...! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Jacob Grimes! Rushdie & Rauch v. Storck: Censorship! Salman Rushdie is one of the many opponents of censorship. Born to an Indian family in Britian, his books contain magical realism, historical fiction, and Eastern-Western connections. His works are often controversial, and in 1989 Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for his death. Rushdie tells us that we are living in a censorious age where our voices are being censored in the name of “respect”. This need for “respect” extends beyond its traditional definition, and also means that one must not overtly disagree with what others say or think. Rushdie thinks this censorship will bring an end to the radical disagreements that shape a free society. ! ! Jonathan Rauch is an American journalist who is also an avid proponent of same-sex marriage. He agrees with Rushdie that censorship should be fought because it is being used to censor simple disagreements; not only people are losing face over voicing negative views about blacks, but also for speaking against advantaged groups such as Christians and men. Rauch argues that censorship’s goal of purifying the world is a futile effort. People typically see the world in terms of in-groups and out-groups, so there will always be prejudice. This prejudice is hard to pin down because it may be confused with misinformation. For example, a protestor saying “God Hates Fags” may be expressing a subjective statement...
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...Review on The Prophet’s Hair by Salman Rushdie The Prophet’s hair is a magical realistic short story from the book ‘East, West’ written by Salman Rushdie. Rushdie is an author, novelist, essayist and sometimes a critic. He blends myth and fantasy in a world of reality and that is what he is famous for. The prophet’s hair is based on the story of the theft of the prophet Muhammad’s hair. Whoever comes in contact with this relic, faces strange or miraculous events. The story takes place in the early 1980’s during winter season in a rural area called Srinagar in India. Srinagar is a Kashmir valley. This story also depicts a setting that can be assumed as the beginning of the 20th century where religion and government structures were reaching its heights. The social environment revolves around money, honor, respectable values and religion; in this case the Islam. Every character is concerned about his place in society and his greed for money. The story is written in third person omniscient point of view. The writer as he describes the setting, moves from character to character narrating the story. In this short story, Hashim is the protagonist. He is the father of Huma and Atta. Hashim comes upon the stolen hair accidentally. He does not return the relic as greed consumes. He justifies his act as a community service basing it on the Islamic views of deity. Hashim turns into a religious hypocrite from a secular person. Hashim’s son Atta knows the truth about the hair and steals...
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...will be the downfall of western society. He argues this by pointing out how young people are focused into their most controversial and awful traits. Contestants and stars are constantly trying to one-up each other in a competition of attention. People gobble up the content, going as far as to bring “Big Brother” to the front page of the tabloids during an important election. These are signs that indicate we are on a slippery slope, and eventually people will be willing to watch gladiatorial murder on TV, among other depraved things, to satisfy our need for controversy. This view of TV audiences, and the world of reality TV, is a shallow one. What Rushdie misses, is that Reality TV is a cheap form of entertainment, and it does not need to rise above the standard it is at now to keep making profits....
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...“Midnight’s Children” by Salman Rushdie Summary Analysis Shanell Smith Cappa Barry University “Midnight’s Children” by Salman Rushdie In the beginning of “Midnight’s Children”, within the chapter referred to as “The Perforated Sheet”, Salman Rushdie explains the importance of the time and date of his birth, which coincided with the “precise moment of India’s arrival at independence” (Salman Rushdie 2006) on August 15, 1947. Salman goes on to claim that his birth was the fate of the country, signifying his urgeobligation to tell his stories before his death, which he believes is soon. In the first paragraph, Salman Rushdie starts off with stating “once upon a time”, (Salman Rushdie 2006) which is generally a fairytale line. This seems to imply that Salman is delusional, or takes a telepathic entity where he is able to speak to the other “Midnight’s Children” in order to create a story for himself. Salman believes that he and the other “Midnight Children” are the fate of the country, and that their history is directly impacted by the country, as well as the country’s history being directly impacted by them. Salman uses a wide array of rhetorical devices throughout the first few pages of “Midnight’s Children” such as metaphor, analogy, and imagery. Salman uses “Midnight’s Children”, the title of the novel, as a metaphor. He is saying that the children that were born at the time of India’s independence, are in fact claimed by midnight and the country. Another example...
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...1. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint Exupery 2. Jonathan Livingston Seagull - Richard Bach 3. Illusions - Richard Bach 4. Bridge Across Forever - Richard Bach 5. The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho 6. 100 years of solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 7. Love in the time of cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 8. Catcher in the rye - J.D. Salinger 9. To kill a mocking bird - Harper Lee 10. The bridges of madison county - Robert James Waller 11. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 12. The Love Story - Erich Segal 13. The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand 14. Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand 15. We the people - Ayn Rand 16. Nana - Emile Zola 17. A Farewell to arms - Ernest Hemingway 18. Across the river and into the trees - Ernest Hemingway 19. The old man and the sea - Ernest Hemingway 20. Jeeves and wooster( this is a series consisting of about 50 books approx.) - PG Wodehouse (Russian authors) 21. Anna karenina - Leo Tolstoy 22. War and peace - Leo Tolstoy 23. A collection of Short stories - Maxim Gorky 24. Notes from the underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky 25. Crime and Punishment -Fyodor Dostoevsky 26. The brothers karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky 27. The Double - Fyodor Dostoevsky 28. The Devils - Fyodor Dostoevsky 29. The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky 30. Short Stories - Anton Chekhov 31. Grapes of wrath - John Steinbeck 32. East of Eden -John Steinbeck 33. Nineteen Eighty four - George Orwell 34. Animal Farm - George Orwell 35. Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance - Robert...
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...Valazia Sophorlrath IB English Mr. Tetenbaum October 28, 2015 Ocean of Feelings Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie is a book about a boy whose mother had left the family for his neighbor, Mr. Sengupta, who did not like stories at all. Due to that tragedy, his father, Rashid, is not able to tell stories. Haroun goes on an adventure to bring back the joy of stories to his father. What do you think Rushdie's saying about the value of stories and how they make people feel? By looking at the roles stories play in Haroun’s society, we can see how important stories are to his father and how his situation with his family affects his ability to tell stories; this is important because it shows that in order for someone to persevere, they...
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...Scott Russell Sanders responds to an essay by Salman Rushdie, a writer who left his home country native India for England. Sanders explains through various tricolons, and hyperboles, why migration is not always a good thing. Sanders uses hyperboles to exaggerate the unknown fact that moving place to place, forcing cultures onto the next is not the pathway to success as Rushdie believes is. Sanders states “The habit of our industry and commerce has been to force identical schemes onto differing locals, as through the mind were a cookie-cutter and the land were dough.” By cookie cutter I think Sanders means forcing something to be what it is not, moving consistently you never have a chance of making a “durable home for yourself or your decedents.” You will never have any roots if you continue to move from place to place. Not enough respect goes into where we root ourselves as stated “when we cease to be migrants and become inhabitants, we might begin to pay enough heed and respect to where we are.” Sanders exaggerates that the one and only plus of migrating would be “to be a migrant is, perhaps, to be the only species of human being free of the shackles of nationalism.” He doesn’t mean...
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...Debating Speech This motion is the death of equality. First, I would like to specify the title of this motion and the opposition’s take on it. We believe that a ‘secular society’ refers to each religion being equal and respected within a society rather than the discrimination of those who hold religious beliefs. Second, I shall set out the main reasons why equality should come ahead of prejudice against people who cannot help the way they were born whilst my partner will tackle the outcry of ‘freedom of belief’, which will be the main argument from the proposition. We, the opposition, believe that as long as a person keeps their anti-equality beliefs to themselves, they should be allowed to have them so if a person in Ireland was against the Gay Marriage bill, they may of course keep this belief as long as they don’t use it to discriminate against others. Now, I would like everyone to think of a time about seventy years ago when, as a shop keeper, it was perfectly reasonable to discriminate against homosexuals, ethnic minorities and even women. Now that racism and sexism are openly criticised, we have become a more equal and fair society, so why was there any controversy over a homosexual couple wanting a shop to bake a cake with an anti-discriminatory message on it? I would like to emphasise that this service was offered by the baker and so refusing this couple and damaging emotional effects on the couple as they strove for equality and the recognition of their position in a...
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...Salman Rushdie's creation, Saleem Sinai, has a self-proclaimed "overpowering desire for form" (363). In writing his own autobiography Saleem seems to be after what Frank Kermode says every writer is a after: concordance. Concordance would allow Saleem to bring meaning to moments in the "middest" by elucidating (or creating) their coherence with moments in the past and future. While Kermode talks about providing this order primarily through an "imaginatively predicted future" (8), Saleem approaches the project by ordering everything in his past into neat, causal relationships, with each event a result of what preceded it. While he is frequently skeptical of the true order of the past, he never doubts its eminence; he is certain that everyone is "handcuffed to history" (482). His belief in the preeminence of the past, though, is distinctly different than the reality of time for the Saleem who emerges through that part of the novel that Gerard Genette calls "the event that consists of someone recounting something" (26) (Saleem-now, we can call this figure). Saleem-now is motivated to act not by the past, but instead by the uncertainty and ambiguity of the future. Saleem's construction of his own story is an effort to mitigate the lack of control he feels in looking toward the unknown future. To pacify himself he creates a world that is ordered but this world is contrary to his own reality. Saleem spends much of his energy in the story setting up neat causal relationships between...
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...Haroun and the Sea of Stories SALMAN RUSHDIE Novel, 1990. Summary. In this story we encounter storytelling as a means of saving your identity, your relationship with your family, and perhaps even your life—which means that, in a sense, you are saving a world. The British-Indian author Salman Rushdie (b. 1947) had to go underground after the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses in 1988. The book was considered blasphemous to Islam by the fundamentalist government of Iran, which issued a death warrant against him. He says that he reached a point where he was so distressed he wasn’t able to think of any stories to tell. But he worked himself out of his depression, and Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a book for children and other people who have a natural love for stories, is the result. This modern fairy tale has many surprising elements, but here we will focus just on the core issue: why stories have value. Haroun’s father Rashid is a professional storyteller and a very popular one. He usually tells cheerful stories, even though they live in a very sad city. Haroun is beginning to ask questions about his father’s storytelling: Where do the stories come from? From the great Story Sea, says Rashid, and you have to be a subscriber to the water, which comes from a tap installed by one of the Water-Genies. But Haroun doesn’t believe him. And now a sad thing happens in their lives: Haroun’s mother Soraya with the beautiful voice leaves her husband and child for another tenant...
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...quite clear that the theme here is Saleem Sinia’s attitude towards and the significance of India’s independence on the day of his birth.The distress and dismay of being born on this day is clearly established: ‘Oh spell it out, spell it out: at the precise moment of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world.’ (Rushdie, 1982). Repition is used to reflect Saleem’s irritation of having to specify his birth date. The protagonist and narrator of the story is Saleem Sinia, born at the exact moment India became an independent country. Saleem was born with telepathic powers and had an enormous and constantly runny nose with an extremely sensitive sense of smell gifts Saleem did not ask for, as he states, ‘For the next three decades, there was to be no escape.’ (Rushdie, 1982) The way the writer plunges the reader into the situation without a contrived introduction and writing from personal experience could be referred to as a poetic technique. The metaphorical emotional connotations portray Saleem’s conflicting emotions towards his country - not really accepting his fate or his country. ‘I had mysteriously been hand-cuffed to history,’ (Rushdie, 1982) in lines four and five (are exaggerated emotion of irony),...
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...not even in the debate about the significance meaning of the exact word – is on the one hand “giving the word more power than it deserves”, which is mentioned in the CBS News clip “Huckleberry Finn and the N-word debate”. On the other hand is the possibility of hurting other people of great important – but when it comes to having a “teachable movement”, which the author and teacher David Bradly describes in the CBS News clip, it can be important to get the problem on the table instead of mystifying the word. The originality of classic literature is under threat of the need to make everything inoffensive. This need is probably created by good intentions, but is at the same time leaning against an extreme controlling society. Like Salman Rushdie points out in his article “On Censorship” from The New Yorker; “Great art, or, let’s just say, more modestly, original art is never created in the safe middle ground, but always at the edge.” Is it not the purpose of classic literature, and art in general, to touch the reader at some point? By censoring the great works the essential meaning of writing becomes affected. Kakutani is a big critic to censor and convinces her audiences by her pathos-marked language and arguments, where she builds op a sense of solidarity and frightens her readers her exaggerated...
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...The Free Radio Salman Rushdie Salman Rushdie is a writer and was born in Bombay on June 19’th 1947. He went to a school in Bombay and read later on History at King’s College and at Cambridge. After graduating, he lived in Pakistan with his family. He worked briefly in the television business before he returned back to England. He began to work as a copywriter for an advertising agency. His published his first novel, Grimus in 1975. Introduction For my Individual Oral Presentation I have chosen the short story "The Free Radio" in the book "East West" by Salman Rushdie. The various stories in East West are largely similar in their extravagant and far-fetched plots however "The Free Radio" reflects a true occurrence in Indian History. A symbol is something such as an object, picture, written word, sound, or particular mark that represents something else by association, resemblance, or convention. For example, a red octagon may stand for "STOP". In "The Free Radio", the importance and focus on the free radio from the protagonist and narrator results in readers being able to observe the various symbols which the free radio adopts and thus allows readers to see beyond its literal meaning to its intended symbolism for better understanding of the text and the messages in which it holds. Young, handsome Ramani- the protagonist of the story was unfortunate enough to fall in love with the "Thief's Widow" The introduction of the decision Ramani made to "Rob himself of his manhood" comes...
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...book, attentive to childhood memories of people and neighbourhoods. In both these respects, subject and method, the novel has sources which influenced and informed its construction, and these will be discussed in more detail below. One of them is the novel The Tin Drum by Günter Grass, first published in German in 1959. In 1985, Rushdie paid this tribute to Grass and to the novel: In the summer of 1967 . . . when I was twenty years old, I bought from a bookshop in Cambridge a paperback copy of The Tin Drum . . . There are books that open doors for their readers . . . And then there are readers who dream of becoming writers . . . [For them] there are (if they are lucky) books which give them . . . permission to become the sort of writers they have it in themselves to be. This is what Grass's great novel said to me in its drumbeats: Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody minded. Argue with the world. This was four years after the publication and great triumph of his own Midnight's Children, a novel which demonstrates the daring that Rushdie claims Grass inspired in him, and which in its own right has inspired a generation of Indian writers. Midnight's Children is now a central text in the study of the postcolonial phenomenon in writing in English, and has engaged the attention of scholars and...
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...Scott Sanders analyzes and responds to Salman Rushdie’s, a writer who left his native India to go to England, essay, where he describes the “effect of mass migration.” Salman wants to differ the type of “people who root themselves in ideas rather than places.” Sanders uses tautology to stimulate the similarities that many different people face but also uses tricolons to show their own different motivations. Scott Sanders uses tautology to emphasize similarities that different societies have. Americans are “restless movers”, we move to experience the feel of new places. Sanders’ tautology – “claims for the virtues of shifting ground are familiar and seductive to Americans, this nation of restless movers –“stimulates the use of similar words,...
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