Constructing The Third Space In Postcolonial Hybridity: A Study Of Magical Realism

What I endeavor to study in my thesis is Midnight's Children, which has won the Booker Prize, the James Tait Black Awards and then Booker of the Bookers. The novel has been claimed as the paradigmatic postcolonial text subverting the notion of received historiography and indigenizing both the language and narrative mode of the colonizing culture. As far as subject is concerned, Midnight's Children reveals the history of India before and after Independence, narrated from the personal perspective of the character narrator Saleem in a story-telling way. Most historical event, were woven into individual life experience, such as his grandparents', parents', uncles', aunts'and his own. The author of this thesis takes up this study at least for two reasons. One is that the neutrality of his postcolonial position enriches our knowledge of postcolonial discourse, and has important realistic meaning. Another reason is that the expatiation of the writer's postcolonial positions from the perspective of magical realism will further our understanding of the artistic feature in the novel.The thesis is going to be divided into six parts: introduction, four main chapters and the conclusion. Chapter one will trace back the prominent position of the author and his masterpiece Midnight's Children. Chapter two will focus on postcolonialism, mainly explaining clearly two most important terminologies, one is"hybridity"and the other is"the third space". In chapter three"magical realism"will be analyzed, then the way in which magical realism is linked to postcolonialism will be interpreted, which will become a key point of accepting my combination of these two study fields in the title. Finally, in chapter four some of the magical realist techniques that are employed to characterize earlier discussed postcolonial position of the author will be explored. The thesis wants to demonstrate that as a form element or a writing style, the magic realism strategies offer Rushdie an appropriate language to articulate his postcolonial thoughts about history and identity. Such a research will show us a literary practice of non-radical postcolonial theory. It can also deepen our knowledge of magical realism, which is not only a literary genre, but also a postcolonial approach to oppose colonial discourse and to embody the hybridity of the postcolonial culture.