Identity and Storytelling in Salman Rushdie's Selected Novels

• Autor(a) principal: Talita Cassemiro Paiva Alves
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFMG
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/45691
• topic: Storytelling; Identity; Hybridity; Rushie, Salman, 1947- – Crítica e interpretação; Ficção inglesa – História e crítica; Identidade na literatura

Based on Jacques Lacan’s idea that writing is a repetition of the mirror stage through language, this dissertation argues that storytelling provides the narrator, or the storyteller, the opportunity to rethink his life experience and to build up another layer of self-knowledge in his/her identity. This dissertation analyzes the relation between storytelling and the construction of personal, collective, and national identities in four novels by Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children (1981), Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), and The Enchantress of Florence (2008). As Rushdie’s novels are usually considered part of postcolonial literatures, I use Homi Bhabha’s concepts of mimicry, hybridity, and in-betweenness in order to better understand the storytellers of the aforementioned novels as representations of Indian national identities.