Literature of the Global Age
A Critical Study of Transcultural Narratives
$39.95
In stock
About the Book
In an age of world citizenship, literary scholarship is focusing increasingly on texts which communicate effectively over cultural lines. Advocating a planetary approach to contemporary literature, this critical text examines eight novels from eight cultures. The writers discussed are Julian Barnes, Magda Szabo, Abraham B. Yehoshua, Ian McEwan, W.G. Sebald, Murakami Haruki, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Azar Nafisi. Focusing on the authors’ encouragement to meditate on life’s most pressing issues, the essays here invite us to reevaluate postmodernism as a current category.
About the Author(s)
Bibliographic Details
Maurizio Ascari
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 212
Bibliographic Info: notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2011
pISBN: 978-0-7864-5959-9
eISBN: 978-0-7864-8535-2
Imprint: McFarland
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments 1
Introduction 5
For a Planetary Culture 7
Transcultural Narratives 11
Through the Green Line 14
Around Postmodernism 17
After 9/11 21
Beyond Postmodernism 25
The Dialectics Between Words and Reality 30
Narratives of Responsibility 33
Morals as Transgression 37
1. Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) 41
Relics of the Past 41
Rethinking History 44
The Language of Parrots 46
Avatars of Truth 49
2. Magda Szabó, The Door (1987) 52
Behind the Door 53
Emotions, Thought and Ethics 55
An Epic of Emotions 56
Against Orthodoxy 59
From Ethics to Aesthetics 62
The Tragedy of Betrayal 63
3. Abraham B. Yehoshua, Mr. Mani (1990) 66
Back to the Bible 68
The Shadow of the Akedah 72
Looking for a Father 75
Escaping from History 76
The Other Within 79
4. Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001) 82
The Dangers of the Imagination 83
Eroticism and Forgery 86
Night into Nightmare 88
War Hells 89
Criminal and Mourner 90
A Book on Books 92
5. W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (2001) 95
Narratives of Exile 96
Architectures of Suffering 98
Mirroring Lives 102
Ghosts of Memory 104
On the Verge of the Abyss 107
6. Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore (2002) 110
Rewriting the Enigma of Oedipus 111
Life on the Shore 113
The Possible Story of Miss Saeki 116
Nakata versus Johnnie Walker 118
Into the Labyrinth 120
7. Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated (2002) 124
One Novel, Two Narratives 126
Heart of Darkness 129
Beyond the Tragic 131
Blindness and Insight 134
Postmemory Novels 136
8. Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) 139
Back to Tehran 139
Life in Black 141
The Politics and Poetics of Identity 143
Narratives of the Iranian Diaspora 146
A Heated Critical Debate 148
Language and Democracy 151
9. Conclusion 154
Traveling with Mr. Bean 154
Bearing Witness 157
Inner Frontiers 162
Narratives and Remediation 163
Grasping Complexity 165
Notes 167
Bibliography 181
Index 197
