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There is the feeling that Rushdie is toying with the concept of freedom of speech in this story as well as destroying the concept of the East as mysterious. Rushdie uses English to tell his story, but he incorporates the Indian oral tradition without any kind of chronological structure to the story. He deconstruct the binary opposition of East and West. He himself is between the Orient and the Occident and he chooses to use both structures, combining Britain and India (Buran 10).
The factors of race and gender complicate the relations of class in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Wole Soyinka's "Telephone Conversation," and Jean Rhys "Let Them Call It Jazz" in various ways. In Heart of Darkness, the story is centered on the typical male experience, which tends to alienate the female reader from the very "mannish" story. There is some speculation that Marlow and Kurtz's sexist views are part of the "horror" that Conrad was conveying as Marlow reveals a world that is very clearly split into two different realms -- male and female, "the first harboring the possibility of 'truth' and the second dedicated to the maintenance of delusion" (Moore 198-199).
In "Telephone Conversation," the narrator has a conversation with a landlady concerning an apartment for rent. The first sentence of the poem reveals a pun that incites curiosity and the reader is made aware that things aren't as they seem. "The price seemed reasonable, location / Indifferent" (Soyinka, lines 1-2). Indifferent can be read as unbiased, rather than neither good or bad, which foreshadows the landlady's biasness toward the narrator. Through description...
She uses her good manners to implicitly tell him that the color of his skin is a problem, and he seems almost grateful for her polite candor, even if it is only a facade for her true ugly nature.
In "Let Them Call It Jazz," Rhys makes it obvious that gender is not something that brings people together in a society; rather Rhys is suggesting that race and class trump gender. This is seen in the landlady's betrayal, which ultimately, the reader views as more of a betrayal than the fact that Selina is alienating us with her incorrect and vulgar use of the English language.
Works Cited
Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. Heinemann; Expanded edition, 1996.
Buran, Abdullah. Salman Rushdie's East, West: Deconstructing the Binary Division
Between Orient and Occident. Germany: Druck und Bindung: Books on Demand,
2008.
Kumar, Amitava. Passport Photos. University of California Press; 1st edition, 2000.
Malan, Robin. New Poetry Works: A Workbook Anthology. Davidphilip, 2007.
Moore, Gene M. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: A Casebook. Oxford University Press; illustrated edition, 2004.
Rukhaiyar, U.S., Prasad, Amar Nath. Studies in Indian Poetry in English. New Delhi:
Sarup & Sons. 2002.
Rushdie, Salman. East, West. "The Prophet's Hair." Vintage; 1st International ed edition,
1995. pp. 33-60.
Works Cited
Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. Heinemann; Expanded edition, 1996.
Buran, Abdullah. Salman Rushdie's East, West: Deconstructing the Binary Division
Between Orient and Occident. Germany: Druck und Bindung: Books on Demand,
2008.
Salman Rushdie is one of the most famous authors of the modern era. In the tradition of Gabriel Marquez, Rushdie sweeps the reader up in his novel, Midnights Children, like the book by Marquez that obviously had a great deal of influence on Rushdie, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Midnights Children is a postmodern look at the modern fairytale that Salman Rushdie weaves for those who wish to pick up
Salman Rushdie: Contemporary Socrates of the 'Global Village' When the Anglo-Indian writer Salman Rushdie's controversial novel The Satanic Verses was first published in 1989, the book ignited an international firestorm, replete with book burnings, massive public protests, and even the issuance of a fatwa, or a religious death sentence against Rushdie by Iran's hard-line religious leader, then-Ayatollah Khomeini. Since then, sixteen years have past, Rushdie is still alive, and writing. Since
Meanwhile, the family became so poor that Grandmother had to sell the porcelain dishes, the silverware, and the linen napkins. But she kept out one set for him to eat from, because an aristocrat couldn't eat from ordinary dishes. One Saturday night he got an idea for an invention. The children took their baths on Saturday night in a washtub in the kitchen. By the last child, the water
In the story, he claims that a big title wave hinder him from doing what he wanted to do. However, when he accomplished his goal, he claimed the title wave was not there at all. The reader could take as the water/title wave to be a metaphor to represent the obstacles he had to go through in order to become a good storyteller again. Part fantasy, part allegory and always clever
Respect and the Thought Police'": Illustrating Socrates' "Gadfly Analogy" from Plato's Apology Webster's New American Dictionary defines "gadfly" as "a person who annoys, esp. By persistent criticism" (p. 213). By that definition, Socrates' critics certainly would have considered him one. (It is easier to decide someone is a mere "gadfly," rather than an astute social critic, or a rare perceiver of truth should one feel offended by the "gadfly." )
But Rushdie's relationship with English as a writer, even as a critic of the former British Empire, is far more complex. In Salman Rushdie's text "English is an Indian literary language," Rushdie states that the output of literature in English by Indian writers is more interesting and vital than those produced in India's native languages. Through creativity and dialogue with the oppressor, a great literature has been generated. India's