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 83
- Downloads 0
Editor's Note
Editor's Note - English Studies at NBU, Volume 4, Issue 2, 2018
Female 'Weight' in the Nigerian Fiction: Iyayi's ‘Violence’ and Ibezute's ‘Dance of Horror’
This article is a masculinist examination of Festus Iyayi’s Violence and Chukwuma Ibezute’s Dance of Horror. The article despises the ideological stance of some feminists – that women are unfairly treated in society and...
Emotions Across the Essay: What Second-language Writers Feel across Four Weeks’ Writing a Research Essay
Pekrun’s (2000, 2006) questionnaire-based model of academic emotions is widely used. However, Appraisal analysis of qualitative data offers richer detail. This study used Appraisal analysis to assess the subjective attit...
Bulgarian Revival culture - an axiological perspective in the texts of Januarius MacGahan and Stanislas St. Claire
Analyzing the vocabulary and the stylistic techniques in the works of the two authors, dedicated to Bulgaria, the article aims to contribute to a change of the two seemingly contrasting attitudes in their Bulgarian recep...
Mirroring the Society, Mirroring its Hospitals: Hyginus Ekwuazi’s Poetry and the Challenge of Nation-building
Anglophone African poetry has become a significant medium through which African society from the year 2000 to date is mirrored. The younger Anglophone African poets, widely referred to as the poets of the third-generatio...