Date: Tue, 30 Jan 1996 01:28:20 -0500 (EST)
From: Amardeep Singh <asingh-AT-emerald.tufts.edu>
Subject: Rushdie everywhere


Rushdie is very charming and I always find him very entertaining when he 
appears. Unfortunately, I'm at a loss at present as to how to read or 
teach his work, or even whether his work is really integral to the 
'postcolonial canon' as it may be emerging from recent debates. 

One approach is to take his whole case as the example, media-hype, 
book-burnings and everything. In this vein, some have incorporated the 
transformation of Rushdie as an author-figure in the hype resulting from 
the Fatwa into their readings of his work, a move which particularly 
lends itself to readings of _The Satanic Verses_. (Srinivas Aravamudan's 
article in Diacritics did something to this effect.) Here, the 'book' is 
part of an integrated web of texts including everything from 
the text of the Fatwa itself to the newspaper articles surrounding and 
following the issue. The discourse following the novel reflects (in some 
cases, directly) the "point" that the novel is trying to make 
(oversimplified: modernist liberal humanism is better than regressive 
absolutism).

If all of this is made part of the reading of _The Satanic Verses_, 
traditional literary reading-strategies are inadequate to the task. For 
me, this is complicated by the fact that _The Verses_ (like Rushdie's 
other work) is very much a _novel_ whose depth and value might best be 
approached in a fairly traditional manner- a 'postmodern' novel is, after 
all is hybridized and hypertextualized, still basically a novel.

All of this in mind, I would like to ask the following question: which is 
more important at this juncture for the recipients of this message? The 
traditional approach, the text removed from all the hype surrounding it, 
as a lesson in the Novel? Or the semiotics and external politics of the 
public discourse surrounding the novel? If the two approaches are combined, 
is the result at all effective pedagogically? 

-Deep


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