Sacred and Profane Authorship in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and Venko Andonovski’s The Navel of the World

Abstract

This article anlyses the conception of sacred/religious vis-à-vis profane/literary discourse as a factor in determining the idea of authorship developed in the two novels. It represents a comparative analysis between Rushdie’s novel The Satanic verses and The Navel of the World by Macedonian writer Venko Andonovski because both novels engage with the thematic of the birth of the secular author from within the fold of religion. By comparing and contrasting the strategies both authors employ in their treatment of this theme, I hope to demonstrate these two authors’ similar conception of (their) literary authorship, in spite of the different linguistic, religious and cultural contexts from which they write.