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Meddling with the Muddling Rushdie Affair

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Bădulescu D.

Linguaculture

2012

vol. 2012

issue 1

65-76

The “Rushdie affair” is one of the most far-reaching book events of the late 20th century. This study argues that the Muslim demonstrations caused by the book’s allegedly “blasphemous” nature, the fatwa and its aftermath may be regarded as a chain of snowballing effects which brought an entire century of book censorship to an end. However, what started the “affair” was not only The Satanic Verses that stirred waves of protests in the Muslim world and ambiguous attitudes in the West, but also its author, whose life was put in serious jeopardy by the fatwa. After 23 years since “the unfunny Valentine” was sent to Rushdie the “affair’”has not stopped radiating a whole spectrum of problems, which are still part of our global culture. This study traces the “affair” since the 14th of February 1989, when the fatwa was decreed, until January 2012, when Sir Salman Rushdie was initially invited to give a video address to the Jaipur Literature Festival in India only to be announced that the address was cancelled on grounds of violence threats from Muslim activists.

Body, Sensuousness, Eros and the New Aesthetic Order from Schiller to Rushdie

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Bădulescu D.

Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture

2013

vol. 3

219-232

In the present article, I look into the culture-building power of Eros from Schiller’s ideas of “the aesthetic state of mind” in Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, through the Pre-Raphaelites’ eroticism to the nineteenthcentury fin de siècle aestheticized homoeroticism and beyond. I argue that eroticism is a reaction to the increasing sense of alienation brought about by bourgeois modernity. The “moments” and texts used to illustrate the thesis that eroticism shaped an alternative order are far from exhausting a very large list which could add nuances to the argument. The body is one of the essential aspects tackled, since eroticism cannot be conceived in its absence. The body may be an object of desire around which imagination weaves its yarn, or a blank page to be inscribed, or a danger zone, or a hypertrophied space projected by the lover’s longing for fusion. Eroticism in Salman Rushdie’s novels is the focus of my approach after a survey of some landmarks of erotic imagination. I argue that his novels are a new stage of the imagination infused by Eros. The article probes into how two centuries of aesthetic modernity have been shaped by the reality principle proposed by Schiller and how that essentially erotic model has suffered changes in time.

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1 Linguaculture

1 Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture

2 Bădulescu D.

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Meddling with the Muddling Rushdie Affair

Body, Sensuousness, Eros and the New Aesthetic Order from Schiller to Rushdie