Intertextuality and Exoticism in Salman Rushdie's the Moor's Last Sigh

Abstract

This paper analyses Salman Rushdie's novel THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH (1995) as a postmodernist text emphasising the role of narrative voice and of intertextuality within the intepretive act, and their implications for the study of intercultural understanding, the postmodern treatment of the exotic, of truth, and of the constructedness of the subject. Intertextuality becomes a central literary strategy whose function is to accomodate a multiplicity of cultural discourses and to articulate a postcolonial perspective on exoticism. In THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH, Rushdie acknowledges the cultural and historical positioning of the reading and writing of narrative fiction, and reflects on the nature of the limits between the visual and verbal text as well as the more general one between fiction and history, and uses his individual historical locus (the aftermath of the Rushdie affair) in order to play with the generic frames activated in reading different kinds of texts.

Keywords: Novel, Exoticism, Intertextuality, Salman Rushdie