Item Details

title

To Be Born IS to Die: A Study of Spatio-Temporal Impossibility and the Apocalypse in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses

author

Eisinger, Clara Louise

abstract

In the nearly 25 years since its first publication, critics have labeled Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses postmodern, postcolonial, modern, or any combination of the three (as well as religious, antireligious, and other terms on which I do not focus). I argue for an interpretation of the text as postcolonial modern because such a reading allows one to grasp the workings of sublimity and apocalypse in the novel as understood in the context of a migrant worldview. Specifically, the apocalypse as I define it involves a reaching for or gesture towards the impossible, achieved via the road of a sublimity which distorts time, space, and the world of intertextual relations in order to disorient characters and readers, to upset their senses of the world and therefore to enable them to open themselves toward a re-grasping and a re-inventing of said world--a reorientation, a finding of oneself, a growth of one's confidence. This reinvention occurs in a spatiotemporal realm in which realistic conceptions of space are linguistically questioned and messianic, returning views of time usurp linear temporality, enabling a more accurate description of how various populations learn to construct, describe, and represent the experiences which constitute life.

subject

apocalypse

British literature

diaspora

migration/immigration

postcolonial modernism

selfhood

contributor

Hena, Omaar (committee chair)

Klein, Scott (committee member)

Holdridge, Jefferson (committee member)

date

2012-06-12T08:35:43Z (accessioned)

2012-06-12T08:35:43Z (available)

2012 (issued)

degree

English (discipline)

identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/37252 (uri)

language

en (iso)

publisher

Wake Forest University

type

Thesis