Hi all,

Here’s a link to a NYT article about the novels shortlisted last Tuesday for this year’s Booker Prize:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/10/books/10book.html?em

Much of the media attention on the shortlist has focused on the fact that Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence made it to the Booker longlist but did not survive the cut to the shortlist. According to the Times, this both “startled and delighted” British critics, an amusing observation that I think reflects the fanfare, commotion, and controversy that the Booker’s judging decisions always seems to incite.

While nobody would argue against the fact that Rushdie is an immensely talented writer, I think it’s refreshing to see some new faces on the shortlist, including two first-time novelists. After winning both 1993’s “Booker of Bookers” prize and this year’s “Best of the Bookers” award, suffice it to say that Rushdie has enjoyed his moment – or decade – in the sun. In addition, as the article points out, Rushdie hasn’t enjoyed a real critical success with any of his recent novels. The judges should focus on the best new novels each year when making their final selections, instead of allowing Rushdie’s status as the end-all-be-all to Booker-prize-winning authors to sway their decisions. They appear to have done just this.

Interestingly, however, the judges appear to feel a need to qualify the decision not to include Rushdie on the shortlist. The Independent reported that Michael Portillo, chair of the judges, said that The Enchantress of Florence “was not one of the six books for us,” but that “It does not mean it would not be for anybody else – it easily could be.” Hmm. Portillo’s statement could be an attempt to temper any outrage felt at Rushdie’s not being included among the finalists, but does he really need to qualify the decision like that?

It’s also exciting to see that this year’s final selections continue the trend of prizing works set in former British colonies (or produced by authors living in former British colonies). The shortlist includes finalists from India, Australia, and Ireland. This year’s prize winner will be announced on October 14th.

- Sophie

The titles are:

Aravind Adiga The White Tiger
Gaynor Arnold Girl in a Blue Dress
Sebastian Barry The Secret Scripture
John Berger From A to X
Michelle de Kretser The Lost Dog
Amitav Ghosh Sea of Poppies
Linda Grant The Clothes on Their Backs
Mohammed Hanif A Case of Exploding Mangoes
Philip Hensher The Northern Clemency
Joseph O’Neill Netherland
Salman Rushdie The Enchantress of Florence
Tom Rob Smith Child 44
Steve Toltz A Fraction of the Whole

Hi all! Happy summer. Here’s a great podcast interview with Salman Rushdie on the topic of his new novel. He has the charm turned up full blast and even makes a cute joke about all the ‘post’ labels (-modern, -colonial) affixed to his work.

In lieu of a Rushdie picture I am posting this beautiful depiction of a tawny owl. The resemblance is obvious.

Enjoy!

-Molly Young

Here’s an interesting article on Rushdie’s well-received new novel, The Enchantress of Florence, and the culture of literary-celebrity that has followed Rushdie following the fatwah.

While our class has regretfully come to an end (well, for you anyway.  I’ve got this looming stack of your impressive work to get through), I hope that you will take a chance to read this article on the announcement of a 40th year anniversary Best of the Booker prize.  You will find many of the selections to be familiar and I hope you will take a moment to predict, laud, discredit, or in some way give voice to the nature of prizing oneself, twice.

On a much more serious note, I am posting an extraordinary paper from our class.  It was a pleasure to read and is exemplary as a piece of literary criticism and more generally as a model of clear and gorgeous prose.coetzeegordimer

I have decided to focus my paper on the global literary field and the marketing of post colonial literature with regards, specifically to indian authors such as Rushdie and Roy and Huggans article on the Post-Colonial exotic.

There has been quite a large number of indian authors who have produced literary works of a similar magical realistic style which has been in many cases seen as an imitation of Rushdie. it deals with the domestication of the exotic and the tendancy of these authors to portray India in a certain light; of robust pickles, succulent sweet fruit and explosions of colour. The line of foreign territory not crossed by these authors in fear of alienating the foreign readers too much is of great interest.

The commercialising of education and the way in which money is the driving force nowadays of such a field as literature is rather unfortunate. Authors whose private lives and celebrity status affect their book sales tend to become treasonous to themselves and lose their depth of content in order to provide the consuming public with something more digestible for a light read before embarking on a beach holiday in goa and the spin offs that these books have on areas such as the travel and fashion industry is rather suspicious….  

My paper will look at the role of history, professionalism, and isolation and their effects on romance in The English Patient and Remains of the Day. The romantic relationships under consideration are those of Almasy and Katherine, Kip and Hana, and Stevens and Miss Kenton. I chose these novels for their overlapping but differing perspectives on the connections between love and war.
Almasy’s professional role and political ties in The English Patient coupled with the isolation of the desert backdrop make for an intricate and difficult romance with Katherine. Also, Kip and Hana begin and end their love story precisely because of the political conditions surrounding them. Similarly, the political and professional role of Stevens makes for stressed relations with Miss Kenton in Remains of the Day.
I will analyze these complex romantic relationships depicted in order to understand the ways in which specific characters either achieve or fail to reciprocate love. I would also like to isolate and analyze how race, politics, and the public world influence the characters’ abilities to communicate and to endure in reciprocal love. Moreover, I will argue that the love relationships within these two works developed as they did only because of the Second World War and the divisions that occurred as a result.

- Julie Mohamed

As India celebrated its 50^th year of independence in 1997, Salman Rushdie boldly proclaimed in a letter to The New Yorker that “”Indo-Anglian” literature represents perhaps the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books.” This declaration, repeated in an introduction to a book on Vintage Indian literature between 1947 and 1997. This statement caused a stir in the Indian literature community, especially among older theoreticians who noted Rushdie’s inability to write in any lanuage other than English as evidence for his strong bias. Later on that year, Arundati Roy, another author of the “Indo-Anglian” genre, won the Booker prize for her novel, The God of Small Things. Certain similarities between Rushdie’s prize winner, Midnight’s Children and Roy’s novel suggests some critical aspects of what the western audience, including Booker judges, value in postcolonial Indian literature. Both Rushdie and Roy are themselves outsiders to mainstream Hindu-centric India. Rushdie, an atheist born to Sunni Muslim parents, moved to England at the age of eleven and remained there until past his college education, while Roy, born to a Syrian Christian mother and a Bengali Hindu father who abandoned her, spent her youth in several different cities within India, including a brief stint in Italy. Both Midnight’s Children and The God of Small Things maintain this outsider perspective with their protagonists, Saleem Sinai and the fraternal twins Rahel and Estha. In this paper, I will argue that the perspective of a exotic digestible outsider is a key element of what the Booker prize rewards in postcolonial Indian literature. Moreover, I will argue that these novels worldwide success are also because the ability of the authors to balance their novels against the expected dual readership, and include components uniquely aimed at each of its two main readership groups, the Western audience, and the literate English-reading Indian population.

- Vivek

My paper seeks to explore the differential representations of history in Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.  These two South African novels, dealing with similar issues, grapple with the idea of Apartheid and how its historical domination should influence the narrative, if at all.  Gordimer was quoted to say, “My novels are anti-apartheid, not because of my personal abhorrence of apartheid, but because the society that is the very stuff of my work reveals itself”.  This outlines a very deterministic style of narrative in which history defines the novel absolutely.  With this in mind, The Conservationist gives a fuller sense of the consciousness of a certain time of South Africa; history becomes the main character of the novel.  In stark contrast, Coetzee claims, “History is nothing but a certain kind of story that people agree to tell each other”.  It would seem that Disgrace follows this idea with its random brutality and search for meaning, in that it, to some degree, ignores history and defines itself in its own terms.  Although the authors have strong words about history, the dichotomy between these novels is more complicated than relying on history versus ignoring history.  My paper seeks to delve into the nuances of this relationship.

-Graham Rogers

My paper looks to investigate the role of empty space as a driving force behind characters’ actions within The English Patient and Disgrace. A number of characters in these novels seem plagued by empty spaces of all varieties; for instance, the geographical gaps between ‘home’ and the current setting, the cultural disparities suffered by migrants, the physical distance between one’s past and present, and the mental separation from both other characters and the narrative action, take their toll on Lurie, Kip, and Almasy (to name a few).  These gaps perpetuate the motifs of the homeless wanderer and the exiled individual, fuel the decontextualization of individuals who land in ‘the space between’, and alter the responsibility, free will, and actions of their inhabitants. Looking at the interplay between decontextualization and action or inaction, my paper will consider the possibility that people’s decisions led them into the strange limbo between places, times, and values. While the disparities between different characters’ situations lead to ambiguities in the relationship between empty space and free will, they all raise interesting points about forgiveness for one’s lack of action: those occupying the empty spaces are seemingly doomed to reflect upon their situations without achieving peace. Thus, within these novels, direct action tends to transform the conquerer into the victim. What does this mean for the Booker Prize and England itself, taking into account the fact that the books were produced in former colonies?

- Manjula Raman