%0 Journal Article
%T Frontiers and Contemporary Thinking: Zygmunt Bauman and Salman Rushdie
%A Dana BADULESCU
%J Postmodern Openings
%D 2012
%I Lumen
%X This paper looks into the nature of contemporary modernity as reflected by the metaphorical discourses of Zygmunt Bauman, an outstanding sociological writer, and Salman Rushdie, a famous novelist. This approach to the two writers¡¯ echoing discourses focuses upon their new perceptions of frontiers, which are crucial in their inquiries. When Rushdie weaves a whole lecture, later published in book form under the title Step Across this Line, around the idea of frontier, he echoes Bauman¡¯s vocabulary and perceptions when he explores his own ideas of modern ¡°liquidity.¡± Rushdie, whose book-length essay came out in 2002, never references Bauman¡¯s Liquid Modernity, published in 2000. Arguably, Rushdie may have never read Bauman¡¯s book. However, the similarity of their perceptions upon the ¡°liquid¡± nature of modernity, especially when applied to frontiers not only spatially but also temporally, is striking. Bauman¡¯s statements that ¡°in the fluid stage of modernity, the settled majority is ruled by the nomadic and exterritorial elite,¡± that ¡°holding the ground is not that important if the ground can be reached and abandoned at whim, in a short time or in no time,¡± that ¡°being modern means being perpetually ahead of oneself, in a state of constant transgression¡± find a mirror in Rushdie¡¯s contentions that ¡°in our deepest natures, we are frontier-crossing beings,¡± that ¡°we are living in a frontier time, one of the great hinge periods in human history, in which great changes are coming about at great speed.¡±
%K Frontier
%K Frontier-crossing
%K Quest
%K Liquid modernity
%K Transgression
%U http://postmodernopenings.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/3-Frontiers-and-Contemporary.pdf