The paper deals with the identification of proverbs in a literary text, which is believed to be the initial stage in the analysis of paremias in literary context and part and parcel of any paremiostylitic analysis. Proverbs manifest themselves in what the author calls a paremic locus. Paremias are present in a text on the formal level, where a particular proverb is signalled by its structure, either canonical or modified. Proverbs can be identified as well on the semantic plane, although in this case their presence is impossible to ascertain in objective terms. The author analyses the ten novels by Salman Rushdie, which all provide ample evidence of paremic loci.
As the anglophone Indian novel exists in the in-between space between transnational and local cultures, it has repeatedly staged the encounter between a variety of cultural dimensions while remaining acutely aware of the way they interact with historical and political discourse. This essay examines four novels—Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Anita Desai’s In Custody and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide—that have conceived their narratives as a site of encounter between cultures in response to articulations of Indian national identity. The essay stresses the authors’ shared concerns but also the different formal solutions and ideological positions they adopt. Rao—a pre-Partition author—deals with otherness within a nationalist paradigm. Rushdie, Desai and Ghosh, on the other hand, tackle otherness in different modes that are dependent on their writing after Partition and in a climate of growing violence and fundamentalism.
JavaScript jest wyłączony w Twojej przeglądarce internetowej. Włącz go, a następnie odśwież stronę, aby móc w pełni z niej korzystać.