incremental textual and extra-linguistic mediations unravelled from the oeuvres of two influential local poets (Edwin Thumboo and Arthur Yap) and to contextualise Singapore’s nascent literary development between the late 1940s and 1980s. While representing their works as an evolving umbilicus of Singapore, I demonstrate a practised mediation of heritage-building and frontier-forging that reveals a tradition of rigour and autonomy in local literary community. By incorporating an examination of indigenized aesthetic practices within an imagined bildungsroman of Singapore Anglophone literature, I foreground the inextricable psychosocial dynamics underlying postcolonial literary interventions.