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Published in August 2015
Svenja Menkhaus
The Metaphysics of Migration
On Border-Crossing and
Uninhabitable Transitory Spaces
in Salman Rushdie‘s Novels
1st Edition 2015. 280 pages, € 39,80.
ISBN 978-3-86628-544-6
Reading Rushdie’s novels one
quickly notices that most of his characters are migrants crossing borders. What
happens to these migrant protagonists during their border-crossing and what
meaning is given to the borders they cross?
Departing from the Lotmanian premise that all action of a novel is linked to a
norm defying action violating a certain normative boundary or even a physical
border between fictional spaces, this book proposes to conceive of the border
in Rushdie’s novels, as more than just a demarcation between places. The border
is narratively enlarged to a space: the Uninhabitable Transitory Space of the
Border. In this space the characters of Rushdie’s novels change profoundly,
reinvent themselves as much as the adjacent places. Hence the Uninhabitable
Transitory Space of the Border becomes their space of identity construction.
Part of this construction of identities is that unanswerable, metaphysical
questions about the human condition are once again asked. Rushdie uses this
realm of the imagination to juxtapose different value systems based on various
systems of belief. Therefore, the Uninhabitable Transitory Space of the Border
permits to question all basic assumptions concerning religious belief and even
scientific models like the Big Bang theory – ultimately unveiling science as a
secular system of belief in which any assumption may only be held to be true
until another assumption takes its place...
The world picture of the
protagonists is shaken by the profound experience of border-crossing and leads
to a critical reevaluation of things otherwise taken for granted. The contents
of this book might be of value not only to literary scholars, but also to
ethnologists interested in postmodern intertwining of religious and secular
world pictures, since it offers a broad study of cross-cultural and
interreligious links in Rushdie’s novels.
About the Author
Svenja Menkhaus studied English and French
literature and linguistics at the University of Constance. After her graduation
(State Exam and Magistra Artium)
she became a PhD student at the literature department of Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Assmann. She received two
grants to support her PhD project, one by the Gleichstellungsrat
of the University of Constance and another one by the Cusanuswerk.
Her long stays in Great
Britain and Canada, but also her large international circle of friends, have
caused her interest in migration and identity construction. Therefore, she
works on the representation of identity constructions in contemporary novels
focusing on the topic of migration. Her dissertation The Metaphysics of
Migration – On Border-Crossing and Uninhabitable Transitory Spaces in Salman
Rushdie’s Novels deals with the meaning of the border as an Uninhabitable
Transitory Space in Salman Rushdie’s novels.
Today, she teaches English
and French at a grammar school.
The Series of the
Yearbooks <Germanistik in Ireland>
Volume 11 / 2016
Transit oder
Transformation? Sprachliche und literarische Grenzüberschreitungen
Transit or Transformation?
Border Crossings in Language and Literature
Ed. Gillian Pye and Christiane Schönfeld
1st edition / 1.
Auflage 2016, 170 pages/Seiten, € 20,00.
ISBN
978-3-86628-573-6
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