Product Description
Magical realism has become almost synonymous with Latin American fiction, but this way of representing the layered and often contradictory reality of the topsy-turvy, late-capitalist, globalizing world finds equally vivid expression in U.S. multiethnic and British postcolonial literature and film. Writers and filmmakers such as Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie have made brilliant use of magical realism to articulate the trauma of dislocation and the legacies of colonialism that people of color experience in the postcolonial, multiethnic world. This book seeks to redeem and refine the theory of magical realism in U.S. multiethnic and British postcolonial literature and film. Frederick Aldama engages in theoretically sophisticated readings of Ana Castillo's So Far from God, Oscar "Zeta" Acosta's Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, and The Moor's Last Sigh, Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, and Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi's Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. Coining the term "magicorealism" to characterize these works, Aldama not only creates a postethnic critical methodology for enlarging the contact zone between the genres of novel, film, and autobiography, but also shatters the interpretive lens that traditionally confuses the transcription of the real world, where truth and falsity apply, with narrative modes governed by other criteria. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Magical Realism
Magical realism has long been associated with Latin American literature and film.Aldama (University of Colorado, Boulder) examines its connections to other cultures as well.In five chapters, plus an introductory discussion of terminology and a coda, he emphasizes the need for precision in distinguishing between aesthetics and ontology while analyzing the films of Dash and Kureishi, the novels of Rushdie, and the Chicano/a narratives of Acosta and Castillo.Aldama posits the importance of storytelling techniques: parody, mimesis-as-play, rebellion, self-reflexivity, and the subaltern voice of the trickster/picaro.Citing such authors as Cervantes and Garcia Marquez as models, he stresses the need for imaginative writers and artists to question the effects of globalizatoin and consumptoin in the modern world.Joining a literature that includes Aldama's edited volume Arturo Islas: The Uncollected Works (2003) and related studes by such critics as Seymour Menton and Edward Said, this thought-provoking analysis should inspire further inquiry and discussion.Summing up: Recommended-all libaries serving upper-division undergraduates and above.Essential-researchers in the fields of comparative literature and film.
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries

Fascinating Study
I've just finished reading this nuanced and rich study of magical realism and finally understand not only how it differs from realism and the fantastic, but also how the make-believe of fiction has been confused with real facts that enable real politics. An excellent book for scholars and creative writers alike.

A valuable contribution to an important field.
This book is a must for serious scholars working on magic realism, postcolonialism, American multiethnic literature, andglobalization.Aldama begins by offering a helpful overview of the critics who have observed and theorized magic realism (or magicorealism, as he dubs it).Even more usefully, he interrogates those theories, explains his own fresh take on the subject, and trains his critical lens specifically and in depth on a spectrum of magic realist works of fiction and film--somealready canonical, some just beginning to come under academic scrutiny.Though written in a complex and theoretically sophisticated style, this book is appropriate for advanced undergraduates.A valuable contribution to an important field.

A poorly re-written dissertation on a much debated topic
This book can only be convincing to those who have no knowledge of the long and by now tedious debate concerning Magical Realism in the field of Latin American literature. What some reviewers call his "innovative" posture is actually based on one of the most conservative and oldest understandings of Magical Realism, Seymore Menton's, articulated in the 1960s. He basically skips over the latest and best criticism by Latin Americanists concerning Magical Realism. He brushes off complex and interesting arguments made by Alberto Moreiras in the space of one paragraph. There is no mention of Moses Valdez who also has written a serious scholarly essay on the topic. Aldama dismisses without confronting in any sustained way the monumental anthology on Magical Realism put out by Lois Parkinson Zamora in recent years. He creates the neologism "magicorealism" or "magicoreelism" (when talking about film) but gives no substantial critical reason for the creation of these terms; At least not one that coherently distinguishes it from any myriad of definitions already available and used when talking about the old term "Magical Realism". There is a lot of confusing argumentation and a lot of neat sounding words that may confuse and convince those who don't know any better of the "greatness" of his argument. However there is nothing here of any real substance. It is little more than a barely re-written dissertation (his dissertation was on a similar topic) that some how made it into press at UT Austin. For any one interested I direct them to Menton's monumental work on the topic, followed by Moreiras, and then the Parkinson Zamora anthology and Moses Valdez's article. All of these people are conversant in the topic, they write in a way that is, for the most part clear and interesting in terms of the theoretical debate.

Editorial Reviews
Book Description: Magical realism has become almost synonymous with Latin American fiction, but this way of representing the layered and often contradictory reality of the topsy-turvy, late-capitalist, globalizing world finds equally vivid expression in U.S. multiethnic and British postcolonial literature and film. Writers and filmmakers such as Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie have made brilliant use of magical realism to articulate the trauma of dislocation and the legacies of colonialism that people of color experience in the postcolonial, multiethnic world. This book seeks to redeem and refine the theory of magical realism in U.S. multiethnic and British postcolonial literature and film. The author engages in theoretically sophisticated readings of Ana Castillo's So Far from God, Oscar "Zeta" Acost's Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, and The Moor's Last Sigh, Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, and Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi's Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. Coining the term "magicorealism" to characterize these works, Aldama not only creates a postethnic critical methodology for enlarging the contact zone between the genres of novel, film, and autobiography, but also shatters the interpretive lens that traditionally confuses the transcription of the real world, where truth and falsity apply, with narrative modes governed by other criteria.

Reviews:
"In this exciting new book, Frederick Luis Aldama has done an outstanding job of remapping 'magical realism"--Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of Afro-American Studies, Harvard University.

"Frederick Luis Aldama offers a vigorous revisionary perspective on postcolonial literature and, more specifically, on the much discussed phenomenon of magicorealism. He has a commanding knowledge of postcolonial theory, and he performs a welcome critical task in demonstrating how it tends to confuse the confines of the academy with the contours of the real world, textuality with ontology. Aldama himself is a political critic, but he sanely argues that the arena of any serious politics is the world of living people and not a text"--Robert Alter, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California at Berkeley and author of Canon and Creativity.

"Providing a lucid and cogent critique of the tendency in contemporary criticism to ontologize "magical realism," a tendency that implicitly articulates a relatively simple mimetic relationship between "magical realism" and various postcolonial cultures, Frederick Aldama instead posits a theory of what he calls "rebellious mimetics" that introduces a complex aesthetic and political mediation in that relationship. In doing so, he weaves together a series of excellent analyses of novels and films by authors and artists as diverse as Salman Rushdie, Ana Castillio, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Julie Dash, and Hanif Kureishi. This is a very significant contribution to the study of this genre"--Abdul R. JanMohamed, Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley.

"In this insightful and forceful study of magical realism, Aldama successfully argues that a true postethnic and postcolonial criticism should not (con)fuse the world with the text. His commentaries on Castillo, Dash, Kureishi, Acosta, and Rushdie force the readers to see these artists' magicorealist works in a new light, thus revealing all of their splendid and contradictory complexities. Aldama's book is a must for anyone who wishes to understand the intricacies of magical realism and the vitality of this genre in contemporary European postcolonial and ethnic American literature and scholarship"--Emilio Bejel, Professor of Spanish American Literature, University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Gay Cuban Nation.

"Through a study of the playful narrative techniques of writers and film-makers such as Dash, Garcia Marquez, Rushdie and Kureishi, Frederick Luis Aldama offers a powerful critique of those who view magical realism as either a means toward postcolonial resistance or as a depiction of some exotic real world. Proposing a "postethnic" approach, Aldama argues convincingly that a reader's or viewer's understanding of the aesthetic dimensions of what he calls "magicorealism" can lead to greater political understanding than older, more ideologically oriented interpretations"--Herbert Lindenberger, Avalon Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, Stanford University.

"It is rare that we come across a truly great book, one in which fierce intelligence asserts itself in pages that truly matter. Such a book assigns us the task of reordering what we have taken as true on the promise of an understanding more profound. In such a book, we are guided by extraordinary vision, by an author with keen insight. In the rarest of occasions, we read words that are wise, words that make broad connection and interrogate a range of thought that afterwards we deem necessary. Postethnic Narrative Criticism is such a book; Frederick Aldama is such an author"--Alfred Arteaga, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley.

This work offers a highly valuable rethinking of magical realism, one that assesses previous work in new ways, one that extends the historical reach of arguments about magical realism, and one that brings a new level of sophistication to arguments about it"--Carl Guitierrez-Jones, Professor and Chair, University of California, Santa Barbara. ... Read more

Product Description
Salman Rushdie (1947- ) has emerged over the years as one of the most controversial figures of our times who excites contrary feelings. But whether admired or criticized, the fact remains that Rushdie, with his commitment to struggle for freedom of expression, for speech to the silenced, for power to the disempowered, is a writer who cannot be ignored.One of the major preoccupations of Rushdie's art is the issue of migrant identity. Many of his characters are migrants drifting from shore to shore in search of some 'imaginary homeland', and obviously the author identifies himself with his migrant personae. Search for identity is perhaps the one recurring theme in Rushdie's works, and the themes of 'double identity', 'divided selves' and 'shadow figures' persist in his writings as correlative for the schismatic/dual identity of the migrant, as well as the necessary confusion and ambiguity of the migrant existence. Rushdie describes the world from this unique point of view of the migrant narrator. He is also conscious of his role in this regard in 're-describing' the world, and thus creating a new vision of art and life.By exercising what he describes as the migrant writer's privilege--to "choose his parents"--Rushdie has 'chosen' his inheritance from a vast repertoire of literary parents, including Cervantes, Kafka, Melville, et al.His novels and stories derive their special flavour from the author's superb handling of the characteristic postmodern devices like magic realism, palimpsest, ekphrasis, etc. Rushdie has been rightly compared with such literary innovators--stalwarts of our times as Gunter Grass, Milan Kundera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, et al. Readers of the present volumes will be taken round the world of Rushdie by erudite scholars whose well-researched, perceptive articles will add substantially to their enjoyment of these fantastic 'imaginary homelands'. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

I have not received the book
Hi
I have yet to receive the book Salman Rushdie: Critical Essays (2 Vols. set)

Please rectify the unfortunate situation as soon as possible.

Thank you

Thaya Pillay ... Read more

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This volume collects together contributions from Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Hindu thinkers who explore the central issues arising from the Salman Rushdie controversy. Shabbir Akhtar's dissection of "Satanic Rites" and its author carries weight because of its fervency and profound sense of hurt. Bhikhu Parekh's analysis of the responses to the Rushdie affair from both the British press and British Muslims passes judgement on the inadequacy of all parties to the events. The Hindu Professor of Political Theory at Hull University, Bhiku Parekh, analyzes how we all got it wrong. ... Read more

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Essays on themes, issues, and approach in Rushdie's first novels and other works. by noted scholar, University of Winnipeg ... Read more

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Salman Rushdie is one of the major novelists of the last two decades. A writer at the forefront of the internationalisation of British fiction, his work is subjected to controversy and, unusually, to both critical and popular acclaim. Catherine Cundy's book, one of the first major studies of Rushdie's oeuvre, explores the diverse cultural influences and tensions that inform his fictions and highlights the complex blend of Eastern and Western ideas that shape his art. A short biographical piece prefaces the book, before moving into a chronological examination of his work. The novels and short stories are considered in relation to narrative technique, filmic influences, mythology, religion and national and sexual politics. Catherine Cundy also addresses the writer's claim of a new hybridised identity and literary style, in the light of current contemporary critical and post-colonial theory. This wide-ranging, accessible and scholarly study of the fictions of Salman Rushdie is also a useful resource where criticism is still largely confined to articles in journals and periodicals. ... Read more

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Salman Rushdie is one of the most widely discusssed but also one of the most generally misunderstood of contemporary writers. From the Booker Prize-winning Midnight's Children to The Satanic Verses which gave rise to the 'Rushdie Affair', Rushdie's work offers special imaginative risks and rewards to the reader. ... Read more

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This book discusses the psychological topography of Korean, Nigerian, and Indian people by exploring the counter-colonial discourse through the study of works by three writers-Yom Sang-Sop, Chinua Achebe and Salman Rushdie-counter-colonial discourse in the works of these three writers strikes back at powerful colonial discourses, Soonsik Kim successfully brings out the Third World "voice" against the colonial legacy of the West and gives readers a taste of being "the Other." This book marks a significant transition in the critical attention of Third World discourse from mere projection to subjective viewpoint. ... Read more

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"A fascinating study, and a major contribution to critical discourse on the literature of exile." - Professor John C. Green, Chair, Department of Theatre, Butler University "A welcome addition to academic library collections in literacy criticism (especially comparative literature), ethnic and immigrant studies, exile and diaspora literature, as well as cultural studies." - James Vroom, Librarian, Carnegie Mellon University"In yoking together with her unsparing research, keen observation, and clearly empathetic stance of three seemingly dissimilar postcolonial writers, Cristina Dascalu has done far more than provide an excellent academic tool and fascinating reading. She has identified and redefined a metaphor for our time." - Professor Francine Ringold, University of Tulsa; Editor-in-Chief, Nimrod International Journal, and Poet Laureate of Oklahoma"Cristina Dascalu writes with a fine touch and knowledge a solid book about exile literature that is clarifying without oversimplifying, convincing, intelligent, poignant.an essential, satisfying reading.a compelling book of extensive scholarship and clear, well-expressed thoughts.A must have, must read book." - Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Poet Laureate of Russia and Distinguished Professor of University of Tulsa"One of the most lucid and concise examinations of exile that I have ever read. Dascalu's meticulous theoretical groundwork allows her to articulate her position in the clearest of terms so that any educated and literate scholar could understand her argument." - Professor G. Matthew Jenkins, Director of the Writing Program, English Department, University of Tulsa"This book holds solid, extensive documentation with an impressive bibliography.the author's daring, courage, and the freshness of her approaches as well as the originality demonstrated in her superb analysis of the texts from Rushdie, Mukherjee and Naipaul is outstanding." - Prof. Dr. Odette Blumenfeld, Chair, Department of English, Al. I. Cuza University of Iasi, Romania ... Read more

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Frequently scorned and reviled, intellectuals have nevertheless played a vital part in shaping our century. They have done this by performing a variety of roles and responding to the diverse national contexts in which they have operated.

Intellectuals in Politics assess the significance of intellectuals in shaping the political landscape. An introductory essay detailing the major issues confronting intellectuals is followed by four sections examining different aspects of the intellectual's role. The first section looks at philosophers and academics who have tried to define the role of the intellectual. The second includes essays on Israel, Algeria, Britain and Ireland and explores how the intellectual assumes the statues of conscience of a nation and the voice of the oppressed. The third section examines the interaction among intellectuals and Marxism especially in Eastern Europe. The final section assesses the place of the intellectuals and their quest for autonomy in American society.

As the epilogue illustrates, the central question raised by this book is: "In whose name and with what authority does the intellectual speak."

Contributors include: Steve Biel, George Cotkin, Davis Schalk ... Read more