Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Ahdaf Soueif s The Map of Love both construct cosmopolitan figures, who through their narratives, attempt to reformulate nationalist constructions of nation. This study compares Rushdie and Soueif's configuration of the cosmopolitan global consciousness and its rootedness in the postcolonial local centers of Bombay and Cairo respectively. The comparison shows that the multiply determined identity of cosmopolitans can both impede, as well as allow for, the active participation in the social and political life of the country in which they inhabit and aim to represent. This thesis considers Rushdie and Soueif's journey back into postcolonial centers where the contested threshold between homogenous constructions of national identity and the heterogeneity of cosmopolitans has to be negotiated before productive critique and reform can begin at home.

No description available.

This thesis is an analysis of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses and The Moor's Last Sigh. The approach is twofold: (a) it seeks to establish an interplay between the concept of exile-in-narration (theme) and narrators-in-exile (form) as a reflection upon questions of rootlessness; and (b) it seeks to underscore this interplay as a recurring 'double bind' within each novel, such that the novels form a loosely bound trilogy that functions as a developing discourse on individual and national identity from a decentred perspective. The aim is similarly twofold: (a) it proposes that the metaphor of exile as a polarized state manifests itself as either an unreflecting pull of opposites or as a thoughtful acceptance of the inter-connectedness between ideas, people, places and things; and (b) it argues that once this polarization becomes evident, it disturbs all static narratives of selfhood and community to the point at which they can be reconceptualized, and yet remain open-ended.

This study examines the complex interplay between textuality and bodily performance by tracing their development within these two novels. Both texts are fundamentally concerned with the body and its interaction with a dominant culture. Often, the corporeal frame is posited as a physical text in which the social mores, cultural ideologies, and historical framework of a character's society are expressed through the bodies of its citizenry. However, both protagonists struggle to achieve an autonomous subject position outside the realm of the dominant culture, with varying degrees of success. At the end of Midnight's Children, Rushdie subverts the body's position as authoritative text by aligning the voice of record with textual production. Conversely, DeLillo's protagonist refutes the ability of linguistic representation to adequately convey her pathos, and instead utilizes her body art as the most effective means of communicating the atmosphere of alienation and fear which characterizes the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. / Department of English

No description available.

This dissertation explores the porous boundaries between Salman Rushdie's fiction and the various manifestations of the filmic vision, especially in Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses, and other selected Rushdie texts. My focus includes a chapter on Midnight's Children, in which I analyze the cinematic qualities of the novel's form, content, and structure. In this chapter I formulate a theory of the post-colonial novel which notes the hybridization of Rushdie's fiction, which process reflects a fragmentation and hybridization in Indian culture. I show how Rushdie's book is unique in its use of the novelization of film. I also argue that Rushdie is a narrative trickster. In my second chapter I analyze the controversial The Satanic Verses. My focus is the vast web of allusions to the film and television industries in the novel. I examine the way Rushdie tropes the "spiritual vision" in cinematic terms, thus shedding new light on the controversy involving the religious aspects of the novel which placed Rushdie on the most renowned hit-list of modern times. I also explore the phenomenon of the dream as a kind of interior cinematic experience. My last chapter explores several other instances in Rushdie's works that are influenced by a filmic vision, with specific examples from Haroun and the Sea of Stories, "The Firebird's Nest," and numerous other articles, interviews, and essays involving Rushdie. In my conclusion I discuss some of the emerging similarities between film and the novel, born out of the relatively recent technology of video cassette recorders and players, and I examine the democratizing effects of this relatively new way of seeing.

Nation-building novels are novels which attempt to weave the experiences, values and richness of a variety of cultures, language groups and social contexts into a national heritage that creates a sense ofnational identity and identification for all people within a particular nation-state. This dissertation explores how Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie, Keri Hulme's The Bone People and Margaret Laurence's The Diviners all use the particularly illuminating metaphor of family to explore nation-building in India, New Zealand and Canada respectively. In questioning traditional definitions of family through the image of the adopted child (or changeling in the case of Midnight's Children), the novels also explore new ways of understanding "belonging" and the "other". Since the meaning of these terms is rooted in the past, these novels also question the "truth" of the past by exposing the fallibility of memory. In chapter one a working definition of "nation" and "nation-building" is given and the vision, purpose and characteristic features of nation-building novels are discussed. Chapter two focuses on Rushdie's novel in which the metaphor of pickling is used to explore history not as a collection of hard facts but as a conglomeration of subjective, sensuous, manufactured and carefully created and preserved flavours. In chapter three Hulme's novel is discussed, particularly in relation to what is "other" and the importance of names. The narrator's idea of "commensalism" is explored as an ideal of syncrecity which does not deny individual identity. Chapter four looks at the development from consolation to contradiction to construction in the development of a hybrid national identity in Laurence's novel. Chapter five looks at the narrative techniques used in order to convey the prophetic nature of the novels' message and discusses the importance of the intertexts of each novel. Chapter six focuses on belonging as it looks at the return of each narrator to her/his symbolic or literal home. The chapter also discusses how the novels attack linearity by separating "time" and "space" (instances of social interaction) from "place" (specific geographical locations) in order to "disembed" their message to emphasise its universal applicability. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1998.

This thesis is concerned with transnational literature and writers of the Middle Eastern and South Asian diasporas. It argues that the diasporic position of the authors enables their roles as comprador subjects. The thesis maintains that the figure of the comprador is always acted upon by its ontological predisposition, so that diasporic positionality often involves a single subject which straddles and speaks from two or more different subject positions. Comprador authors can be said to be co-opted by Western metropolitan publishing companies who stand to benefit by marketing the apparent marginality of the homelands about which these authors write. The thesis therefore proceeds from the notion that such a diasporic position is the paradoxical condition of the transnational subject or writer. I submit that there is, to some degree, a questionable element in the common political and cultural suggestions that emerge upon closer evaluation of diasporic literature. Indeed, a charge of complicity has been levelled against authors who write, apparently, to service two distinct entities – the wish to speak on behalf of a minority collective, as well as the imperial ‘centre’ which is the intended interlocutor of the comprador author. However, it is this difference, the implied otherness or marginality of the outsider within, which I argue is sometimes used by diasporic writers as a way of articulating with ‘authenticity’ the cultures and politics of their erstwhile localities. This thesis is concerned, therefore, with the representation of ‘the East’ in four novels by diasporic, specifically comprador writers, namely Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. I suggest that the ‘third-world’ and transnational literature can also be a selling point for the transnational subject, whose representations may at times pander to preconceived ideas about ‘the Orient’ and its people. As an illustration of this double-bind, I offer a close reading of all the novels to suggest that on the one hand, the comprador author writes within the paradigm of the ‘writing back’ movement, as a counter-discourse to the Orientalist representations of the homeland. However, the corollary is that such an attempt to ‘write back’, in a sense, re-inscribes the very discourse it wishes to subvert, especially because the literature is aimed at a ‘Western’ audience. Moreover, the template of the comprador could be used to explain how a transnational post-9/11 text from an Afghan-American, for instance, may be put to the service of the imperial machine, and read, therefore, as a supporting document to the U.S. policy on Afghanistan.