Rushdie: Postmodernism and history
| Abstract | This paper has two parts: the first part briefly discusses the idea of 'history' in 'postmodernism'; and the second part discusses Rushdie's idea of historicity (but not history) in his fiction-in particular, Midnight's Children. The concept of history originated from Aristotle's distinction of history, philosophy and poetry, (as history being particular and philosophy being general and poetry combining both the general and the particular), Sidney's definition that historians deal with a particular 'truth', whereas poetry deals with both particular and universal truths, to Hegel's concept of history being a dialectical process of progress of 'Spirit' (GEIST), to the postmodernist concept of history being 'finite' and 'hyperreal', there is a growth in the attitude to history. In the postmodernist concept of history, according to Fukuyama, modern history achieved its goal of universal freedom in the market-oriented liberal democracy of the USA. In Baudrillard's view, real today is, in fact, 'hyperreal' through the creation of virtual images. In place of 'grand narratives', we have finite history. Today the interest of the modern writers is to write history as narrative, where the narrative becomes a demonstration of the art of writing history. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | No categories specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,631 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Only published papers are available at libraries |
Similar books and articlesJ. C. D. Clark (2003/2004). Our Shadowed Present: Modernism, Postmodernism, and History. Stanford University Press.
Leonard Mendes Marsak (1977). The Nature of Historical Inquiry. Huntington, N.Y.,R. E. Krieger Pub. Co..
W. Clark (1995). Narratology and the History of Science. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 26 (1):1-71.
Kaya Yilmaz (2010). Postmodernism and its Challenge to the Discipline of History: Implications for History Education. Educational Philosophy and Theory 42 (7):779-795.
Will Durant (2010). Lessons of History. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks.
Callum G. Brown (2005). Postmodernism for Historians. Pearson/Longman.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads9 ( #113,901 of 548,973 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #63,511 of 548,973 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
