This dissertation juxtaposes Virgil's Aeneid with Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses in order to explore how epics, which question and upend our very ideas of civilization, represent a crisis in culture and anticipate new ways of imagining community. This juxtaposition, develop…
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This dissertation explores issues in modern and postmodern literature involving culture and the struggle of marginalized voices to find identity. Through their emphasis on change, literal metamorphoses reveal much about modern literary criticism and culture. The substitution of …
This dissertation addresses both the historical predicament of twentieth-century exile and its figuration in selected fictional and non-fictional texts. Although it treats writers from disparate backgrounds working in different genres, its object of inquiry is neither primarily …
This thesis considers the status of the "end" in the literature of the late twentieth century. The very proliferation of announcements on the end (of truth, man, history, the world) has undermined to some extent the force of the apocalypse. In an age where "the sense of an endin…
This dissertation argues that the novels of Toni Morrison, Tahar ben Jelloun and Salman Rushdie are neither realist nor anti-realist, nor can they be accurately defined as magical realist. They are better understood as attempts to reimagine the possibilities for realism in a pos…
Magic Realism in the context of literature tends to be considered peculiar to Latin America, but that perception is changing. Much more frequently now, magic realism is discussed both as a tendency within postmodern literature, as Well as a mode unfettered by geographical bounda…
After reading Rushdie's major works, it may be stated that he is a post-colonial writer in the sense that his impulse is to always deconstruct the colonizer/colonized binary. In doing so, he attempts to clear a new space, "the third principle," where as Albert Memmi states one c…
The literatures emerging from the postcolonial world bring new dimensions of linguistic heterogeneity to English literature, opening up rich possibilities for the heteroglossia and interanimation of languages celebrated by Mikhail Bakhtin. Two case studies illustrate the “breaki…
In his novels on India, Rushdie finds it necessary to employ the mythical mode which accommodates the deeply religious as well as the secular side of the nation. Especially in Midnight's Children and The Moor's Last Sigh, the Hindu gods dance through his pages, taking on the myt…
Satire is a significant but largely untheorized mode of writing in post-colonial fiction. This study explores theoretical problems posed by satiric post-colonial novels and discusses the generic, representational, and political strategies of satire in texts by V. S. Naipaul, Chi…
Graphic Violence explores the role of assassination in contemporary historiographic fiction. The introduction begins by outlining the principal questions, and theoretical concerns, of the project. What kind of crisis does the historiographic endeavor entail for fiction? How does…
This dissertation examines how and why late 20th century writers of disparate nationalities, ethnicities, and linguistic traditions use al-Andalus as a metaphor in their fiction. Following a critical introduction to the conflictual historiographies of al-Andalus that highlights …
What I aim to accomplish below is an analysis of the commitment exhibited within The Satanic Verses and NW to portraying the complexities of the relationship between the religious and the secular in a postcolonial and postmodern age. Through a thorough and intricate depiction of…
This dissertation examines the creation of a "third space" out of the rigid binary structure of dominance and subjugation under post-colonial conditions in the works of James Joyce, Salman Rushdie and Maxine Hong Kingston. Employing the subversive politics of difference, minorit…
In examining the work of three "ethnic" writers (Nakagami Kenji is Japanese burakumin, Leslie Marmon Silko Native American, Salman Rushdie an Indian living in England), this project studies literary depictions of ways in which the body is portrayed and used as a space for cultur…
This dissertation examines the fiction of Bharati Mukherjee, Salman Rushdie and Sara Suleri to show how their writings disturb and reconfigure representations of the nation by positing new fictions of transit, migrancy, and dispersal. In all three writers, hybridity fissures the…
Ireland and India describe the poles of the British imaginary. At the turn of the twentieth century, the neighboring Celtic brute was England's oldest possession, the ineffable, remote Oriental a comparatively late creation of the Raj. These versions of Caliban nonetheless occup…
As proposed by recent work in literary theory, literary and language genres are now considered to have been and to be in continuous flux as they respond to social, historical, and cultural factors. Many contemporary British writers have been acting on this premise by changing re…
This dissertation argues that transnational literatures of the 1990s emphasize everyday place-making during a period when physical distance might be erased through new technologies and social identities might be understood diffuse and "groundless." Drawing on a range of cross-di…