ALLUSION

DEFINITION:

• An ALLUSION is a reference to a famous person, historical moment, literary text, or pop culture event/person/thing. In a broad sense—it is a reference to something that is (or should be) culturally known.

• ALLUSIONS are used in literature all the time to help make cultural connections to the reader as well as to ‘say a lot’ with fewer words.

PURPOSE?

• Allusions Culturally Connect Us! • If we do not understand an allusion we cannot

understand the author.

TYPES OF ALLUSIONS

• Mythology: Achilles‘ Heel, Cupid, Pandora’s Box• Biblical: Cain and Abel, Good Samaritan,

Forbidden Fruit• Literature: Scrooge, Jekyll and Hyde, Romeo• Historical: Benedict Arnold, Utopia, Nazi

EXAMPLES: WHAT IS BEING SAID THROUGH THESE ALLUSIONS?

THEY WANT EFX

• Focus Question: What allusions must you recognize in order to understand the song?• CIRCLE OR BOX any allusions you recognize.• Then, with a partner, choose 5 allusions to IDENTIFY and

EXPLAIN.

• Analysis Question: What is Das Efx’s (the rapper) purpose? • Why did he choose these specific allusions? What is

trying to say though these allusions?

ALLUSIONS IN HAROUN

• "Sea of the Rivers of Story" is the English equivalent of Kathāsaritsāgara, the title of an 11th-century collection of Indian legends.

• Another reference is to the stories of One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of West and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. In English these stories are known as the Arabian Nights• Haroun, the son of Rashid Khalifa refers to Harun al-Rashid, a caliph

(Islamic political and religious leader) who ruled from 786 to 809 and who appears frequently in One Thousand and One Nights stories.

• The Walrus plays off of The Beatles song, "I am the Walrus".• “I am the egg man, they are the egg men/I am the walrus”

• Haroun encounters a warrior who is fighting his own shadow. This is possible a reference to J.M Barrie's Peter Pan.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND

• The Walrus

• The Pages as compared to the Queen and her Court (cards)• both are extended metaphors used in

similar ways

• Time, especially time stopped • (The Mad Tea Party and the word-play

involving time).•

• The Language of wordplay, puns, and seeming nonsense.

THE TWILIGHT STRIP AND THE TWILIGHT ZONE

• According to the video, what is The Twilight Zone?

• What is Rushdie saying about The Twilight Strip through this allusion? • What can we as readers better understand about it

now that we recognize the allusion?

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

• Why might Salman Rushdie have chosen to include so many allusions in Haroun and the Sea of Stories?

• How might the use of allusion in Haroun and the Sea of Stories and They Want Efx connect to Kattam-Shud’s statement that “inside every single story, inside every Stream in the Ocean, there lies a world, a story-world, that I cannot Rule at all”?• AND, as a bonus, how might recognizing allusions and their

meaning help us to answer the question of “What’s the point of stories that aren’t even true?”