Rushdie, Postmodernism & Postcolonialism :: Essays Papers

Rushdie, Postmodernism & PostcolonialismRushdies Midnights Children, published in 1980, was maybe the seminal text in conceiving opinions as to interplay of post-modern and post-colonial theory. The title of the raw refers to the take in of Saleem Sinai, the novels principal narrator, who is born at midnight August fifteenth 1947, the precise date of Indian independence. From this remarkable coincidence we are at one time drawn to the conclusion that the novels concerns are of the new India, and how mortal born into this new state of the Midnights child, if you will, interacts with this post-colonial state. To characterise the novel as one merely concerned with post-colonial India, and its various machinations, is however a reductive practice. While the novel does at various times diffuse with what it is to be Indian, both pre and post 1947, it is a much more layer and pertaining piece of knead. Midnights Childrens popularity is such that it was to be voted twenty-fifth in a poll conducted by the Guardian, listing the 100 outgo books of the last century, and was also to receive the Booker Prize in 1981 and the begrudge Booker of Bookers in 1993. http//www.bookerprize.co.uk/ Why Midnights Children is much more than of interest to the reader interested in post-colonialism, is possibly due to its strong elements of conjuring trick realism, a literary device that goes hand in hand with postmodernism. perchance the most notable exponent of magic realism in literary works is the Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose One Hundred Years of Solitude compose in 1967 came to be seen as the standard bearer for the genre. Marquez was an undoubted influence on Rushdies work and in Midnights Children in particular, which was to adopt umpteen of the surrealist flights of fancy which characterise One Hundred Years of Solitude. The stipulation was start used in a wider post-colonialist context in an essay by Jacques Stephen Alexis, of the Magical Realis m of the Haitians (Alexis 1956), although the term itself had been in circulation since Franz Roh the German art novice coined it in 1925. Yet the term only became popularised when it was employed to characterise the work of South American writers such as Marquez. More recently the term has come to refer to the inclusion of any mythic material from topical anaesthetic written or oral culture used in coeval narrative. The material is often used to examine the assumptions of Western narrative, which is usually categorized by its rationality and strict linearity.