This Thing Called the World : The Contemporary Novel as Global Form

Ganguly, Debjani

Duke University Press（2016/08発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 277 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9780822361374
• DDC分類 823.909

Full Description

In This Thing Called the World Debjani Ganguly theorizes the contemporary global novel and the social and historical conditions that shaped it. Ganguly contends that global literature coalesced into its current form in 1989, an event marked by the convergence of three major trends: the consolidation of the information age, the arrival of a perpetual state of global war, and the expanding focus on humanitarianism. Ganguly analyzes a trove of novels from authors including Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje, and Art Spiegelman, who address wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sri Lanka, the Palestinian and Kashmiri crises, the Rwandan genocide, and post9/11 terrorism. These novels exist in a context in which suffering's presence in everyday life is mediated through digital images and where authors integrate visual forms into their storytelling. In showing how the evolution of the contemporary global novel is analogous to the European novel's emergence in the eighteenth century, when society and the development of capitalism faced similar monumental ruptures, Ganguly provides both a theory of the contemporary moment and a reminder of the novel's power.
 

Contents

Acknowledgments  ix

Introduction  1

1. Real Virtualities and the Undead Genre  39

Part I. World

2. World-Making and Possible Worlds  69

3. Spectral Worlds, Networked Novel  87

4. From Midnight's Child to Clown Assassin  110

Part II. War

5. Visualizing Wartime: A Literary Genealogy  135

6. The Sky Is Falling: The Narrative Screen of Terror  157

Part III. Witness

7. This I Saw: Graphic Suffering  175

8. Forensic Witnessing: The (Non)Evidence of Bones  192

9. Affective Witnessing: Orphic Netherworlds  219

Coda  249

Notes  261

Bibliography  279

Index  293