The Riddle of the Riddle: A Study of the Folk Riddle's Figurative NatureIn this study, Nyla Ali Khan focuses on the representation of South Asian life in works by four contemporary Anglophone writers: V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Anita Desai. Concentrating on the intertwined topics of nationalism, transnationalism, and fundamentalism, Khan offers a critical dialogue between these works and the contemporary history they encounter, using history to interrogate fiction and using fiction to think through historical issues. In doing so, Khan argues that in the mixed, heterogeneous space of transnationalism, cultural and linguistic authenticity is a pipe dream. The binary structures created by the colonial encounter undergo a process of dialectical interplay in which each culture or language makes incursions into the other. Some of these structures are as follows: black-white, primitive-savage, self-other, silent-articulate, rational ruler and irrational ruled. These categories generate a dichotomy that creates the perception that a people have of themselves and their political and social relationships. Their recognition of this dialogic interplay of community and place becomes the basis for strategies that enable transnational and postcolonial writers to revise dogmatic categories. Despite all their differences, the works of these authors delineate the asymmetrical relations of colonialism and the aftermath of this phenomenon as it is manifested across the globe in this day and age. Khan shows, for instance, how Naipaul articulates a sensibility created by multilayered identities and the remapping of old imperial landscapes, in the process suggesting a new dynamic of power relations in which politics and selfhood, empire and psychology, prove to be profoundly interrelated; how Rushdie encourages a nationalist self-imagining and a rewriting of history that incorporates significant cultural, religious, and linguistic differences into our sense of identity; how Ghosh is critical of the putative cultural and religious necessity to forge a unified nationalist identity, arguing that no single theory sufficiently frames the multiple inheritances of present diasporic subjectivities; and how Desai seeks to imagine a responsible form of artistic, social, and political agency. |
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Page 16
... substitution for the object which ought to be named in the answer . ( b ) The folk riddle dwells on the brink of rationality . It is next to impossible rationally to derive an answer from the data of a question . The relationship ...
... substitution for the object which ought to be named in the answer . ( b ) The folk riddle dwells on the brink of rationality . It is next to impossible rationally to derive an answer from the data of a question . The relationship ...
Page 60
... substitution , but the core of our configuration is a special kind of substitution . Its function is double signification of ontologically uneven contents , the manifest and the latent . Let us formulate this view in the following ...
... substitution , but the core of our configuration is a special kind of substitution . Its function is double signification of ontologically uneven contents , the manifest and the latent . Let us formulate this view in the following ...
Page 65
... substitutions for an initial one , whereby the middle link may fade from direct representation on the expression plane in an utterance and yet continue to be implied ( ibid .: II.94 ) . Such a chain of substitutions may lose the middle ...
... substitutions for an initial one , whereby the middle link may fade from direct representation on the expression plane in an utterance and yet continue to be implied ( ibid .: II.94 ) . Such a chain of substitutions may lose the middle ...
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Methodological Reflections | 3 |
What is the Folk Riddle from Oral Tradition? | 11 |
Copyright | |
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Common terms and phrases
aimed ancient archaic archetypal Aristotle's bylina classes collection compact complex conception core cultural defamiliarization defined Demófilo descriptive metaphor domain enigmatics ethnologists explicit answer expression field figure of concealment folk riddle folklore folklorists formal Freud full-fledged form functional structure genetic code genre Georges & Dundes grotesque guess heterogeneity Humpty Dumpty ibid immanent analysis implicit subject implicit target incongruity inner form Johan Huizinga kind kinship Köngäs language Lehmann-Nitsche lexical motifs linguistic literal descriptions logical Maranda meaning metaphoric object mode morphological nature notion observation offers oral tradition paradigm Petsch phenomena phenomenology poetic presents question recorded answer riddle describes riddle from oral riddle studies riddle's description riddle's functional Rigveda ritual Russian riddle Sadovnikov semantic predilections sexual content sexual symbolism Shklovsky signifies structural definition stylistic substitution symbolic structure taboo Taylor Taylor's classification texts theory thing true folk riddle true riddle verbal versions Virtanen Wolfgang Schultz Wossidlo