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Contemporary British Fiction

Contemporary British Fiction. Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange (1962) John Fowles: The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) Angela Carter: The Bloody Chamber (1979) OR Amy Sackville: The Still Point (2010) Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children (1980)

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Contemporary British Fiction

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  1. Contemporary British Fiction • Anthony Burgess: A ClockworkOrange (1962) • John Fowles: The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) • Angela Carter: The Bloody Chamber (1979) ORAmy Sackville: The Still Point (2010) • Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children (1980) • Julian Barnes: Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) OR A History of the World in 10 ½ chapters (1989) • Tibor Fischer: Under the Frog (1992)

  2. Postmodernism

  3. Postmodernism • vague and fashionable term (1980s) • meaning and value: disputedno (little) perspective (How to define our own age?) • poststructuralism and deconstruction„meaning is neither inherent in language, nor in the world of things but is ‘constructed’ by conventional frameworks of thought and language” (Gray, 1992) • individuality, human character, freedom: constructs of a particular culture and time(vs. universal truths, absolute authenticity)

  4. Postmodern • result of meaninglessness: play with styles and values • outside factors: threats of extinction of humanity (nuclear holocaust, despoiling the environment/planet, overpopulation)=> sense of despair and disillusionment (vs. 60s)

  5. modernism (early 20th c.): breaks with artistic traditions and conventions, experimentation • with time the experiment becomes conventional • countereffect: pre-modernist writing reshaped cf. Fowles (pastiche, invention) • No clear barrier between modernism and post-modernism(cultural history: palimpsest)

  6. Ihab Hassan: The Postmodern Turn (1987) hints

  7. postmodern texts look at themselves as texts (Ø illusion, isolated from author and extratextual reality) often reveal the instability of language meanings are constructionsontological uncertainty: which is the real world? fragmentation • freedom of interpretation (limitless?) • SalmanRushdie: magicrealism (plausible and impossible) • reader’s role, author’srole: death of the author?

  8. How far is it relevant in the 21st century?Post-postmodernism? Pseudo-modernism?re-evaluation of traditional values and communities (religion, nation) interactivity / participation of the recipientconcept of author (cf. Wikipedia)

  9. Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie(b. 19 June 1947)अहमद सलमन रशदीاحمد سلمان رشدی

  10. Salman Rushdie • born in Bombay (Mumbai), on 19 June, 1947in a Muslim family of Kashmiri descent • both him and his father were educated in Cambridge • worked for advertising agencies before becoming a full time writer • 1981: success of Midnight’s Children • 1989: Khomeini’s fatwa for Satanic Verses (2,8 m USD)failed assassination attempts (Paddington bombing), hidingdiplomatic tension with Iran • 2007: knighthood • in popular culture: U2, Bridget Jones’s Diary, 4th wife model/actress Padma Lakshmi • movie version of Midnight’s Children (dir: Deepa Mehta) releasedon 2 Nov 2012

  11. Grimus (1975) Midnight's Children (1981) Shame(1983) The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (1987) The Satanic Verses (1988) Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (1992) Homeless by Choice (1992, with R. Jhabvala and V. S. Naipaul) East, West (1994) The Moor's Last Sigh (1995) The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) Fury (2001) Shalimar the Clown (2005) The Enchantress of Florence (2008) Luka and the Fire of Life (2010) Joseph Anton: A Memoir(2012)

  12. India notpresent in English (Victorian) literatureallaspects of English life – acceptthat it is an empire • exception: Rudyard Kipling cf. Peter Walsh in Woolf’s MrsDalloway E. M. Forster: A Passage to India (1924) since mid-20th c.: English literature -> literature(s) in English plurality of writings post-colonialliterature: shift from centre to periphery ”pressuresonculturefrom the imperium” (Edward Said) orientalism: discourse of West about the East, an instrument of power, ”a kind of Western projection onto and will to govern over the Orient” (Orientalism, 1978)

  13. Rushdie: authentical oriental (?) [Aadam Aziz in Heidelberg] ”learned that India – like radium – had been ‘discovered’ by the Europeans […] he was somehow the invention of their ancestors” ‘Taj Mahal was falling down until an Englishman bothered to see to it.’ Bombay, where I grew up, was a city in which the West was totally mixed up with the East. The accidents of my life have given me the ability to make stories in which different parts of the world are brought together, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes both—usually both. Jack Livings, Interview with Salman Rushdie magical realism only couleur locale ?

  14. Midnight’s Children (1981) • story of independent India and Pakistan and the life of narrator Saleem Sinai born at midnight, August 15, 1947, simultaneously with the independence of his country; • events of Saleem’s life coincide with major historicalevents on the subcontinent (wars, state of emergency under Indira Gandhi); • physical disintegration of Saleem (loss of hair, finger, memory, virility) and the disintegration of India • story of Saleem’s family from 1915 to 1947 to 1978with disruption and restoration of straight line of succession (Saleem a changeling, his bastard son, Aadam Sinai, by Major Shiva, “true great-grandson of his great-grandfather”)

  15. disintegration of Saleem’s body • cf. the fragmented nature of Aadam’s learning his future wife’s body through the hole in the sheetlater: Amina learning to love his husband ‘At this rate there will always be something fresh about him to love; so our marriage just can’t go stale.’

  16. betrayal: history of independent India is a betrayal of hopes and expectations; Saleem’s betrayal of his generation • variousinfidelitieswithin the familiesform: pattern of Arabian Nights (Saleem-Padma: Scheherazade-King Shahryar); • the fantastic and the grotesque:Saleem’s ability to communicate with all the midnight’s children; ReverendMotherdreamingothers’ dreams • political events summed up at almost journalistic level

  17. Midnight’s Children History: personal, family, national Identity: personal, family, national Autobiography – authenticity? "People assumethatbecausecertainthings in the characteraredrawnfromyourownexperience, it justbecomesyou. In thatsense, I’venever felt that I’vewritten an autobiographicalcharacter." – unreliable narrator? (rememberedtruth vs. factualaccuracy) authorcreatesnarrator -> narratorcreatesstory

  18. Memory and its failures Understanding and its failures storytelling: narrationproblematised – Padma • ‘…bydayamong the picklevats, bynightwithinthesesheets, I spendmytime at the greatwork of preserving. Memory, aswellasfruit, is being savedfrom the corruption of the clock.’ • ‘But here is Padma at myelbow, bullyingme back into the world of linearnarrative, the universe of what-happened-next:”At thisrate” – Padmacomplains – ”you’ll be twohundredyears old beforeyoumanage to tellaboutyourbirth.” • pressures of ‘what-happened-nextism’ • ‘Padma has startedgettingirritatedwhenevermynarrationbecomesself-conscious, whenever, like an incompetentpuppeteer, I reveal the hands holding the strings.’ (cf. Fowles)

  19. David Lodge on Magic Realism When marvelous and impossible events occur in what otherwise purports to be a realistic narrative[…]All of these writers have lived through great historical convulsions and wrenching personal upheavals, which they feel cannot be adequately represented in a discourse of undisturbed realism. David Lodge, The Art of Fiction (1992) G. García Márquez: HundredYears of Solitude(1967)Jorge Amado: DonaFlor and HerTwoHusbands(1966) implication: history itself may be a form of fiction

  20. comic vs. a great national epic • humour present (as usual with magic realism), yet the tragic tone is overwhelming • ‘the water shortage had reached the point where milkmen could no longer find clean water with which to adulterate the milk’ • ‘Mumtaz noticed with concern that her mother was swelling, month by month. The unspoken words inside her were blowing her up.’

  21. religion • India: Hindu and Muslim (Christian minority) • ‘…he was caught in a strange middle ground, trapped between belief and disbelief […] And he was knocked forever into that middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve.’ • ‘and as he aged and the world became less real he began to doubt his own beliefs, so that by the time he saw the God in whom he had never been able to believe or disbelieve, he was probably expecting to do so.’ • in modernism: existential crisisin postmodernism: playfulnes with anything, condition of doubt denial of the existence of the sacred (vs. profane)typical trouble in the communication between west & east

  22. http://midnightschildren.com/

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