Repository logo
  • English
  • 中文
Log In
Have you forgotten your password?
  1. Home
  2. College of Liberal Arts / 文學院
  3. Foreign Languages and Literatures / 外國語文學系
  4. Representation of Cultural Hybridity and Migrant Aesthetics in Salman Rushdie's Three Novels
 
  • Details

Representation of Cultural Hybridity and Migrant Aesthetics in Salman Rushdie's Three Novels

Date Issued
2006
Date
2006
Author(s)
Kung, Shao-ming
DOI
en-US
URI
http://ntur.lib.ntu.edu.tw//handle/246246/52656
Abstract
This dissertation attempts to explore how cultural hybridity and migrant aesthetics are represented in Salman Rushdie’s three major novels, including Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses, and The Moor’s Last Sigh. The three texts are sequential in the sense that they embody the symbolic trajectories of Rushdie’s migration. Besides, they are interrelated by the emerging postcolonial agendas in his writings. The Introductory chapter gives a brief review of current Rushdie scholarship and then foregrounds significant topics concerning Rushdie: his mixed cultural background and ambivalent positionality, his configuration of cultural hybridity, as well as his migrant aesthetics specific to his postcolonial writings. Chapter One reads Midnight’s Children as a postcolonial novel, laying emphasis on the importance of memory to Saleem Sinai’s representation of Indian history and to his exilic re-imagination of homeland. Then I discuss key leitmotifs Saleem employs in his narrative—a perforated sheet, a silver spittoon, a fisherman’s pointing finger, as well as the metaphor of “chutney.” These leitmotifs reflect Rushdie’s cogent critique of contemporary “postcolonial India”—the complicity of the postcolonial bourgeoisie with British colonial legacy, the partition of Pakistan with India, as well as Indira Gandhi’s suppression of the “midnight’s children” during the period of Emergency. Chapter Two, which discusses The Satanic Verses, focuses on the metaphor of “translation,” which is culturally and symbolically performed by postcolonial immigrants in London. Rushdie deliberately invokes the issues of transgression and transformation that confront his migrant characters to negotiate between continuity and discontinuity, tradition and modernity, Englishness and Indianness. elucidates how Rushdie invokes the issues of transgression and transformation that confront his migrant characters to negotiate between continuity and discontinuity, tradition and modernity, Englishness and Indianness. Chapter Three examines The Moor’s Last Sigh by exploring the postcolonial metaphor of palimpsest and its multi-layered representations of postcolonial India. Especially, it is through Aurora’s paintings that Rushdie’s privileging of cultural hybridity finds the most elaborate and original expressions. Her palimpsestic canvases represent a politico-aesthetic commitment, which aims at re-collecting the pluralist values destroyed by the monolithic claim of the Hindu fundamentalism. The Moor’s Last Sigh proves to be Rushdie’s swan’s song of cultural hybridity, whose decay can be re-deemed only through an undying hope of aesthetic re-imagination. In the Conclusion, I consolidate the major arguments presented in the preceding chapters and reiterate my argument about of reading Rushdie’s writings through his configuration of cultural hybridity and through the lens of migrant aesthetics. Against the narrow spectrum of racism, nativism and nationalism, Rushdie’s novels, I contend, clear a postcolonial space which foregrounds impurity, mongrelization, mélange, hybridity. In addition, the thematic concerns in Rushdie’s later works will be briefly explored. With a particular emphasis on the transnational effects of global cultures and the anxiety over Islamic terrorism, there is a “global turn” in Rushdie’s post-fatwa fiction, which displays not only the writer’s attempt to “open up the universe a little more” but also a critical dialogue with the world.
Subjects
遷徙美學
重複的母題
羊皮紙的隱喻
migrant writings
cultural hybridity
migrant aesthetics
memory and imaginary homelands
leitmotif
cultural translation
metaphor of palimpsest
SDGs

[SDGs]SDG16

Type
thesis
File(s)
Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Name

ntu-95-D89122002-1.pdf

Size

23.53 KB

Format

Adobe PDF

Checksum

(MD5):0b139243be24002088edfb9bca5d25ec

臺大位居世界頂尖大學之列,為永久珍藏及向國際展現本校豐碩的研究成果及學術能量,圖書館整合機構典藏(NTUR)與學術庫(AH)不同功能平台,成為臺大學術典藏NTU scholars。期能整合研究能量、促進交流合作、保存學術產出、推廣研究成果。

To permanently archive and promote researcher profiles and scholarly works, Library integrates the services of “NTU Repository” with “Academic Hub” to form NTU Scholars.

總館學科館員 (Main Library)
醫學圖書館學科館員 (Medical Library)
社會科學院辜振甫紀念圖書館學科館員 (Social Sciences Library)

開放取用是從使用者角度提升資訊取用性的社會運動,應用在學術研究上是透過將研究著作公開供使用者自由取閱,以促進學術傳播及因應期刊訂購費用逐年攀升。同時可加速研究發展、提升研究影響力,NTU Scholars即為本校的開放取用典藏(OA Archive)平台。(點選深入了解OA)

  • 請確認所上傳的全文是原創的內容,若該文件包含部分內容的版權非匯入者所有,或由第三方贊助與合作完成,請確認該版權所有者及第三方同意提供此授權。
    Please represent that the submission is your original work, and that you have the right to grant the rights to upload.
  • 若欲上傳已出版的全文電子檔,可使用Open policy finder網站查詢,以確認出版單位之版權政策。
    Please use Open policy finder to find a summary of permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher's copyright transfer agreement.
  • 網站簡介 (Quickstart Guide)
  • 使用手冊 (Instruction Manual)
  • 線上預約服務 (Booking Service)
  • 方案一:臺灣大學計算機中心帳號登入
    (With C&INC Email Account)
  • 方案二:ORCID帳號登入 (With ORCID)
  • 方案一:定期更新ORCID者,以ID匯入 (Search for identifier (ORCID))
  • 方案二:自行建檔 (Default mode Submission)
  • 方案三:學科館員協助匯入 (Email worklist to subject librarians)

Built with DSpace-CRIS software - Extension maintained and optimized by 4Science