عنوان

Postsecularism and the ethics of ethno-religious pluralism in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and Zadie Smith's NW

TL48198

انگلیسی

Postsecularism and the ethics of ethno-religious pluralism in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and Zadie Smith's NW

[Thesis]

[Thesis]

[Thesis]

[Thesis]

Christopher J. Tumminello

Rizzuto, Nicole

Georgetown University

2015

59

Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-1-321-71231-5

M.A.

English

Georgetown University

2015

What I aim to accomplish below is an analysis of the commitment exhibited within The Satanic Verses and NW to portraying the complexities of the relationship between the religious and the secular in a postcolonial and postmodern age. Through a thorough and intricate depiction of the presence of difference in the urban center of London, both texts are clearly committed to establishing an ethics of ethno-religious pluralism in the Western metropolis. I propose that this appeal to ethics mirrors that of Kwame Anthony Appiah's notion of the ethical universal, since both texts make narrative and aesthetic maneuvers that emphasize their concern with humanism and the power of the individual. In The Satanic Verses this is on display through a form of metafiction that implicates all narratives in the web of discourse, resulting in an equivalence of all texts, from the novel itself to the Qur'ān. While Rushdie was evidently eager to contest the ideas of fundamentalist Islam throughout the novel, this metafictional move confirms that even his own authority is highly questionable, and thus his own text is up for equal contestation. Combined with its attentiveness to Islamic beliefs and history, The Satanic Verses illustrates a type of critical, postsecular ambivalence that values tolerance, and the existence of a pluralism that requires constant confrontation and negotiation.

Ethics; Literature; Political science

Language, literature and linguistics;Philosophy, religion and theology;Social sciences;NW;Pluralism;Rushdie, Salman;Smith, Zadie;The Satanic Verses

Mian, Ali Altaf

Rizzuto, Nicole

English

Georgetown University

1679935909; 1587418

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y