Parody in the context of Salman Rushdie’s magical realistic fiction : midnight’s children, the moor’s last sigh, and shalimar the clown

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2010

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Tekin, Kuğu

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The aim of this dissertation is to trace the function of parody in the context of Salman Rushdie’s magical realistic fiction. The magical realism of Rushdie’s fiction presents a complex Third World experience which constitutes an alternative to, and challenges the Eurocentrism of western culture. The form and content of Rushdie’s novels are so intense and rich that the whole body of his work comes to the fore, not as an outcome of the two clashing civilisations, that is East and West, but rather as an immense medley of the two cultures. While “writing back to the empire”, Rushdie draws on innumerable sources ranging from such grand narratives as Genesis, Iliad, Ramayana, A Thousand and One Nights, Hindu, Persian, Greek, and Norse mythologies, and local cultural traditions, to modern politics mingling fiction and reality in a broad historical perspective, so that his work becomes a synthesis of East and West, an international aesthetic plane where diversities express themselves freely. The dissertation focuses particularly on Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, The Moor’s Last Sigh,and Shalimar The Clown.; it contains an introductory chapter, a theory chapter, including two subchapters, a development chapter with three subchapters which analyse the above mentioned three novels, and a conclusion chapter. The introductory chapter presents an overview of the issues to be investigated in the subsequent chapters. The theory chapter deals with the concepts of colonialism, nationalism, and the past and the present of postcolonial literary theory with reference to its leading theorists, such as M. Foucault, E. Said, H. Bhabha, and other recent critics; this chapter also introduces magical realism by reference to a number of current definitions and approaches. The following three subchapters, which focus on the analyses of the three novels, explore how parody functions both thematically and structurally in relation to Rushdie’s magical realism. The concluding chapter demonstrates that Rushdie’s work creates an unrestrained plane of an international culture where multiple visions and diversities can find a room to assert themselves.

Subject Keywords

English literature., Postmodernism (Literature)

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http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/3/12611466/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/19195

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Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

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Citation Formats

K. Tekin, “Parody in the context of Salman Rushdie’s magical realistic fiction : midnight’s children, the moor’s last sigh, and shalimar the clown,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2010.