Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children"McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 2004 - 317 páginas Many non-Indian readers find the historical and cultural references in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children demanding. In his close reading of the novel, Neil ten Kortenaar offers post-colonial literary strategies for understanding Midnight's Children that also challenge some of the prevailing interpretations of the novel. Using hybridity, mimicry, national allegory, and cosmopolitanism, all key critical concepts of postcolonial theory, ten Kortenaar reads Midnight's Children as an allegory of history, as a Bildungsroman and psychological study of a burgeoning national consciousness, and as a representation of the nation. He shows that the hybridity of Rushdie's fictional India is not created by different elements forming a whole but by the relationship among them. Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children also makes an original argument about how nation-states are imagined and how national consciousness is formed in the citizen. The protagonist, Saleem Sinai, heroically identifies himself with the state, but this identification is beaten out of him until, in the end, he sees himself as the Common Man at the mercy of the state. Ten Kortenaar reveals Rushdie's India to be more self-conscious than many communal identities based on language: it is an India haunted by a dark twin called Pakistan; a nation in the way England is a nation but imagined against England. Mistrusting the openness of Tagore's Hindu India, it is both cosmopolitan and a specific subjective location. |
Contenido
Introduction | 3 |
Hybridity | 17 |
3 | 31 |
Magic Realism | 48 |
Parts and Whole | 77 |
Lack and Desire | 97 |
The State | 131 |
Communalism | 144 |
England and Mimicry | 167 |
The Dispossessed and Romance | 190 |
Hindu India | 212 |
Cosmopolitanism and Objectivity | 229 |
Conclusion | 252 |
299 | |
311 | |
Pakistan and Purity | 155 |
Otras ediciones - Ver todas
Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" Neil ten Kortenaar Vista previa limitada - 2004 |
Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" Neil ten Kortenaar Vista previa limitada - 2004 |
Términos y frases comunes
Aadam Aziz actually Ahmed Sinai Amina assassination ayah Aziz's baby switch becomes Bildungsroman blood body Bombay Brass Monkey Brennan British called Chatterjee child claim colonial confession cosmopolitan cultural declares Delhi desire dream Evie Burns eyes father fear feels fiction figure film finger Ganesh hand hero Hindu hybridity ibid identify identity imagined India Indira Gandhi inside Islam Jamila Karachi Kashmir literal London magic realism Mary Pereira mean memoirist memory metafictional metaphor Methwold's Estate metonymic Midnight's Children Millais's painting mimicry modern Muslim Nadir Khan Narlikar narrator Naseem Ghani nation-state national history nationalist Nehru nose Padma Pakistan Parvati political postcolonial Raleigh readers relation represents Reverend Mother romance Rushdie's novel Sabarmati Saleem Saleem says Saleem's narrative Salman Rushdie Satanic Verses sense sexual Shiva spittoon story story-telling Sundarbans synecdoche Tagore things Trivedi truth University Press voice washing-chest whole women words writing