On The Threefold Literary Spaces Of Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns

Khaled Hosseini, a dark horse in the American literature, has exerted a strong influence on today’s world literature. As an Afghanistan American writer, his novel A Thousand Splendid Suns displays various special social and cultural experiences of space, which opens a window for people to understand the real Afghanistan more clearly. Meanwhile, the post-modern spatial turn provides us a new theoretical way to analyze literary works:Spaces have the productivity and the feature of power game, and demonstrate a multivariate dynamic relationship. Therefore, the author chose A Thousand Splendid Suns as the object and studied the threefold literary spaces in a creative way which combines the contemporary space theory. The purpose is to reveal the novel’s aesthetic connotation and literary value.The introduction includes:a brief introduction of Khaled Hosseini and his novel A Thousand Splendid Suns; a summary on the present research results of Hosseini and space theory both home and abroad; and based on the relevant theoretical terms, my explanation focuses on the three literary spaces as theoretical framework:material space, mental space and political space.Thus it lays the foundation for analyzing the whole novel.Chapter I:focuses on the realistic family problems in the material space. In this part, Gaston Bachelard’s "poetic space" theory is quoted and particular emphasis is made on the description of material space. This part also reveals the novel’s main anti-poetic space which reflected the ethics of love and marriage, as well as inter-generation ethics by the heroine’s identity as a natural daughter and her miserable marriageChapter II:concentrates on the gender problem in mental space. The relationship between Afghanistan men and women, and the mental relationship between Afghanistan women are delicate and dynamic. This part mainly analyzes the literary figures’ minds, sentiments, imaginary space from the man’s and woman’s point of view. Besides, it intends to explicate the ideal way of creating a harmonious coexistence relationship between men and women.The main topic of Chapter III is the national problem in political space. The novel’s political space complies with "the third space" features, which deconstructs and rebuilds continuously: the time in the novel goes through several historical periods, such as Afghanistan’s capital Kabul being invaded by the Soviet Union, Jihad movement, warlords melee, Taliban domination, and invasion by America. The protagonist has experienced these changes of spaces, but never escaped from the sufferings of wars.The summary part draws ideas from Michel Foucault’s "Third Space" theory featurin gin multi-spacial concurrence to summarize the novel’s theoretical structure of threefold literary spaces or multi-literary spaces. This part also emphasizes the aesthetic orientation, social and cultural implication in the A Thousand Splendid Suns.