Revisiting the Elements of Postmodernism in Salman Rushdie’s Shame

Abstract

Postmodern literature is thought to be typically anti-traditional and anti-foundationalist. It can be said that the major body of postmodern literature is thought to have started from the 1950s onwards. The major postmodern literary features are metafiction, self-reflexivity, intertextuality, writerly text, hybridity, magical realism, foreshadowing, irony, parody, anti-novel, anti-hero, fabulation, surfiction, hyperreality, use of language games etc. The prominent themes in postmodern literature are such as crisis of identity, cultural hybridity, experiences of migrants and their feeling of alienation, the general feeling of rootlessness. Postmodern fiction also emphasizes the disbelief in God as well as the disbelief in the conventional notions of the unified or coherent individual. Salman Rushdie has been studied and researched as a postcolonial writer as there are obvious postcolonial themes in his novels. But we can also study him as a postmodern writer. The paper makes an attempt to discuss the postmodern literary concept of meaningless of life as prevalent in Rushdie’s Shame and to put forth Rushdie as a postmodern writer.