The Third Space: Rushdie's Cultural Identity And His Literary Strategy

In the literature circle of English, Salman Rushdie(1947—) V.S. Naipaul(1932—) and Kazuo Ishiguro(1954—) are called The Three Musketeeres of English Migrant Writers. Rushdie is also respected as Godfather of postcolonial novel. The thesis will analyze Rushdie and his works in the postcolonial context, using Homi Bhabha and other postcolonial critics' theories.In Introduction, the thesis will introduce Bhabha's theory of the third space and illustrate the relation between his theory and Rushdie's literature, supplying the reason of using the third space to generalize the writer's cultural identity and his literary world. In Chapter I , the thesis will discuss the splitting and locating of his cultural identity, by analyzing Rushdie's living environment, and will point out the interaction between his experiences as a migrant writer and his literary world, making a natural transition for continuing Chapter II, III, and IV. In Chapter II, the thesis will analyze the cultural hybridity of his literary world through characters, images and intertextuality, taking his Midnight's Children as the specific text. In Chapter III, the thesis will approach Rushdie's idea about the past and nowadays and the relation between them, taking his The Moor's Last Sigh as the specific text. It is the conclusion that the past and nowadays are both in the context of hybridity. At the same time, this novel is the hybrid of the past and nowadays. In Chapter IV, the thesis will discuss the characteristics of truth and fiction of his literary world through the aspect of the true local and the myth beyond human's belief, taking his The Ground Beneath Her Feet as the specific text. This part will go further to discuss the hybridity of Rushdie's literary world. In Chapter V, the thesis will expound Rushdie's literary strategy from the language and the magic realism as a postcolonial discourse. The Conculsion will restate the main view of this thesis and point out the meaning of Rushdie-research in nowadays.