scholarly journals When not to tell stories: Unnatural narrative in applied narratology

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-20
Author(s):  
Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar
Keyword(s):  
Salman Rushdie ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Professional Practices ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
Academic Fields ◽  
Narrative Tradition ◽  
Midnight's Children ◽  
Unnatural Narrative ◽  
Literary Narrative ◽  
Günter Grass

AbstractInterest in literary fiction and literary theory from other academic fields and professional practices of storytelling has often been limited to what we could call an Aristotelian narrative approach, with its emphasis on coherence and closure. In this paper, I critically assess interdisciplinary applications of narratological theory as being too limited. After all, literature also offers an alternative narrative tradition, that of, anti-mimetic or ‘unnatural’ narratives. This tradition could enrich what is referred to in this paper as ‘applied narratology’: the transfer of narratological methods and findings to professional practices of narrative. When faced with the confusion of border experiences (Bühler), the institutionalised exclusion of otherness or traumatic experiences, we can greatly benefit from unnatural narrative, which exemplifies how coherence and closure can become oppressive. I also explore the example of The Long Awaited, a novel by Dutch-Moroccan author Abdelkader Benali, which together with The Tin Drum by Günter Grass and Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie forms the minor literary tradition of ‘the tragic picaro’, a specific type of unnatural narrative. It is argued that such literary narrative experiments may offer interesting models for interdisciplinary applications of narratological theory.

The Indian Novel in the 21st Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amardeep Singh
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Tamil Nadu ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Salman Rushdie ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Amitav Ghosh ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Cultural Narrative ◽  
Midnight's Children ◽  
And Gender

The Indian novel has been a vibrant and energetic expressive space in the 21st century. While the grand postcolonial gestures characteristic of the late-20th-century Indian novel have been in evidence in new novels by established authors such as Vikram Chandra, Amitav Ghosh, and Salman Rushdie, a slate of new authors has emerged in this period as well, charting a range of new novelistic modes. Some of these authors are Kiran Desai, Aravind Adiga, Githa Hariharan, Samina Ali, Karan Mahajan, and Amitava Kumar. In general, there has been a move away from ambitious literary fiction in the form of the “huge, baggy monster” that led to the publication of several monumental postcolonial novels in the 1980s and 1990s; increasingly the most dynamic and influential Indian writing uses new novelistic forms and literary styles tied to the changing landscape of India’s current contemporary social and political problems. The newer generation of authors has also eschewed the aspiration to represent the entirety of life in modern India, and instead aimed to explore much more limited regional and cultural narrative frameworks. If a novel like Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) took its protagonist all over the Indian subcontinent and indexed a large number of important historical controversies in the interest of broad representation, Padma Viswnanathan’s The Toss of a Lemon (2008) limits itself to a focus on a single Tamil Brahmin family’s orientation to issues of caste and gender, and remains effectively local to Tamil Nadu. There is no central agenda or defining idiom of this emerging literary culture, but three major groupings can be identified that encapsulate the major themes and preoccupations of 21st-century Indian fiction: “New Urban Realism,” “Gender and Secular History,” and “Globalizing India, Reinscribing the Past.”

History Turmoil And Politico-Cultural Conditions of the Sub-Continental Men In Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 26-28
Author(s):  
Gunasekaran N ◽  
Bhuvaneshwari S
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Salman Rushdie ◽  
Fiction Writing ◽  
Pluralistic Society ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
The World ◽  
Midnight's Children ◽  
First Time

Salman Rushdie remains a major Indian writer in English. His birth coincides with the birth of a new modern nation on August 15, 1947. He has been justly labelled by the critics as a post-colonial writer who knows his trade well. His second novel Midnight’s Children was published in 1981 and it raised a storm in the hitherto middle class world of fiction writing both in English and in vernaculars. Rushdie for the first time burst into the world of fiction with subversive themes like impurity, illegitimacy, plurality and hybridity. He understands that a civilization called India may be profitably understood as a dream, a collage of many colours, a blending of cultures and nationalities, a pluralistic society and in no way unitary.

Demystifying Magical Realism: A Close Reading of Quichotte

Ensemble ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 166-173
Author(s):  
Muthunagai P. ◽  
◽  
Marie Josephine Aruna ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Magical Realism ◽  
Salman Rushdie ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Indian Diaspora ◽  
Midnight's Children ◽  
Different Dimensions ◽  
Innovative Techniques

Magical Realism is a genre that brings in together two completely different dimensions of study, namely realism and fantastic imagination (magic). There is always an air of eerie complexity around the genre due to the confluence of such contradictions. Salman Rushdie is one of the most important Indian Diaspora writers prominently known for the triumphant utilization of this genre through innovative techniques in his work. Some of his most famous literary productions of this genre are The Midnight’s children, Shame, etc., This present paper takes Rushdie’s (2019) recent blockbuster publication Quichotte under study, and scrutinizes it from a hermeneutical point of view. It uses the principles theorized by W. B. Frais (2004) in her book Ordinary Enchantments and attempts to analyse the book under the derived perspective. This brief analysis underscores the hidden elements that are unanimously typical of all Magical Realist texts with reference to Quichottein and endeavours to demystify it.

Magic Realism as Rewriting Postcolonial Identity: A Study of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-82
Author(s):  
Khum Prasad Sharma
Keyword(s):  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Magic Realism ◽  
Postcolonial Identity ◽  
Oppressed Group ◽  
Midnight's Children ◽  
Simultaneous Existence ◽  
Sense Of Reality ◽  
Narrative Mode ◽  
Literary Narrative

Magic realism as a literary narrative mode has been used by different critics and writers in their fictional works. The majority of the magic realist narrative is set in a postcolonial context and written from the perspective of the politically oppressed group. Magic realism, by giving the marginalized and the oppressed a voice, allows them to tell their own story, to reinterpret the established version of history written from the dominant perspective and to create their own version of history. This innovative narrative mode in its opposition of the notion of absolute history emphasizes the possibility of simultaneous existence of many truths at the same time. In this paper, the researcher, in efforts to unfold conditions culturally marginalized, explores the relevance of alternative sense of reality to reinterpret the official version of colonial history in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children from the perspective of magic realism.  As a methodological approach to respond to the fiction text, magic realism endows reinterpretation and reconsideration of the official colonial history in reaffirmation of identity of the culturally marginalized people with diverse voices.

scholarly journals Woman, Genealogy, History: Deconstructions of Family and Nation in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and Manju Kapur’s Diffi cult Daughters

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
María Elena Martos Hueso
Keyword(s):  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Salman Rushdie ◽  
Indian Literature ◽  
Indian English ◽  
Amitav Ghosh ◽  
Diffi Cult ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Midnight's Children ◽  
History Of ◽  
Posterior Division

Abstract:Since the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the recent history of Indian Literature in English has been characterised by a growing interest in rewriting the history of India from an angle diametrically opposed to that of official historiography. Taking as a starting point Foucault’s concept of Nietzschean genealogy, which emphasises the value of microhistory and interrogates the function of narrative linearity in historiographic practices, this paper analyses two analogous Indian English novels based on the independence and subsequent partition of the Indian subcontinent: The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh and Difficult Daughters by Manju Kapur. It mainly focuses on the deconstruction of the nationalist myth, where women and motherhood lay at the centre of the gestation and birth of the new nation.Keywords: Amitav Ghosh, Manju Kapur, The Shadow Lines, Diffi cult Daughters, history, genealogy, women, Indian Literature in English.Resumen:Desde la publicación de Midnight’s Children de Salman Rushdie, la historia reciente de la novela india en lengua inglesa se ha visto marcada por un interés creciente en reescribir la historia de la India desde un ángulo diametralmente opuesto al de la historiografía oficial. Partiendo del concepto de la genealogía nietzscheana de Foucault, que enfatiza el valor de la microhistoria y cuestiona la linealidad narrativa de la práctica historiográfica, este estudio analiza dos obras de inquietante paralelismo basadas en la independencia y posterior división del subcontinente indio: The Shadow Lines de Amitav Ghosh y Difficult Daughters de Manju Kapur. Se centra principalmente en la deconstrucción de los mitos nacionalistas, donde la mujer y la maternidad se convierten en foco de toda una alegoría en torno a la gestación y nacimiento de la nueva nación.Palabras clave: Amitav Ghosh, Manju Kapur, The Shadow Lines, Difficult Daughters, historia, genealogía, mujeres, literatura india en lengua inglesa.

Kashmir as the center of conflict in the novel “Midnight's Children” by Salman Rushdie

Litera ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Olga Igorevna Chuvanova
Keyword(s):  
Salman Rushdie ◽  
Conflict Situation ◽  
Sense Making ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Kashmir Valley ◽  
Midnight's Children ◽  
Eastern Cultures ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Clash Of Cultures ◽  
Artistic Images

The subject of this research is the conflicts generated by mythological and historical space in Kashmir Valley, which is one of the central artistic images in the novel “Midnight's Children” by the British writer of Indo-Pakistani descent Salman Rushdie. Conflict situation within the framework of Kashmir’s topos is sense-making, as it is associated with the problem of choice and acquisition of cultural wholeness by the character of the novel. The historically substantiated propensity towards conflict of the actual geographical region, which became the cause for interethnic hostility between Pakistan and India, is complicated by the conflict of Western and Eastern cultures. The "East – West" opposition implies the conflict between the conservatory intentions of the Eastern autochthonous culture and the attempts of it suppression by pro-Western migrants. The author applies historical and literary, hermeneutical and mythopoetic methods. It is determined that involvement of Kashmir’s topos in the artistic world of the novel is substantiated by the historical and interethnic conflicts in the region related to acquisition of independence by India. On the mythological level, Kashmir manifests as a space that synthesizes the ambivalent forces of destruction and creation, which reveals the latent propensity towards conflict that underlies the world. The clash of cultures and worldviews is described in the novel through the symbolic pair of characters – Indian Westerner Adam Aziz and the local boatman Tai. Relations between the characters actualize the stratified systemic conflict (interpersonal, internal, religious-mythological, problem of choice). Subsequently, this conflict propels to the ontological level, reflecting the problem of heroes of finding their place in postcolonial world

scholarly journals Postmodern Chic and Postcolonial Cheek: A Map of Linguistic Resistance, Hybridity, and Pedagogy in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Prathim-Maya Dora-Laskey
Keyword(s):  
Salman Rushdie ◽  
Third Space ◽  
Code Mixing ◽  
Midnight's Children ◽  
Multiple Meanings

This essay examines how Salman Rushdie appropriates the colonial linguistic medium (English) in Midnight’s Children and embeds resistance within its commonplace and seemingly innocent lexical interstices through the insertion of Hindi/Urdu terms in his wordplay. This lexical hybridity may be examined as a creative example of Homi Bhabha's exegetical “third space” that is postmodern in its disruption of semiotic stasis and postcolonial in its disruption of the primacy of English. This paper contextualizes Rushdie’s code-mixing of English and Hindi/Urdu lexical registers to produce multiple meanings and puns, maps select examples through L.G. Heller’s mode of linguistic diagramming, and provides an overview of the resultant ideological considerations.

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