Roaming, wandering, deviation and error : dialogues between Paradise lost and the novels of Salman Rushdie / Mayra Helena Alves Olalquiaga.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Olalquiaga, Mayra Helena Alves, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Rushdie, Salman--Criticism and interpretation.

Rushdie, Salman.

Milton, John, 1608-1674. Paradise lost.

Milton, John.

Criticism and interpretation.

Physical Description:

157 pages ; 21 cm

Place of Publication:

Newcastle upon Tyne : Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016.

Summary:

This book proposes a reading of John Milton's epic Paradise Lost in relation to four novels by the contemporary novelist Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, The Moor's Last Sigh, Fury and The Ground Beneath Her Feet. In such a reading, terms such as influence and inheritance will inevitably, come up. Rather than bypass them, the book refines such terms in order to meet some of the challenges posed by contemporary critical theory in the field of comparative studies. In this more nuanced comparative reading of these texts, which looks beyond a linear paradigm, Jacques Derrida's term destinerrance is taken up as a means for thinking how the work of this "successor" (Rushdie) dialogues with Milton, conferring on the epic an elusive kind of afterlife. Destinerrance will he taken here to signal an ongoing process Of re-signification of texts that does away with the notions of adhesion or similarity, to an original, central point In the case of Milton and his "successor", the fictional work of Salman Rushdie will be seen as constituting sites in, which collaboration and contestation in relation to the epic are simultaneously and continually staged. Rushdie can, then, be seen to interweave Miltonic images of Eden, of the fall and a Satanic discourse of transgression to write territories and characters constituted in the crossings of domains of difference, territories in which colonial past and contemporary cultural formations and power structures are continually questioned and negotiated. In this way, his work enacts a re-signifying of Milton's text, mediating, in these deviations, the way it reaches us today. Book jacket.

Contents:

Chapter 1 Derrida's Destinerrance and the Roaming/Wandering/Erring of Miltonic Influence 13

Chapter 2 Hybridity, Mimicry, Multiculturalism and Cosmopolitanism: Rushdie and "Post-Colonial" Critical Theory 45

Chapter 3 Salman Rushdie's "Fallen" Narratives: A Destinerrant Dialogue with Paradise Lost 77.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 153-157).

ISBN:

9781443887250

1443887250

OCLC:

938999255

Publisher Number:

99967721881