Faculty of Humanities and Social Science > English
Salman Rushdie
Gopa B. Caesar:
Historigraphic Metafiction
Metafiction: ‘a language about language’ ►human communication ►dogs cannot bark about barking
Includes self referential element that challenges convention of realistic novels►mimetic & diegetic
Self-conscious problematization of the making of history and fiction ►postmodern
A productive intertextuality that neither simply repudiates the past nor reproduces it as nostalgia
Gopa B. Caesar:
MEMORY
History: Memory:: Public culture: Individual Memory
‘memory is not a calendar memory; our experience of time does not keep company with the rhythms of month and year alone; it is aggravated by the void, the final sentence of the plantation’- Gissant
To counter the erasures of History, it is necessary to unravel other submerged histories through an imaginative, if not literal, effort of memory.
Gopa B. Caesar:
Exposing the ‘Myth of the Nation’
Midnight's Children inaugurated what seemed like an endless stream of "nationsroman" (novels of the nation) in the 1980s.
Ex. Allan Sealy's Parsi version, The Trotter-Nama (1988), Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, and Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel.
Un-nationalistic: The modern nation state from philosophical, political, and historical to satirical, parodic, and mocking grounds.
more elegiac than celebratory of the nation.
The 1980s has taken place at a time when the future of the Indian nation-state is being questioned, when Rushdie's enigmatic ending in Midnight's Children of a "broken creature spilling pieces of itself into the street" is echoed in communal unrest and separatist violence.
a curious obsession to mythologize the nation not at its moment of birth when it was the glorious victor of a liberation struggle, but in its unglamorous middle age, riddled by the maladies of modernity and despair, which the novels proceed to catalogue in painstaking detail.
In many ways, Rushdie severed the critical and stifling affiliation between British English and the subcontinent, bringing a historical distance from which to observe and analyze the condition of being once-colonial subjects.
Gopa B. Caesar:
‘Minority Literature’
After Deleuze and Guattari (1986): a literature constructed by a social or political minority through which it exerts a critical, political force on "great" (or established) literature.
Minority literature is an outcome of critique and conscience, and it functions on numerous registers to expose, revise, or otherwise resist the triumphalist narratives of groups in power.
Alternatives to ‘grand narratives’.
The proliferation of the "nationsroman" critiques the Enlightenment myth of nationalism within the discourse of the novel.
The ‘nationromans’ is characterised by its unabashed ambition, as well as the seriousness with which it is taken within public culture in India.
effective critique needs both a voice and an audience.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari developed their thesis on minority literature after Franz Kafka►Saladin Chamcha turns into a Goat in England
Gopa B. Caesar:
POSTMODERNISM
Indeterminacy: ambiguities, ruptures, displacements that affect knowledge (episteme)
Fragmentation: ‘Let us wage war on totality; let us be witness of the unpresentable’ –Lyotard
Decanonization: decentring all forms of authority
Self-less-ness
The Unpresentable
Irony
Hybridization: mutant replication of genres (parody, pastiche)
Carnivalization (feast of changes—becoming), polyphonic, heteroglossic
Performance/Participation
Reconstruction
Immanence
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