From "Fundo Stuff" to Furia

Greetings, yet again! It seems a bit strange to say/realize this, but tomorrow night's class represents a culmination of sorts, a kind of invocation of "khattam-shud" before the real khattam-shud of the semester. Tomorrow represents the last spittoon in which to catch the commentary of a reading-intensive week, the last real class discussion. From there, we'll of course have the second film (Frears's Dirty Pretty Things) to look forward to, and then the various odds & ends that come with the final class meeting on 5/1. You'll want to bring a lateral-minded, longitudinal, capacious, recapitulatory type sensibility to our final conversations, especially since it's this approach that will launch you on your final writing projects for the course. To that end, in terms of tomorrow night, we should be prepared to consider Fury on its own terms (with all of its oddities and eccentricities!) and in the context of the various novels and critical pieces that we've read. What kind of conversation can we create between Fury and The Moor's Last Sigh? Between Fury and Haroun and the Sea of Stories? Between Fury and The Satanic Verses? And we'll also, of course, have the Saskia Sassen essay to fold into the ongoing conversation, as well.

And surely there are some remainders, some thoughts still in the queue from The Moor's Last Sigh? I'm suddenly thinking (as I continue to ruminate on the novel's haunting conclusion and on our brief conversation about Barthes' "The Death of the Author") about incarceration and the writer, and specifically the way Rushdie so wonderfully brings together the Moor's story, Rushdie's personal experience with the fatwa, and the incarceration of Cervantes (which is said to have led to the inspiration for and creation of Don Quixote). I'm also thinking there might be some nice comparative possibilities as we consider the Moor's enlistment in Mainduck's "fight club" in the context of Saleem's Buddha/CUTIA experience in Midnight's Children: in the latter it's Islamic extremism/purity that is interrogated, and in the former it's Hindu extremism ("the virile pleasures of comradeship and all-for-one" (305)). I'm also remembering that wonderful example of cultural hybridity early in the novel when the Catholic nativity scene gets cross-fertilized with an Eastern experience: the holy family goes native, you might say, and a solidly Western/European tradition gets hybridized and amalgamated (see pages 62-3).

And on another note, perhaps one/some of you might be inclined to start a thread relating to final paper ideas? We could all seek to comment, to offer suggestions, to share our own ideas about this paper within that thread ... Just an idea! If nothing else, each of you will have at least a few minutes to preview your inquiry when we meet on that last night ...