scholarly journals The Liminal Space in Salman Rushdie’s The Midnight’s Children

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (5) ◽  
pp. 173-177
Author(s):  
Konika Mukherjee
Keyword(s):  
Liminal Space ◽  
Midnight's Children

Pater's Parerga: Framing the Imaginary Portraits

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-135
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Formal Structure ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Similar Operation ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Relationship

Walter Pater's late-nineteenth-century literary genre of the imaginary portrait has received relatively little critical attention. Conceived of as something of a continuum between his role as an art critic and his fictional pursuits, this essay probes the liminal space of the imaginary portraits, focusing on the role of the parergon, or frame, in his portraits. Guided by Pater's reading of Kant, who distinguishes between the work (ergon) and that which lies outside of the work (the parergon), between inside and outside, and contextualised alongside the analysis of Derrida, who shows how such distinctions have always already deconstructed themselves, I demonstrate a similar operation at work in the portraits. By closely analysing the parerga of two of Pater's portraits, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), focusing on his partial quotation of Goethe in the former, and his playful autocitation and impersonation of Heine in the latter, I argue that Pater's parerga seek to destabilise the relationship between text and context so that the parerga do not lie outside the text but are implicated throughout in their reading, changing the portraits constitutively. As such, the formal structure of the parergon in Pater's portraits is also a theoretical fulcrum in his aesthetic criticism and marks that space where the limits of, and distinctions between, art and life become blurred.

Unclean Truth

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Talbot
Keyword(s):  
Human Remains ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
Pedagogical Tool ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Museum Exhibits ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Object Biography ◽  
Physical Form ◽  
English Society ◽  
Physical Objects

The Metropolitan Police’s Crime Museum, famously known as the Black Museum, exhibits evidence from some of the most appalling crimes committed within English society from the late-Victorian era into modernity. Public admittance to this museum is strictly prohibited, preventing all but police staff from viewing the macabre exhibitions held within. The physical objects on display may vary, but whether the viewer is confronted with household items, weaponry or human remains, the evidence before them is undeniably associated with the immorality surrounding the performance of a socially bad death, of murder. These items have an object biography, they are both contextualized and contextualize the environment in which they reside. But one must question the purpose of such a museum, does it merely act as a Chamber of Horrors evoking the anomie of English society in physical form, or do these exhibits have an educational intent, restricted to their liminal space inside New Scotland Yard, to be used as a pedagogical tool in the development of new methods of murder investigation.

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.

Riot After Riot

1988 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-287
Author(s):  
Akbar S. Ahmed
Keyword(s):  
Uttar Pradesh ◽  
Early Morning ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Indian Government ◽  
Communal Violence ◽  
Legislative Branch ◽  
Midnight's Children ◽  
English Speaking

One of the great paradoxes of the modern world is that India, the land that produced such major world religions as Buddhism Jainism is now torn apart by caste and communal violence. Pakistan and Sri Lanka, like India, face severe ethnic problems. Law and order are to be emphasized. Caste and community must be protected by the executive branch of the Indian Government. This bas been laid down in the rules framed by the legislative branch. When this is not done there is a breakdown. No one is safe and no group is secure. In India today this is clearly the case. This book by M. J. Akbar is a collection of 15 journalistic pieces, written for Akbar's newspaper and magazine, The Telegraph and Sunday over the last decade. Because it is journalism, the important "burning" issues are covered such as the Moradabad massacre in 1980, the slaughter of the Uttar Pradesh Harijans in 1981 and the ongoing Babri Masjid controversey. It is journalism, but the writing is of high quality and evocative: "It is early morning and a mist lies on the river, making the pre-dawn haze more blurred. A part of the Howrah Bridge looms through the gauze, like a picture deliberately created by a photographer in search of art. The fires are out." (p. 170) Akbar's material is hard, brittle, compelling stuff. He writes with the passion of the committed and his commitments are to secularism, to humanity, to the truth, as he sees it, on the ground. Here, a brief account of Dr. Akbar's cultural background seems appropriate: He was born in 1951 and has become the English-speaking voice of post-Midnight's Children of India. The significance of post 1947 independence as a dividing line is generally not fully appreciated. Missing is the literary, sentimental romanticism of the earlier Indian generation of writers. Don Moraes and Ved Mehta already appear as dated figures of the past. Their India is another country. In Akbar's background there is no punting on English rivers, laboring at Oxford intonations, getting drunk after the Oxford-Cambridge boat race nor leisurely reading of the English romantic poets on the banks of the Cam. Akbar lives in the urban nightmare of Calcutta and in his nostrils is the smell of burning flesh and rotting corpses. Missing, though he is aware of the loss, is the romantic vision of Nehru and the religious idealism of Gandhi. Akbar is an Indian writing with a white-hot pen for Indians of today's India ...

Legal Paratexts

2019 ◽  
pp. 737-755
Author(s):  
Robert Spoo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Copyright Protection ◽  
The United States ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Statutory Requirement ◽  
Strict Compliance ◽  
American Publishing ◽  
Gerard Genette ◽  
Privacy Invasion

This chapter offers an overview of a genre that has attracted little attention qua genre: the legal paratext. Gérard Genette likened the paratext to a vestibule that operates as a zone of transition and transaction, a liminal space that prepares the reader’s experience of the text. Yet there are other, more cautionary paratexts that crowd, often invisibly, the vestibules of books and other cultural forms. This chapter surveys the transatlantic (American and British) repertoire of legal paratexts appearing in books, including copyright notices, once mandatory in the United States but now permissive there and in many countries; statements of US manufacture, deriving from a period in American publishing when copyright protection turned on strict compliance with the statutory requirement that books be physically manufactured on US soil; “all characters are fictitious” disclaimers, which urge readers to put aside their instinct to sue for libel or for privacy invasion and to engage with the text as a fictive and aesthetic creation; “no-obscenity” statements—a feature of many controversial modernist works—which seek to discourage official attempts at censorship and assure readers that books have been or are likely to be deemed by a court to be safe for consumption. Legal paratexts continue to crowd the vestibules of books, movies, musical recordings, and other works, warning readers, scolding them, and attempting to regulate their behavior in accordance with legal and corporate norms. They are linked to other literary genres, such as parody, satire, the apologia, and the palinode.

The ‘Question of Palestine’: From liminality to emancipation

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-127
Author(s):  
Victoria Mason
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
Significant Potential ◽  
Inherent Vulnerability ◽  
State Of Affairs

AbstractWhile the gravity of the injustice and inequality experienced by Palestinians is now widely documented, evidenced, and acknowledged, when it comes to action the situation appears ‘impervious’ to international law and norms of global politics, with Israel largely enjoying impunity. This article argues that this state of affairs can be most coherently understood through a critical interdisciplinary emancipatory framework centred on ‘liminality’. Referring to situations and actors ‘betwixt and between’, the framework of liminality offers significant potential for understanding how particular actors and spaces are intentionally marginalised, disempowered, and silenced within global politics and international law. Furthermore, in revealing the root causes of liminality, and the inherent vulnerability of such spaces to contestation and subversion, the framework also opens up potential pathways of transformative emancipation. Applying the lens of liminality to Palestine, it is demonstrated that Palestinians have been deliberately corralled to a liminal space within international law and global politics in order to enable an expansionist Zionist/Israeli settler colonial enterprise. After exploring how Palestinian liminality manifests in global politics and international law, the article turns to a range of efforts to subvert Palestinian liminality and assesses prospects for a teleological emancipation for Palestinians.

scholarly journals Between field and home: notes from the balcony

2021 ◽  
pp. 147447402110205
Author(s):  
Shruti Ragavan
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Dairy Farms ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
The Past ◽  
Urban Village ◽  
The City

Balconies, windows and terraces have come to be identified as spaces with newfound meaning over the past year due to the Covid-19 pandemic and concomitant lockdowns. There was not only a marked increase in the use of these spaces, but more importantly a difference in the very nature of this use since March 2020. It is keeping this latter point in mind, that I make an attempt to understand the spatial mobilities afforded by the balcony in the area of ethnographic research. The street overlooking my balcony, situated amidst an urban village in the city of Delhi – one of my field sites, is composed of middle and lower-middle class residents, dairy farms and farmers, bovines and other nonhumans. In this note, through ethnographic observations, I reflect upon the balcony as constituting that liminal space between ‘field’ and ‘home’, as well as, as a spatial framing device which conditions and affects our observations and interactions. This is explored by examining two elements – the gendered nature of the space, and the notion of ‘distance and proximity’, through personal narratives of engaging-with the field, and subjects-objects of study in the city.

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