The Reconstruction Of The Third Space

Salman Rushdie is one of the most important postcolonial diasporic writers in western postmodern literature. In 2008, Salman Rushdie published a new novel---The Enchantress of Florence. The Enchantress of Florence is generally regarded as Rushdie’s most coherent and readable novel. This novel is filled with magical powers, fantasy dreams and illusions, along with unique storytelling method and complex themes. The novel is set in the sixteenth century which was a moment of great art and philosophical development both in Florence and in Sikri. Because of the ethnocentrism in the West, it is rare to make connections between these contemporary moments, and yet Rushdie links them. Rushdie seamlessly bridges story and historical events by situating fictional description against the historical background, and putting fictional figures or fictional plots among historical events as intermediating devices-personalized agents of diffusion, discussion, hybridity-migrants across time and space. This thesis intends to bridge literary text and literary theories in a postmodern environment, and analyze the relationship between the Eastern and the Western spaces in The Enchantress of Florence under Homi Bhabha’s Hybridity and Third Space theories. Homi Bhabha has already illustrated these two terms in his essays and works, especially in The Location of Culture. In its dominant form, it is claimed that it can provide a way out of binary thinking, and even permit a destabilizing and restructuring of power.Because of the inter-communities existing in The Enchantress of Florence and Homi Bhabha’s theories, the dissertation focuses on the mutually constituting relationship between order and disorder in The Enchantress of Florence and exploring the ways in which certain places.This thesis consists of four parts. The first chapter makes a brief introduction of Rushdie’s novel and Bhabha’s theory. In the second chapter, the contradictions between the East and the West are illustrated firstly, then deconstructing this binary opposition through the unique storytelling technique. Chapter three is the body part of this thesis, it is a detailed analysis about hybridity elements in the novel, for instance, the confusing time, characters status and the narrative style. It suggests that there are plenty of hybridity elements existing in this new space. What’s more, at the end of this chapter, it also lists the utopian characteristics of this unstable space. Finally, it comes to a conclusion with presenting the major findings, limitations and further studies about this thesis.