All That Is Solid Falls from the Sky: Modernity and the Volume of World Literature

Dominic Davies

doi:10.1017/pli.2021.33

Abstract

AbstractThis article pits two conceptions of modernity—that of the Marxist humanist Marshall Berman and the ANT (Actor-Network Theory) sociologist Bruno Latour—against each other, exploring the implications of each for postcolonial and world literary criticism. The article begins by explaining “modernity” in the terms of both theorists, focusing on the “split” between subject and object, text and world. It then identifies a wider Latourian turn in postcolonial and world literary studies that has emerged in response to the prescriptively structural approaches of groups such as the WReC. In response, the article offers in turn a Latourian reading and then a structural critique of the Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s fifth novel, The Sound of Things Falling (2011, trans. 2013), probing their possibilities and limitations. In conclusion, it suggests Berman’s more expansive definition of modernist practice as one way in which postcolonial and world literary criticism might more effectively mediate between structural critique and close reading.

Highlights

The article offers in turn a Latourian reading and a structural critique of the Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s fifth novel, The Sound of Things Falling (2011, trans. 2013), probing their possibilities and limitations
It suggests Berman’s more expansive definition of modernist practice as one way in which postcolonial and world literary criticism might more effectively mediate between structural critique and close reading
Published in Spanish in 2011, The Sound of Things Falling is Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s fifth novel, and his third to be translated into English

Summary

Introduction

In her recent book, Postcolonialism After World Literature (2019), Lorna Burns goes to remarkable lengths to show how this Kantian division between “a representational realm and that of real-world action” pervades dominant theories of world literature and haunts the “intractable debate between poststructuralism and Marxist historical materialism” that has long preoccupied postcolonial studies.[22].

All That Is Solid Has Volume

All That Is Solid Falls from the Sky

All That Is Solid Makes a Sound

All That Is Solid Melts into Air