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In The Thick Of National Consciousness: Difference And The Critique Of Identity In Elias Khoury’S Little Mountain And Salman Rushdie’S Midnight’S Children, Karim Abuawad

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

How should the relationship between literary texts and nationalism be explained? What is the difference between texts that resist nationalism’s logic aesthetically and those that do so discursively? The answers to these questions form the core of this study whose central inquiry focuses on how the internal operations of fictional narrative handle the persistent depositories of national culture represented by a visceral bond between individual and nation. Most crucially, the potential of unraveling this resilient bond is located in the narrative’s aesthetic operations, not in its discursive pronouncements, irrespective of how critical such pronouncements may be.

Rather than promoting …