Meditations on Genre in Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton

  1. Celia Wallhead 1
  1. 1 Universidad de Granada
    info

    Universidad de Granada

    Granada, España

    ROR https://ror.org/04njjy449

Revista:
Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses

ISSN: 0211-5913

Any de publicació: 2015

Títol de l'exemplar: “Indias from Afar”: Narrating the Indian Diaspora

Número: 70

Pàgines: 89-104

Tipus: Article

Altres publicacions en: Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses

Resum

In Salman Rushdie’s book Joseph Anton: A Memoir (2012), the narrator alternates between first-person and third-person and leaps from the present back to his childhood. He combines the sub-genres of life writing with a novelised account, stressing the concept of story. In the former, we study the implications of “memoir,” the possibility of defining the work as an example of J M Coetzee’s “autre-biography” or autobiography “against itself” à la Barthes. Through the contribution of the latter aspect, read as a literary novel and also a detective story, Rushdie has created a work in which all these apparently defining factors are present and which can therefore only be described as generically “hybrid.”