“A Line of Yoricks. Salman Rushdie’s Bastard Legacies between East and West”

The paper traces the elements of the short story “Yorick” derived from Hamlet, Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy, and other English classics. The paper suggests that Rushdie’s text as a whole, like the fictional line of descendants it attributes to Yorick, is a knowingly ‘bastardized’ construction whose allusions ironically undercut the Western literary canon.