Pratistha Bhattarai

PhD Candidate, Literature

Fellowship Year(s)

  • 2020-2021

Pratistha Bhattarai is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University. Her research interests include postcolonial literature and theory, feminist theory, history of the novel, media theory, and computational poetics. In her dissertation, she examines the present relevance of the interpretive model of national allegory, asking what materialist understanding of postcolonial novels the model may offer in the post-1970 period of globalization. Central to her work is a theoretical and methodological rethinking of allegory. She takes the allegorical message of any literary text to be encoded in its syntactic composition rather than in any image the text invokes through its semantic meaning, further showing how the anti-ocular hermeneutic of the post-1970 novel defamiliarizes the spectacle of political life under globalization and thereby opens up the possibility of meta-commentary in the present. Pratistha received her B.A. and M.S. in mathematics and computer science, and she continues to draw on these fields in her current work.

Pratistha Bhattarai
Pratistha Bhattarai