Jonathan (Nick) Pumilia ‘08

“Fiction, History and an Ethic of Imagination in Midnight’s Children”

Nick Pumilia’s senior tutorial essay on Salmon Rushdie’s book examines and interrogates the critical commonplace that the novel exemplifies postmodern and/or post-colonial narrative agendas. Instead his essay explores an ethic of imagination that emerges from an imaginative act’s self-reflexive awareness of its own limitations and historical contingency. He was nominated for this prize in 2008 by Professor Anu Needham.