Building The "Third Space"--Towards Hybridity In Salman Rushdie

The British-Indian author Salman Rushdie is now one of the most remarkable writers with noteworthy achievements among a gallery of modern literary letters using English as their working language. So far, as a prolific writer, Salman Rushdie's oeuvre has included 8 novels, a collection of short stories, works of non-fiction, numerous articles, a screenplay, and a documentary film. And in this thesis I endeavor to take his representative novel Midnight's Children, which has the Booker Prize, the James Tait Black Award and then Booker of Bookers to its credit, as an example for analysis, and the novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories, his collection of short stories East, West and Imaginary Homelands, a collection of reviews and essays, are referred to at times."His life has been a perpetual osmosis of black and white, Muslim and Hindu, Islamic faith and European skepticism, and Eastern myth and Western postmodernism" (Riggs, 1999, p. 550). Rushdie's multi-cultural identity allows him the flexibility to shift perspective freely and offer new angles through which to see the world. In his writing Rushdie attempts to resist Western version of reality and to re-create new independent identities. Since it is impossible to create a new discourse totally independent of Western colonialism, the postcolonial hybridity is inevitably the result of the trial interrogation of Western colonial discourse. This thesis is making the point that since Rushdie's writing interpolates between different literary traditions of both the Eastern and Western worlds he has been striving to construct a condition of hybridity in his literary practice, through which he attempts to build the "third space" (a term from H. K. Bhabha).The thesis is divided into four parts. Chapter One introduces Salman Rushdie - his life, his works - and illustrates the item the "third space" and furthermore constructsthe notion of Rushdie's hybridity on the base of three scholars' views. Chapter Two and Chapter Three are devoted to Rushdie's cultural and stylistic hybridity from three aspects respectively. Chapter Four is a conclusion of the above. Through his efforts, "melange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that", Rushdie trys to make "newness enter the world" (IH, 394).