Desirous Texts/Texts of Desire: Storytelling and Cultural Prejudice in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

This essay proposes an interdisciplinary reading of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) with an attempt to press the boundaries of narrativity to the broader field of cultural studies. Divided into two parts, it is concerned with the dialectics of desire between text and reader. While part one attempts to explain the mechanics of desire, which steer both text and reader, as theorized mainly by Roland Barthes and Peter Brooks, part two seeks to read Mohsin Hamid’s novel in the light of these interpretive models. The second part is mainly concerned with investigating the different manifestations of desire both on the narrative and thematic levels. It relates narrativity to cultural, political and spatial concerns.