Amal Sayyid

Ideology and Literary Form: a Structural Marxist Reading of Post 9/11 Fictional Narratives of Updike and Hamid Amal Sayyid

In the post- 9/11 world, where ideological conflicts form the very basis of all geopolitical developments, the domain of literature too cannot be considered insulated from ideological concerns. As a matter of fact, in the aftermath of 9/11 a burgeoning literature has emerged from the East and the West offering varying perspectives on the themes of fundamentalism, terrorism, American consumer capitalism and clash of civilizations according to the ideological and political leanings of the authors. The current study seeks to compare and contrast the ideological nature of the representations of post 9/11, American capitalism and Islamic terrorism in the novels of John Updike and Mohsin Hamid, two authors of vastly differing civilizational backgrounds. This study further seeks to combine an investigation of the aesthetic mores of a literary work with a study of its ideological connotations. For this purpose the author has employed the model of symptomatic reading given by Althusser and Macherey in order to investigate how gaps and fissures in the formal elements of the narrative constitute an unconscious critique of authorial ideology inbuilt in the very fabric of the textual fable.