Honors Theses
Date of Award
2006
Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Department
English
First Advisor
Al Lopez
Relational Format
Dissertation/Thesis
Abstract
Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children is a two-pronged postcolonial critique. Saleem Sinai's metanarrative of emancipation that also overhauls the postcolonial episteme.^ While Rushdie's confrontation of native subjectivity and the epistemic structures that inhibit the native's agency are plainly rooted in the postcolonial conversation, the major theorists in the field do not offer models of opposition that properly house his intervention. The work of Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak is representative of the trajectory of the strategies of discursive opposition to the employed by postcolonial theory. None of these theorists' metaphors for opposition create sufficient distance from the knowledge structures that prevent the postcolonial object from attaining his subje ctivity. For this reason, I wish to turn to the American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty for a theory of literature that provides an alternative way to think about and read the quest for centrality in Midnight's Children. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty claims that literature fulfills two purposes. It provides illustrations of what private perfection - a self-created autonomous human life - can be like'' and "gives us details about kinds of suffering being endured by people to whom we had previously not attended (CIS xiv, xvi). In addition, he thinks of both the narrative and aesthetics as tools that redescribe various parts of human experience. Redescription is the central metaphor in Rortian criticism. It stresses reading the novel for descriptions of self creation and cruelty that broaden or deepen conceptions of My contention is that by analyzing Midnight's Children in these terms the full scope of Rushdie's postcolonial critique can be seen in a Cruelty, in the postcolonial violence^ and is a shared human experience. different and valuable light. context, takes the form of epistemic overcome through the creative process, Rushdie's aesthetic. which relies on creating increasing epistemic is a redescription of the knowledge structures key to the remission of the native to an object position. Rushdie's metanarrative should be read as a redescription of the postcolonial condition which improves on the possibilities for native agency presented by the three Rortian reading" of the novel, a discussion of postcolonial theory is necessary. 3
Recommended Citation
Bonner, Zachary Mori, "Beyond the Binary: Rorty Rushdie" (2006). Honors Theses. 2175.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/2175
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