Transgression in Salman Rushdie's Shame and Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Abstract

In my thesis, I argue that the way of writing in Shame and Haroun and the Sea of Stories has a kind of transgressive ability. I will examine what kind of characteristics of the texts and their way of writing can be ascribed to certain transgressive strategies and how transgression appears at certain levels of the texts. I will focus on two transgressive strategies: hybridity and textual excess, on the basis of Benyei Tamas’s work that deals with transgressive abilities or possibilities of magical realist texts. I do not intend to put the label of magical realism on these two novels that I will analyse, but in my opinion this guideline for the possibility of transgression, offered by Benyei, has relevance in these novels.