The Great Work of Making Real

The present collection of essays endeavours to chart a number of lines of enquiry suggested by the reading of a Rushdian text that works against monological rhetoric on the themes of death, love, art and outsideness.
In the first part of the book the aspects highlighted by the authors of the essays are situated at the meeting-point between the text and the world: the presence of myths from classical Graeco-Roman antiquity (Orpheus and Eurydice, Apollo and Dionysus, Cassandra, Proteus) and from India (for instance the hybrid figure of the apsarâ), echoes of the Bible and European thinkers (R.M. Rilke and F. Nietzsche), the fascination of pop and rock music (Elvis Presley, Freddie Mercury, among others), and inevitably the political subtext of yesterday and today (Orpheus as the prototype of the coloniser on board the Argo).
In the second half of the book the aspects analysed lie at the meeting-point between the text and some elements that contribute to its formation: the montage, the chronotope, the narrator’s voice, dialogue, word-play, onomastics, the narrative-commentative modes. Attention also focuses on Rushdie’s idiolect as it appears in this novel and on some (possible) isotopic readings of the textual rise and destruction of a parallel/alternative world.
The great work of making real is entrusted once again to literature, which ultimately tells the truth about the unsolidity of solid ground and the big bad wolf of change, and about reality, potentiality and transformation.