The first-person plural in Hanif Kureishi’s essays

Bibliographic Data

ID9002844
AuthorsDave Gunning (University of Birmingham, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume50
Issue2
Pages133-149
Publication date2014-10-26
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-9894 • E-ISSN: 1741-6442
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0021989414554631
OpenAlexW1971094218
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited12

In this discussion I examine the significance of the first-person plural in selections from Hanif Kureishi’s Collected Essays (2011). I identify two distinct ways in which it is employed, during two distinct periods of his writing. In his essays of the late 1980s Kureishi uses ‘we’ only rarely, and with notable care, always signalling for whom else he might be attempting to speak. In his essays about ‘fundamentalism’, however, especially those written after the London bombings of July 2005, his use of the first-person plural functions to interpellate the reader in a way not seen in the earlier writing. I argue that the rhetoric of defending liberalism which dominates this later writing can therefore be read as sacrificing a liberal aesthetic which enacts, rather than insists upon, openness and tolerance. The potential of the meditative literary essay as a form which might embody such a liberal aesthetic especially effectively may thereby be lost

Aesthetics · Art · Fundamentalism · Liberalism · Linguistics · Literature · Openness to experience · Plural · Political science · Rhetoric · Sociology · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Literature and Cultural Memory · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychology · Social Psychology

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