Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Versesis one of the most controversial postcolonial novels, which among a plethora of themes seems to mainly focus on the notion of hegemonic power. The Satanic Verses can partly be read as a denunciation of the British hegemony in which social injustice, racial discrimination and violence, in its different forms, exerted upon marginalized and stigmatized people (such as non-European expatriates) are legitimized by the dominant group and understood as something conventional and normal by the subjugated people. Moreover, this novel encourages the readers to criticize religion as a political tool with the help of which the dominant group can make groups of people subservient to authority. This part of my essay is related to the criticism of hegemony as such. Employing Gramsci’s analysis of hegemony, this paper begins with an investigation of the relationship between the figure of a migrant, violence and cultural hegemony inRushdie’s Britain. In the second part, the link between dream scenes and the ways through which they contribute to the overall argument about hegemony is studied. Finally, the last part of this essay revolves around religious hegemony. Hence, what links all these three sections together is the concept of hegemony and the ways through which hegemonic power is achieved and implemented in this novel.

Ng Chui-yin, Christine. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 148-156). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / Acknowledgement --- p.vi / Contents --- p.vii / "Introduction: History, Fiction, and Narrative" --- p.1 / History and Narrative in Traditional Historical Narrative --- p.4 / A Rethinking of the Relationship between History and Narrative --- p.6 / Historical Narrative in a Postcolonial Context --- p.21 / Historical Novel Writing and Postcolonial Counter Discourse --- p.26 / Chapter Chapter One: --- Resistance to Solitude: Garcia Marquez's Vision of a New World in One Hundred Years of Solitude / Imperial Historical Narratives and Latin America --- p.35 / Magical Realism and Historical Representation of Latin America --- p.44 / "Solitude, Family History and the Problem of Identity" --- p.59 / Conclusion --- p.71 / Chapter Chapter Two: --- Midnight's Children and Hybridity / Imperial Historical Narratives and India --- p.74 / Metafictional Writing and Historical Novel Writing --- p.80 / Hybridity of Indian Cultural Identity --- p.91 / Conclusion --- p.101 / Chapter Chapter Three: --- Non-resistance to National Historical Narratives: Xi Xi's Flying Carpet / "British Colonial Narratives, Chinese National Narratives and Hong Kong" --- p.102 / Fairy-tale Realism and an Alternative Historical Representation --- p.112 / The Representation of the HongkongnesśؤHeterogeneity and All-inclusiveness --- p.119 / Conclusion --- p.129 / Conclusion: Postcolonial Counter Discourse in Historical Novel Writing --- p.131 / Notes --- p.141 / Work Cited --- p.148

This dissertation is intended primarily as a contribution to postcolonial criticism and theory and the rhetorical analysis of epidemic writing as they undergo various crises and sublimations in the geopolitical landscape that has come into focus since the multilateral undertaking of the War on Terror in 2001. I begin with a set of questions about representation: when, how, and why are extra-legal, insurgent, anti-colonial, and terrorist forms of violence figured as epidemics in literature and connected discursive forms? What events in colonial history and scientific practice make such representations possible? And how do these representational patterns and their corollary modes of interpretation both reflect and transform discourse and policy? Although the figure is ubiquitous, it is far from simple. I argue that the discourse of the late colonial era is crucial to an understanding of how epidemiological science arises and converges with colonial management technologies, binding the British response to the 1857 mutiny and a growing Indian nationalism to the development of surveillance and quarantine programs to eradicate the threat of the great nineteenth century epidemic, the so-called Indian or Asiatic cholera. Through a constellation of readings of key texts in the British and French colonial and postcolonial traditions, including selected works of Bram Stoker (Dracula, "The Invisible Giant"), Albert Camus (La Peste, Chronique Algérienne) and Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses, Shalimar the Clown, Joseph Anton), I demonstrate how epidemics have played a complex representational role in relationship to violence, enabling us to imagine specific kinds of actors as absolute, powerful enemies of biological and social life, while also recoding violent political action as an organic affliction in order to efface or suppress the possibility of agency. There are two crucial aspects of this story that run throughout the histories and texts I engage with in this project. The first is that the figure of insurgent violence as epidemic has two opposing, yet interrelated faces. One looks to the promise of scientism, data collection and rational study as a means of eradicating the threat of irregular warfare. This is the function of the figure embedded in the practices and progress of epidemiology. On the other hand, the mythopoetics of infectious disease also point toward the occult and the unknowable, and code natural forces of destruction as sublime and inevitable. This is the function of the figure embedded the literary and political history of the term terror, which encompasses both natural and political events and the structures of feeling to which they give rise. The result of this duality is the persistent epistemic collapse of data-driven rational scientism and irrational sublimity in texts where epidemic and terror are at issue. The second crucial aspect of this story is that the dissolution of a colonial world system changes the shape of thinking about both epidemics and violence by displacing a binary architecture of antinomy in both public health and politics. The broadened view of epidemic since the end of the nineteenth century, in other words, has moved us away from metaphors of bellicosity to a more multi-factorial view of bacteriology and virology in temporal, geographic, and demographic space. One of the main goals of this project is to examine the relationship between these shifting epistemologies, narrative form, and imperial strategy. A connected through-line in the dissertation attempts to map what becomes of the biologistic and organicist conception of the state--which are already a matter of representation and imagination--as the very notions of biotoic life and the purview of the organism undergo no less radical redefinitions than the concept of the nation itself, providing the conceptual underpinnings for a subsequent biomorphic conception of the globe.

This thesis examines different forms that ‘disidentification,’ as defined by Lisa Lowe and José Esteban Muñoz, takes in Bluebird: A Memoir by Vesna Maric and The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. I further define ‘disidentification’ by narrowing down to two types that I coin ‘social disidentification’ and ‘political disidentification.’ I use ‘social disidentification’ as a model of survival and ‘political disidentification’ as a model of resistance. Throughout, I examine how the construct of multiculturalism effects the formation of migrant identities and because of this I look at which type of ‘disidentification’ the migrant will align with. By examining migrant identities and how they come to identify with some form of a British identity across both texts, I conclude that the idea of “Britishness” needs to be revised to be inclusive of all identities that make up the space of Britain rather than just including privileged identities. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2019. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Le traitement actuel de la violence exprime nos inquiétudes et nos préoccupations devant un monde rendu de plus en plus incertain. Cette violence nous convie à de nouveaux paradigmes, imaginaires, signes et représentations. Conséquemment, l'inflation des images de la violence entretient le désordre et le chaos de notre monde moderne, en plus d'en faire la propagande sous la forme d'un spectacle convenable et standardisé. À partir du roman Shame de Salman Rushdie, il sera montré que les images de la violence proposées par cet écrivain font émerger une violence fondatrice, un objet de pensée riche en interprétations, contrairement à une violence spectaculaire dénuée d'ambiguïtés et de nuances. À ce propos, les positions de plusieurs penseurs sur la question de la violence, du rapport à l'image et à la fiction seront abordées afin de mieux comprendre le rôle de la figuration de la violence dans l'œuvre romanesque de cet écrivain. L'étude du processus de figuration servira à dégager un réseau de figures construites autour de la violence et caractérisées par le dualisme et l'altérité. À partir du personnage principal de Shame, une idiote qui incarne et transcende le sentiment de honte, il s'agira d'examiner la relation subversive qu'entretiennent figure et affect. Dans ce cas-ci, la figure de l'idiot qui est à la fois une puissance d'affect et de concept, nous autorise à penser l'origine de la violence, mais permet aussi de poser un regard neuf sur le monde. Ce mémoire dépeint la manière singulière dont le récit décante le processus de figuration, c'est-à-dire en mettant une distance avec ses propres figures consentant ainsi à la prise de recul nécessaire d'une posture critique. Une critique de la violence deviendra donc le moteur d'une écriture peuplée de ruptures, de répétitions et d'exacerbations visant à détourner la violence contemporaine en l'attaquant avec ses propres armes. La figuration de la violence autorise la représentation de l'irreprésentable et l'aveu de l'inavouable et est en ce sens perçue comme une stratégie de subversion narrative et textuelle qui détruit les formes sclérosées de la littérature et vient modifier l'acte de lecture. Cette violence qui s'immisce dans l'imaginaire de Rushdie, en plus d'exposer les complexités de l'identité et notre rapport avec l'Autre, se mêle aux procédés littéraires des romans postmodernes afin de les transformer et les enrichir. Ce mémoire propose enfin une étude des particularités de la métafiction, de l'imaginaire contemporain, ainsi que de la satire, tactique de subversion par excellence. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Violence, figuration, imaginaire, subversion, dualisme, identité, métafiction, postmodernité, Salman Rushdie, Shame.

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This dissertation investigates representations of betrayal in works by Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, Irvine Welsh, and Alan Hollinghurst. In rethinking "bad" acts of betrayal as embodying an ethical desire not for the good but for "the better," this dissertation challenges the simplistic good/bad binary as mandated by neo-imperialist, late capitalist, and heteronormative society. In doing so, my project intervenes in the current paradigm of ethical literary criticism, whose focus on the canon and the universal Good gained from it runs a risk of underwriting moral majoritarianism and judgmentalism. I argue that some contemporary narratives of betrayal open up onto a new ethic, insofar as they reveal the unethical totalization assumed in ethical literary criticism's pursuit of the normative Good. The first full chapter analyzes how Kureishi's Intimacy portrays an ethical adultery as it breaks away from the tenacious authority of monogamy in portraying adult intimacy in literature, what I call the narrative of "coupledom." Instead, Intimacy imagines a new narrative of "singledom" unconstrained by the marriage/adultery dyad. In the next chapter on Fury, a novel about Manhattan's celebrity culture, I interrogate the current discourse of cosmopolitanism and propose that Rushdie's novel exposes how both cosmopolitanism and nationalism are turned into political commodities by mediafrenzied and celebrity-obsessed metropolitan cultural politics. In a world where an ethical choice between cosmopolitanism and nationalism is impossible to make, Fury achieves an ethical act of treason against both. The next chapter scrutinizes Mark Renton's "ripping off" of his best mates and his critique of capitalism in Trainspotting and Porno. If Renton betrays his friends in order to leave the plan(e) of capitalism in the original novel, he satirizes the trustworthiness of trust in Porno by crushing his best mate's blind trust in business "ethics" and by ripping him off again. The last full chapter updates the link between aesthetics and ethics in post-AIDS contexts in Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty. In portraying without judgment beautiful, dark-skinned, dying homosexual bodies, Hollinghurst's novel "fleshes out" the traditional sphere of aesthetics that denies the low and impure pleasures frequently paired with gay sex.

The aim of this dissertation is to trace the function of parody in the context of Salman Rushdie&rsquo / s magical realistic fiction. The magical realism of Rushdie&rsquo / s fiction presents a complex Third World experience which constitutes an alternative to, and challenges the Eurocentrism of western culture. The form and content of Rushdie&rsquo / s novels are so intense and rich that the whole body of his work comes to the fore, not as an outcome of the two clashing civilisations, that is East and West, but rather as an immense medley of the two cultures. While &ldquo / writing back to the empire&rdquo / , Rushdie draws on innumerable sources ranging from such grand narratives as Genesis, Iliad, Ramayana, A Thousand and One Nights, Hindu, Persian, Greek, and Norse mythologies, and local cultural traditions, to modern politics mingling fiction and reality in a broad historical perspective, so that his work becomes a synthesis of East and West, an international aesthetic plane where diversities express themselves freely. The dissertation focuses particularly on Rushdie&rsquo / s Midnight&rsquo / s Children, The Moor&rsquo / s Last Sigh,and Shalimar The Clown. / it contains an introductory chapter, a theory chapter, including two subchapters, a development chapter with three subchapters which analyse the above mentioned three novels, and a conclusion chapter. The introductory chapter presents an overview of the issues to be investigated in the subsequent chapters. The theory chapter deals with the concepts of colonialism, nationalism, and the past and the present of postcolonial literary theory with reference to its leading theorists, such as M. Foucault, E. Said, H. Bhabha, and other recent critics / this chapter also introduces magical realism by reference to a number of current definitions and approaches. The following three subchapters, which focus on the analyses of the three novels, explore how parody functions both thematically and structurally in relation to Rushdie&rsquo / s magical realism. The concluding chapter demonstrates that Rushdie&rsquo / s work creates an unrestrained plane of an international culture where multiple visions and diversities can find a room to assert themselves.

Mild psychological effects, such as sleep-deprivation, on an oppressed and tortured human being can be characterized as “normal”. However, Shame by Salman Rushdie uses magical realist style to describe the psychological effects of shame in a patriarchal society which is based on capitalistic class values. This essay will focus on the Marxist feminist reading of the novel with a psychoanalytical perspective which is going to help analyse the effects of the oppressed female characters, Bilquis Hyder, Sufiya Zinobia and Rani Harappa.  The essay focuses on different incidents in the lives of these characters with the help of critics such as Aijaz Ahmad and Timothy Brennan. Both have written critically about Rushdie. This essay will discuss the different aspects of Marxism, feminism as well as psychoanalysis and connecting them to the novel, which would give the answers as to what shame can do to a person’s psyche. The Beauty and the Beast fairy-tale gets a different perception in this story, as Sufiya Zinobia is both the characters in one.

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