Historicity

Paper Summary:

This paper describes historicity in post-modern fiction as yielding a sense of radical disjunction or of combinations of events that do not take place either chronologically or in terms of historical veracity. It discusses examples of historicity in two modernist postmodern novels - Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" and Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man".

From the Paper:

"In Farishta's hallucinations, as Rushdie implies, his dream-images of the Prophet Muhammad offer him, in the latter years of the 2oth century, no modern day comfort. Controversial portions of The Satanic Verses, including this one, examine, in fragmented post-modern fashion, the imagined (by this troubled fictional character) the roots of a belief system, Islam, that within this character's hallucinations are not what they are historically; theologically; and traditionally believed to be. Here, therefore, Rushdie playfully "rewrites" Islamic history, in the form(s) of far-fetched dreams of an unstable and unreliable character. Farishta hallucinates, among other things that the wives of the Prophet Muhammad, founder of Islam, moonlight as prostitutes, and that Muhammad himself is (in Farishta's strange dreams) but a "for profit" Prophet."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Brucker, C. Ralph Ellison 1914- [from Survey of American literature], {online], April 21, 2006. Available from: http://www.lfa.atu.edu/Brucker/Ellison.html.
• Ellison, R. Invisible man, The Modern Library, New York, 1994.
• Harper, B. P. (1994). Framing the margins: The social logic of postmodern culture, Oxford UP, New York.
• Historicity. Wikipedia, 2006 [online]. April 20, 2006. Available from: http://www.answers.com/topic/historicity.html.
• Phillips, A. The satanic furor, Maclean's, 27 February 1989, [n.p.].

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