Description
TitleNew geographies of the contemporary novel: scale, border, semi-periphery, world
Date Created2021
Other Date2021-10 (degree)
Extent1 online resource (vi, 240 pages)
DescriptionWorking at the intersection of comparative literature and novel theory, my dissertation is a comparative study of how the formal and spatial coordinates of the contemporary novel have changed in the last decades in relation to transnational migrations and to the acceleration of capitalist uneven development. I argue that the combination of these world-historical forces has led to the emergence of a new global realism that, in originating from peripheral and semi-peripheral areas of the world literary system, can more lucidly diagnose social and economic inequalities across multiple scales. I focus on texts and authors that activate multiple geographies, either through multilingualism (Igiaba Scego, Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, and Junot Díaz), multilayered narrative structures (Nuruddin Farah and Roberto Bolaño), and expansive political horizons (Vivek Shanbhag and Nicola Lagioia). Coming from diverse linguistic and cultural traditions, the authors and texts I study challenge us to develop a more historically attentive vocabulary to discuss how the contemporary novel has engaged with cultural and linguistic displacement, postcolonial diasporas, and the legacies of colonial modernity.Each of the four chapters is centered on a spatial concept: scale, border, semi- periphery, and world. I suggest that each concept functions simultaneously as a formal device, an interpretive key, and a mode of organizing the narrative space. My dissertation thus explores how the contemporary novel circulates across multiple geographies in today’s globalized marketplace, but also how it discursively incorporates them. I discuss dynamics of circulation, publishing networks, and economies of cultural prestige; at the same time, I focus on how the texts I analyze foreground their own multilingual histories and their attachments to multiple locations. In so doing, this dissertation shows that the study of contemporary works of fiction requires a spatially flexible framework in which multiplacedness is used to register colonial histories, the irruption of neoliberal forces into peripheral spaces, and the geopolitical rearrangements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In exploring how works of fiction articulate a consciousness of the world that is spatially grounded and historically determined, my dissertation approaches contemporary novels as indexes of the conditions of the world we inhabit—both imaginatively and materially.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses
LanguageEnglish
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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