‘Never Just a Game’: Storytelling, Gaming, and Death in Luka and the Fire of Life and Joseph Anton

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 330-340
Author(s):  
Rizia Begum Laskar
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Children’S Fiction ◽  
Children's Fiction

Salman Rushdie's Luka and the Fire of Life and Joseph Anton both reflect on his concerns with death along with an attempt to keep the process of storytelling alive. This article explores Rushdie's addressing of the literal threat of death in the memoir and the metaphorical death of storytelling abilities in the children's fiction. The emphasis of this article is on Rushdie's usage of gaming and virtual reality to retain his authority in the storytelling world.

Magic Realism, Technology and Subjectivity in Contemporary Children’s Fiction in India: Reshaping Gender Attitudes

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (5) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Dr. Madhavi Nikam ◽  
Ms Jyothi Sadasivam
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Gender Attitudes ◽  
Magic Realism ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Organic World ◽  
Narrative Device ◽  
Virtual Experiences ◽  
Children’S Fiction ◽  
Children's Fiction

One of the objectives of using fiction as a medium of socialization of children is to infuse an understanding of gender roles in society. A number of children’s fiction books published in India in the last couple of decades have addressed this concern and contemporary critical studies on children’s literature have focused on the representation of gender and the biases inherent in it. Globalisation and the staggering advance of technology have triggered innovative fictional responses to gender roles and attitudes to appeal to the digital generation addicted to virtual reality and video games. The children’s text examined in this study represents technology as empowering adolescents and investing them with the capacity to transform age-old conservative attitudes towards gender identities specifically manifested in the still recurrent practice of female foeticide in India. Ranjit Lal’s Faces in the Water, creates a kind of magic realism by interweaving virtual reality into an everyday organic world, almost blurring the distinction between the two; an experimental narrative device that aims at re-examining conventional notions of masculinity and feminity. The purpose of creating an alternate world of virtual experiences is to comment upon the real world and effect transformatory action.

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