"What's Real and What's True Aren't Necessarily the Same" Interrogating Identity and The Fantastic in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses
Loading...
Links to Files
Permanent Link
Collections
Author/Creator
Author/Creator ORCID
Date
2017-01-01
Department
English
Program
Texts, Technologies, and Literature
Citation of Original Publication
Rights
This item may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. It is made available by UMBC for non-commercial research and education. For permission to publish or reproduce, please see http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/specoll/repro.php or contact Special Collections at speccoll(at)umbc.edu
Distribution Rights granted to UMBC by the author.
Distribution Rights granted to UMBC by the author.
Abstract
This theses examines Salman Rushdie'suse of the fantastic to construct multiple conceptions of Indian national identity in Midnight'sChildren and The Satanic Verses. In both texts, the "irruptions of the fantastic" work to establish Rushdie'scharacters? mixed identifications with their individualized conceptions of Indian heritage and their individualized conceptions of modernity. With each character, Rushdie complicates any essentialist notion of Indian heritage, European-influenced modernity, and Eastern modernity by presenting his characters as hybrid beings whose identification continuously shifts throughout both texts, to prove that few characters remain fixed in their identification with any of these notions; their shifts in identification tell the reader much about their individualized constructions of India from both within the nation?in Midnight'sChildren?and outside the nation?in The Satanic Verses. It is argued that a character'sreaction to "irruptions of the fantastic" in both texts determines where that character'sidentification lies in this complex schema, whether they are identifying more with their conception of heritage or more with their conception of modernity at that point in the text, and how those conceptions of heritage and modernity present Rushdie'slarger construction of India as a postmodern, postcolonial nation.