Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
In this paper, I discuss the figure of professor Malik Solanka, the protagonist of Salman Rushdie's latest novel, Fury (2001), and his attempts at constructing a fairy tale utopia as a means of establishing his identity. I try to elucidate this problem referring to the concepts of the fairy tale utopian as formulated by J. R. R. Tolkien, Ernst Bloch, and Jack Zipes, as their propositions can be regarded as the most effective exponents of the utopian imagination and seem very applicable to Rushdie's utopian attempts. On the basis of such a reading, I also reflect on the contemporary status of the genre, and in particular its existence online, as well as its resisting and copying the spellbinding and illusory images generated by Disneyland, which for many is now equivalent to the entire genre, and which is one of the most successful forms of the culture industry that corrupts the original fairy-tale utopian potential and mesmerizes audiences with projections of false dreamworlds. Finally, I explore Rushdie's utopian practice as his comment on America's potential to function as a departure point for constructing a utopia by a psychologically, culturally, and geographically displaced individual.
Repository Citation
Deszcz, Justyna. "Solaris, America, Disneyworld and Cyberspace: Salman Rushdie's Fairy-Tale Utopianism in Fury." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 2, no. 3, 2002, pp. 1–23. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol2/iss3/13
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