Social and political agendas of American society in the new millennium (Salman Rushdie’s “Quichotte”)

Abstract

The subject of the research is the artistic interpretation of social and political problems in Salman Rushdie’s novel Quichotte (2019). This work is a postmodern reinterpretation of Cervantes’s story about the ingenious gentleman of La Mancha, which tackles a number of pressing issues, faced by American society at the beginning of the twenty-first century, from opioid addiction and migration to the environmental crisis and cyber-spies. The purpose of the article is to identify and describe those social and political triggers that, on the one hand, define today’s agenda of the American post-truth society, and on the other hand, appear to be kind of tags of the relevance and priority of the issues raised. Explication of the strategies of literary representation of such problems in the work of fiction reveals their relationship with the author’s worldview. The application of the methods of hermeneutic, intertextual, cultural, semantic, and linguistic-stylistic analyses enables us to study the author’s intentions in the literary space with an emphasis on the most topical concerns of contemporary issues. The literary forms representing the post-truth narratives in Rushdie’s novel are designed to expose the most troublesome issues in the Age of Anything-Can-Happen. The article examines the interpretation of such problems as the influence of mass media products, racism, and gender inequality, as well as some issues of language, ageism, and psychological pressure on children. The results of the study. The concept of post-truth, which penetrates fiction from public discourse to become a key means of explaining the author’s intentions and creating narratives of hyperreality, in Quichotte, appears as the prism through which all events, phenomena, and meanings are interpreted. Having become the main form of artistic vision, hyperreality appears in postmodern fiction to transform the contemporary literary landscape. This post-truth environment helps Rushdie see and analyse in detail the most crucial problems of American, or, in general, world society. They are manifested at all levels and in the actions of the characters, and the situations that happen to them, as well as in the author’s comments.

Keywords

• escalation
• postmodern hyperreality
• post-truth
• pressing issues
• troubled society