In Conspicuous Bodies: Provincial Belief and the Making of Joyce and Rushdie, Jean Kane re-examines the literature of James Joyce and Salman Rushdie from a post-secularist perspective, arguing that ...their respective religions hold critical importance in their works. Though Joyce and Rushdie were initially received as cosmopolitans, both authors subsequently reframed their public images and aligned themselves instead with a provincial religious identity, which emphasized the interconnections between religious devotion and embodiment. At the same time, both Joyce and Rushdie managed to resist the doctrinal content of their religions. Conspicuous Bodies presents Joyce as a founder and Rushdie as an inheritor of a distinctive discourse of belief about the importance of physical bodies and knowledge in religious practice. In doing so, it moves the reception of Joyce and Rushdie away from what previous critics have emphasized-away from questions of aesthetics and from a narrow understanding of belief-and instead questions the assumption that belief should be segregated from matters of physicality and knowledge. Kane reintroduces the concept of spiritual embodiment in order to expand our understanding of what counts as spiritual agency in non-western and minority literatures.
Mapping out the Rushdie Republic differs from existing studies on the work of Salman Rushdie by dint of its seriousness of intent and profundity of content. Every major work of the writer is paid due ...attention as separate articles are devoted to every aspect of his literary persona. As such, the contributions raise pertinent issues and questions that invite the perceptive reader to enter into a meaningful dialogue with the views of a range of formidable academics of national and international repute. A long interview with Timothy Brennan, a notable Rushdie critic, offers further insights, making this a book that designedly stops short of being merely encomiastic about Rushdie's achievement as an author. The significant act of mapping out the Rushdie republic makes this a must-read for those who find the Rushdie phenomenon an interesting one as part of ongoing debates and discussions.
This book proposes a reading of John Milton's epic Paradise Lost in relation to four novels by the contemporary novelist Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, The Moor's Last Sigh, Fury and The Ground ...Beneath Her Feet. In such a reading, terms such as influence and inheritance will, inevitably, come up. Rather than bypass them, the book refines such terms in order to meet some of the challenges posed by contemporary critical theory in the field of comparative studies. In this more nuanced comparative reading of these texts, which looks beyond a linear paradigm, Jacques Derrida's term destinerrance is taken up as a means for thinking how the work of this "successor" (Rushdie) dialogues with Milton, conferring on the epic an elusive kind of afterlife. Destinerrance will be taken here to signal an ongoing process of re-signification of texts that does away with the notions of adhesion or similarity to an original, central point. In the case of Milton and his "successor", the fictional work of Salman Rushdie will be seen as constituting sites in which collaboration and contestation in relation to the epic are simultaneously and continually staged. Rushdie can, then, be seen to interweave Miltonic images of Eden, of the fall and a Satanic discourse of transgression to write territories and characters constituted in the crossings of domains of difference, territories in which colonial past and contemporary cultural formations and power structures are continually questioned and negotiated. In this way, his work enacts a re-signifying of Milton's text, mediating, in these deviations, the way it reaches us today.
Employing Salman Rushdie as a guide to a historicized contemporary, this study offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the plurality of cities along his transnational trajectory. It engages with ...the geographically identifiable Bombay, Karachi, Islamabad, London or New York; the phantasmal, politically coded, Jahilia or Mildendo, the inspirational yet flawed urban precedents of Fatehpur Sikri or Renaissance Florence and the ways these cities generate, interact with and transform each other. The book situates Rushdie's cities in relation to developments in Bombay, Karachi, Islamabad and London writing and focuses on novels which shuttle between cities. Parashkevova attends to cities' cultural and historical contexts, to many of Rushdie's numerous literary, cinematic and artistic influences and to diverse events, processes and paradigms - earthquakes, translations, seductions - that politically re-position cities and citizens on the contemporary urban map.
In After Empire Michael Gorra explores how three novelists of empire—Paul Scott, V. S. Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie—have charted the perpetually drawn and perpetually blurred boundaries of identity ...left in the wake of British imperialism. Arguing against a model of cultural identity based on race, Gorra begins with Scott's portrait, in The Raj Quartet, of the character Hari Kumar—a seeming oxymoron, an "English boy with a dark brown skin," whose very existence undercuts the belief in an absolute distinction between England and India. He then turns to the opposed figures of Naipaul and Rushdie, the two great novelists of the Indian diaspora. Whereas Naipaul's long and controversial career maps the "deep disorder" spread by both imperialism and its passing, Rushdie demonstrates that certain consequences of that disorder, such as migrancy and mimicry, have themselves become creative forces. After Empire provides engaging and enlightening readings of postcolonial fiction, showing how imperialism helped shape British national identity—and how, after the end of empire, that identity must now be reconfigured.
Fiction after the Fatwa: Salman Rushdie and the Charm of Catastrophe proposes for the first time an examination of what Rushdie has achieved as a writer since the fourteenth of February 1989, the ...date of the fatwa. This study argues that his constant questioning of fictional form and the language used to articulate it have opened up new opportunities and further possibilities for writing in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Through close readings and intensive textual analysis, arranged chronologically, Fiction after the Fatwa provides a thought-provoking reflection on the writer's achievements over the last thirteen years. Aimed principally at academics and students, but also of interest to the general reader, it engages with the specific nature of the post-fatwa fiction as it moves from the fairy-tale world of Haroun and the Sea of Stories to the heartbreaking post-realism of Fury.
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Stranger gods Clark, Roger Y
Stranger gods,
c2001, 20001218, 2000, 2001-03-01
eBook
Clark's exploration of Rushdie's novels works on at least three levels. First, he clarifies and interprets Rushdie's often puzzling references to figures such as Loki and Shiva, settings such as the ...mountains of Qaf and Kailasa, and experiences such as the annihilation of the self and the temptations of the Muslim Devil, Iblis. Second, he demonstrates how otherworldy motifs work with or against each other, fusing or clashing with Dantean, Shakespearean, and other literary forms to create hybrid characters, plots, and themes. Finally, he argues that Rushdie's brutal assault on tradition and taboo is mitigated by his secular idealism and his subtle homage to mystical ideals of the past.
