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Rogues of Modernity: Picaresque Variations in the Postcolonial Genre of the Enlightenment Missionary
Author(s) -
Almond Ian
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0730.2006.00882.x
Subject(s) - enlightenment , modernity , literature , turkish , history , representation (politics) , orientalism , chatterjee , philosophy , art , law , linguistics , theology , epistemology , political science , bengali , politics
The article examines the representation of the ‘Enlightenment missionary’ in a number of postcolonial texts, both Indian and Turkish. Moments where the individual becomes so enamoured of a certain aspect of Western culture ‐ Freud, Proust, Chopin ‐ that he seeks, upon his return, to disseminate this ‘new’ knowledge to as many of his fellow villagers as possible. The figure of the picaro, traditionally understood as an alienated, roguish, rootless protagonist, thereby finds in postcolonial literature a new manifestation. This article examines not only how the arrival in India of ‘enlightenment’ thought created such picaresque figures, but also how novelists such as Upamanyu Chatterjee depict the failure of the Enlightenment project as producing a similar genre of disillusioned protagonist.