Archive

Special issues:

Literature and Linguistics (Vol. 1 No. 2); Literature and Violence (Vol. 3 Nos. 1-2)

Women, Consumption and Popular Culture (Vol. 4 No. 1); Life, Community, and Ethics (Vol. 4. No. 2)

The Making of Barbarians in Western Literature (Vol. 5 No. 1); Chaos and Fear in Contemporary British Literature (Vol. 5 No. 2)

Taiwan Cinema before Taiwan New Wave Cinema (Vol. 6 No. 1); Catastrophe and Cultural Imaginaries (Vol. 6 No. 2)

Affective Perspectives from East Asia (Vol. 9 No. 2); Longing and Belonging (Vol. 10 No. 2, produced in collaboration with the European Network for Comparative Literary Studies)

Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations, 1776 to the Present (Vol. 11 No. 2). 

ABSTRACT

This essay proposes an interdisciplinary reading of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) with an attempt to press the boundaries of narrativity to the broader field of cultural studies. Divided into two parts, it is concerned with the dialectics of desire between text and reader. While part one attempts to explain the mechanics of desire, which steer both text and reader, as theorized mainly by Roland Barthes and Peter Brooks, part two seeks to read Mohsin Hamid’s novel in the light of these interpretive models. The second part is mainly concerned with investigating the different manifestations of desire both on the narrative and thematic levels. It relates narrativity to cultural, political and spatial concerns.

KEYWORDS: narrativity, desire, Roland Barthes, Peter Brooks, Mohsin Hamid, 9/11 literature