Deadly Writing – Reading Salman Rushdie
Course Description
Summary
Born to a multilingual family and culture, with connections to both India and Pakistan, and educated at Cambridge in the UK, Rushdie was already a celebrated writer when an Iranian clerical fatwa against him in 1989 launched him to another level of fame (or infamy). Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini charged Rushdie with blasphemy in his novel, Satanic Verses, published the prior fall (1988), offering a bounty for his life. The fatwa was never repealed. Decades later in 2022, when the fatwa was all but forgotten, Rushdie was stabbed by a man carrying out its seemingly stale mission.
In this course our gaze focuses on bulwark novelist Salman Rushdie, both the work and the controversy. Cited as a major inspiration by writers like Zadie Smith, Rushdie’s impact on today’s global literature—and on English—has been profound.
We will read Rushdie’s magnum opus Midnight’s Children (1981) as well as Satanic Verses, considering both works on their own literary terms. Rushdie’s writing has been criticized—but also embraced—for its excess or abundance, the way the story doesn’t seem to fit on the page, the way details are stuffed into any given line. This is particularly in contradiction to trends in contemporaneous and contemporary American fiction that value concision and simplicity. What is the significance of style? How is the interpretation of style racialized? That is, what’s “excess” vs. “abundance”?
We then consider the fatwa, reading material around it including Rushdie’s own nonfiction up to the present day (e.g., in his recent memoir Knife). Our goal is to understand what makes “Rushdie,” the literature, good, and also how Rushdie as a writer might be both celebrated and critiqued. Was/is Rushdie brave or provocative? Both? Delving into the Iranian Islamist socio-politics that led to the fatwa, we will think about how a novel can become the main target for international politics. How do cultural and state politics interact? What are the politics of a novel? What is freedom of expression? Why does art matter?
We will cultivate a sensibility of openness and understanding in this course, thinking about how to develop writerly and readerly community without political consensus. As writers and thinkers we will use Rushdie as inspiration to take formal risks. What is it to write free? How might we write both freely and ethically as storytellers, whether of fiction, our own stories, or other histories?
Learning Outcomes
- To learn the corpus of Salman Rushdie as centered on his two most famous books
- To foray into postcolonial literature more broadly via Salman Rushdie
- To learn how domestic politics (i.e., Iranian postrevolutionary politics in the 1980s) can impact global cultural politics
- To create a theory of contemporary fiction. (We will organically develop one as a class, but also, your own personal definition.)
- To learn—and articulate—why literature matters
Prerequisites
BENNINGTON STUDENT APPLICATIONS
Please upload a single PDF to this link with your name as the document title: . Include the following:
- List two relevant courses you’ve taken that prepare you for this course
- A 300-500 word response outlining your interest in Rushdie and the aforementioned issues
- Note that you must be logged into your bennington.edu email to access the drive.
Please contact the faculty member : mariamrahmani@bennington.edu