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 79
- Downloads 0
A year in review - 2018
A year in review - 2018 of English STudies at NBU
The methodological structure of a language A to language B translation textbook
The paper is based on the author’s experience of writing a Russian-English translation textbook and looks into the methodology of teaching students to translate into their non-mother tongue (language B). It is argued tha...
Helping learners with dyslexia read in English
Dyslexia is a specific learning difficulty which resists conventional teaching methods. The phonological deficit hypothesis of dyslexia determines the present day focus on phonics targeting the primary area of difficulti...
Alice in the Wonderland of Science: Intertextual Figures in Scientific Articles
Since numerous scientific and mathematical concepts can unsurprisingly be found in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the book itself has been a great source of inspiration for many scientists. This paper gives an overvie...
Where Google fails
The paper presents ongoing research in contrastive corpus linguistics with envisaged applications in machine translation (MT) and with focus on Google Translate (GT) performance in English-Bulgarian translation. Structur...