Pragmatic Approach of Cultural Materialism in Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner

Literature has been privileged with the power to shape and mould society and culture by inculcating social values and ideologies. Cultural Materialism recognises and emphasises the role of the productive and creative process in shaping the culture and ideology of society. This paper tries to analyse culture as a productive process in accordance with Raymond Williams, the Welsh Critic, who asserts that literary or cultural text and other forms of art such as film, television series, art, and architecture are cultural materials or cultural products. This research paper tries to portray that Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner as a cultural product, which exhibit the political and economic forces prevalent in Afghan society. Cultural Materialism began to study text by examining how themes, characters, and dialogues could be seen as expressions of dominant ideological narratives or as attempts to subvert the dominant ideologies of the society. Thus, Cultural materialism tries to situate the text in a relevant historical and cultural context to understand the text.