Systems and accidents in 20th century magical realist literature: Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" and Sadegh Hedayat's "The blind owl" as critiques of modern nation-making experiments
Journal Title: English Studies at NBU - Year 2015, Vol 1, Issue 2
Abstract
This article compares two major 20th century magical realist novels - Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl – as critiques of modern nation-making practices, in Nehruvian post-independence India and Iran under Reza Shah Pahlavi. The analysis centers the interplay of accidents and systems, in political constructions and contestations of modern self, history and knowledge. The works are assessed in terms of two aesthetic paradigms of modernity: Baudelaire’s vision of modernity as traumatic deracination involving new creative possibilities and freedom, and Cocteau’s vision of modernity as an Infernal Machine where a pre-recorded universe annihilates creative freedom. The political significance of these aesthetics are evaluated against the two distinctive nationalist narratives which the authors set out to contest in their respective novels. Both novels offer important critiques of violence. Yet both reveal a Proustian aesthetic of nostalgia, rejecting organized political action in the public sphere to celebrate imaginative introversion.
Authors and Affiliations
Tadd Graham Fernée
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP370142
- DOI 10.33919/esnbu.15.2.4
- Views 72
- Downloads 0
Bulgarian polemics on American Generativism 1950s-1970s: a peek through the Iron curtain
The paper discusses the attitude of Bulgarian linguistic circles towards American generative grammar at its birth and establishment in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s. Bulgarian treatment of generativism is analys...
Reflections on the Relation between National Cultures and Innovations in Education - the case of Bulgaria
Pluralism, multiculturalism, leaner autonomy and motivation have become buzz expressions discussed widely both by the Common European Framework of Reference and the European Centre for Modern Languages. However, despite...
Emotions Vocabulary and the Reconceptualisation of Emotions in Ann Radcliffe’s “The Italian; Or, the Confessional of the Black Penitents”
The article undertakes the analysis of Ann Radcliffe’s novel The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797) from a history of literary emotions perspective which, I argue, yields insights into the attitud...
Vicarious Learning in the Translation Classroom: How Can It Influence Students’ Self-efficacy Beliefs?
This action research study aims to analyse the ways in which vicarious learning, one of the sources of self-efficacy beliefs according to Social Cognitive Theory, can materialise in the translation classroom. To achieve...
Система городской навигации города Москвы как проблема мултьтикультурного моделирования лингвистического образа города (The Latinization of Moscow street signs as an approach to urban navigation in a multicultural environment)
The paper discusses directions in the Latinization of Moscow street signs as an approach to facilitating urban navigation in a multicultural environment. Existing transliteration standards are critically reviewed and com...