Global Fiction Research Articles

Women’s Empowerment in Local and Global Fiction: From Toba Beyond

This study explores women's empowerment in literature, focusing on the interplay between tradition and modernity across different cultural contexts. Employing comparative literary analysis, this research examines Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid and Mangalua by Idris Pasaribu. The methodology involves thematic and narrative analysis, where thematic analysis identifies key motifs related to empowerment, resistance, and gender roles, while narrative analysis examines how each character's story arc reflects broader societal norms. Through these analyses, the study highlights how each protagonist navigates societal expectations and challenges gender norms within traditional and modern frameworks. Findings indicate that both novels use women’s empowerment as a lens to critique and reshape cultural expectations, offering insights into gender roles across varied societies. The study concludes with recommendations for further research on cross-cultural gender narratives, acknowledges the limitations of focusing on only two novels, and suggests broader literary comparisons for future studies.

‘My open eye’: Souvankham Thammavongsa, Anthony Veasna So and short fiction as minor literature

From the 1980s to the 2000s, contemporary world fiction gained increasing prominence through the maximalist form of the postcolonial novel. More recently, short story collections with postcolonial themes, realist styles and minimalist constraints have gained in prominence, even as patterns of migration entangle the categories of local and global. This article focuses on two recent and acclaimed books, How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa, and Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So, in order to argue that these reflexive, humorous and polyvocal collections provide new and generative iterations of contemporary global fiction through the form of the short story.

Nonfictionality, Function, and Salience

Focusing on different treatments of the same nonfictional entity, Huntington’s disease, in two global fictions, Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) and Lisa Genova’s Inside the O’Briens (2015), this paper seeks to understand the affective, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of crucial problematic moments in each. It deploys the concepts of status (fictional, nonfictional, or a blurring of the two), function (how does the particular element contribute to the larger narrative purpose) and salience (how significant is that function for that larger purpose) in order unpack the rhetorical logic of those passages. This unpacking leads to a more positive view of McEwan’s construction of Saturday than the one offered by many of McEwan’s previous critics as well as a general defense of Genova’s construction of Inside the O’Briens. More generally, the essay offers new insights into the interaction of local nonfiction and global fiction.

Imagining Afghanistan: Global Fiction and Film of the 9/11 Wars by Alla Ivanchikova

Reviewed by: Imagining Afghanistan: Global Fiction and Film of the 9/11 Wars by Alla Ivanchikova Hong Zeng (bio) Alla Ivanchikova. Imagining Afghanistan: Global Fiction and Film of the 9/11 Wars. Purdue UP, 2019. Pp. 259. US$44.99. Alla Ivanchikova’s Imagining Afghanistan: Global Fiction and Film of the 9/11 Wars examines how Afghanistan was imagined in literary and visual texts after the 9/11 attacks and subsequent United States invasion. She convincingly argues that Afghanistan after 9/11 became a testing ground for global forces that reflect the moral defects of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)-centric humanitarianism, Cold War logic, America’s unwitting contribution to transnational terror, and the damage of wars on human and nonhuman environments. The book’s innovative central arguments criticize a NATO-centric view of Afghanistan, which portrays it as a primordial, isolated country, a site of suffering that justifies Western intervention. According to the author’s astute definition, such a NATO-centric position views Afghanistan through the lens of Orientalism. This book also innovatively deconstructs the prevalent Western Cold War logic of regarding Afghanistan’s problems solely as the outcome of Soviet invasion, which disregards Afghanistan’s multifaceted history, including its indigenous socialism before the Soviet invasion and the domestic strife among religious factions that had already devastated the land. Besides her shrewd criticism of NATO-centric views, Ivanchikova studies several authors’ alternatives views of Afghanistan in post-9/11 literature, including the view of Afghanistan as a site of global forces and variable history rather than a site of flattened history that accounts for only recent Taliban rule. Secondly, she re-evaluates the Soviet Union’s role in Afghanistan: despite massive casualties, the Soviets did restrain Afghanistan’s indigenous theocratic violence and bring about a degree of economic equality and women’s liberation. Thirdly, she satirizes how the American invasion and exploitation of Afghanistan was masked as humanitarian intervention. Fourthly, she points out America’s responsibility in the Taliban’s rise, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the global wars after 9/11, citing the US’ support of local religious extremist groups during the Cold War to compete with the Soviet Union for influence in Afghanistan. Chapter One, “Humanitarian Sublime and the Politics of Pity,” responds to Nivi Manchanda’s questions in Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge: “[H]ow is Afghanistan thought about in a way such that it is possible to invade and bomb it?” and “[W]hat are the sources [End Page 175] of authority that sanction the discourses that make that act of invasion permissible and possible in the first place?” (Manchanda 5). To answer these questions, Ivanchikova critiques three works—Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s film Kandaha (2001), Yasmina Khadra’s novel The Swallows of Kabul (2002), and Tony Kushner’s acclaimed play Hombody/Kabul (2002)—which frame Afghanistan as a site of intense suffering and humanitarian crisis that legitimizes US-led invasion. Ivanchikova insightfully points out the cognitive fallacy of this humanitarian view, which relies on “empathy of distant suffering,” “the flattening of Afghan history,” and “the medievalization of Afghanistan” (16). Chapter Two, “Imagining the Soviet: The Faustian Bargain of Khaled Hosseini’s Kabul trilogy,” brilliantly contrasts Hosseini’s best-selling anti-Soviet novel The Kite Runner (2003) with M. E. Hirsh’s Kabul (1986) as well as with Hosseini’s subsequent novels A Thousand Splendid Suns (2006) and The Mountains Echoed (2013). Her comparison reveals the intense anti-Soviet stand of the first book that wins the author success as much as Hosseini’s inability in his later books to similarly depict Soviet invasion and Western “salvation.” Chapter Three, “Humanitarian Jihad: Unearthing the Contemporary in the Narrative of the long 1979,” examines two novels and a graphic novel: Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil (2008), Soraya Khan’s City of Spies (2015), and Didier Lefèvre’s The Photographer (2009). These works depict ghost wars orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in its support of jihad against the Soviets, which later led to the empowerment of Islamic extremist groups and the retrogression of women’s liberation. In particular, Lefèvre’s The Photographer uses the graphic novel genre to...

Colonial Struggle-Revolt of Adivasis against Corporate Policies and It’s Invisibility in Modern Global Fictions of Indian English Literature

The treatment to the adivasi community in Postcolonial Indian English fiction lacks in many grounds. Tribal historical revolts, encroachments of British rule into tribal territories, grabbing lands of the tribals, exploitation of tribal women, cruel landlords, deforestation and degradation of tribal environmental values do not find realistic representation in Indian English fictions. In Gita Mehta's The River Sutra, tribal are shown as the worshipper of Narmada River and performing some ritual on the bank of River Narmada, but tribal religious concerns are not so much the limited and full of superstitions. They consider land, forest and water as godly gift to them. In fact these natural objects are itself Godlike for them but when British power and landlords took the illegal entry in their territories, they protested against them and became the epitome of valor and martyrdom in the history. This research article tries to examine the bias attitude of mainstreams literature writing regarding the adivasi heritage and glorious tradition of revolt and sacrifice.

Narrative and Cosmopolitan Mobility: Teju Cole’s Open City, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Global Fiction

Narrative and Cosmopolitan Mobility: Teju Cole’s Open City, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Global Fiction Jeffrey Gonzalez (bio) Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008) deluge readers with images of the urban landscapes their narrator-protagonists explore. The narration of each novel painstakingly lists consumer goods, traits of neighborhoods, street names, subway lines, and monuments these characters encounter as they travel around New York and other major cities. Cole and O’Neill have their narrators begin active exploration of New York in early chapters, and their movement around the city and the globe triggers narrative leaps to memories of each migrant-narrator’s homeland, other places they have lived or locations they visit, as well as ones they imaginatively construct. The texts root their fictive protagonists in actual streets and buildings in New York and elsewhere, then consistently connect their diegetic locales to other places or times. Both born outside the U.S., highly mobile within New York and around the globe, highly educated and culturally sophisticated, Cole’s Julius and O’Neill’s Hans also lost fathers young, have complex relationships with their mothers, write a substantial amount about birds, and seem quite good at and insistent upon figuring out people’s nationalities by looking at them.1 This last feature lets each narrator linger on the diversity of New York and the other global cities they inhabit, calling attention to the “intense flow of human traffic across all and any territories” that Zygmunt Bauman says is characteristic of “liquid modernity” (8). Hans grew up in [End Page 200] The Hague, spends time in India, and lives in London before and after his time in New York; Julius spends four weeks in Brussels and narrates passages regarding his upbringing in Lagos. The places they visit contain large numbers of people like them, individuals who have come from elsewhere and might be reasonably expected to live somewhere else eventually. Because each novel has this international range of reference, as well as deploying metaphorical figures of flight and devoting attention to population shifts, Open City and Netherland conjure a feeling of global reach and awareness. These characteristics indicate that these texts belong to the category of global fiction, a genre enjoying both critical and cultural prestige as well as insistent redefinition, despite each featuring first-person narration. Both O’Neill and Cole seem intent on working within the novel’s limitations to produce a narrative sensation of a large, complex, interconnected world. They sidestep one of this ambition’s potential pitfalls—simply affirming the banal idea that humans are all linked2—by making their cosmopolitan narrators, the very figures offering this sophisticated vision of the world, objects of critique. As Nasia Anam and Simon Gikandi have noted, globalization’s preferred face is the white-color cosmopolitan, but refugees or migrants seeking economic opportunity or safe haven account for a far greater proportion of the global shifts in human population (Anam, “Nervous Condition”; Gikandi 22–35). Each author’s decision to situate cosmopolitan figures like Hans and Julius as our guides into this shifting landscape might seem to blunt the texts’ ability to comment critically on the globalized present. Yet each novel makes the contrast between their cosmopolitan narrator’s immersion in and movement across inegalitarian environments, filled with less mobile and less privileged individuals, a manifest component of each work. Bauman writes that the collapse of “the structuring centers” of the postwar, midcentury Western consensus “seem[s] to run parallel with the emergent centrality of the orphaned self ” as a common form of subjectivity (14). Cole and O’Neill give us orphaned narrators, isolated individuals physically separated from their origins and from their families, but whose isolation means they do not feel constrained by a sense of authority to which they must submit. While Bauman imagines fluid modernity’s orphans as lacking structure and foundation, the symbolic orphaning of Hans and Julius also grants a freedom from physical and intellectual [End Page 201] boundaries, which yields to wide play with narrative space and time. The instability of each narrator’s life is paralleled by the instability of his narration, instabilities further complicated...

The Many Fictions of Illness: A Rhetorical Approach to Understanding Fictionality in Mom’s Cancer

Recent studies of fictionality within narrative theory have emphasized the permeability between global fictions and nonfictions. That is, global nonfictions often deploy elements of local fictionality without compromising their global commitments. This paper seeks to contribute to this ongoing exploration by arguing that nonfictional illness narratives deploy fictionality to enrich their referential content. I examine Brian Fies' graphic memoir Mom's Cancer, emphasizing how the text utilizes fictionality to address the complicated question of how to narrate the illness experience of others. I also move beyond the particulars of Mom's Cancer to consider (a) how the graphic medium lends itself to the inventions of fictionality, (b) why authors of illness narrative often turn to the indirections of fictionality to come to terms with the actual experiences of illness, and c) how a rhetorical understanding of fictionality can help answer recent challenges to the role of narrative studies in the medical humanities.

Timely, Untimely, Timeless: Temporal Limits in J.M. Coetzee’s Late Global Fiction

ABSTRACT J.M. Coetzee’s late global fictions regularly offer formal experiments with fleetingness – works designed to become dated, superannuated – yet repeatedly return to the theme of enduring, almost transcendental, literary value. These are works that illustrate a crisis point in literary history, when the global and the digital inflict on authors an imperative to be timely while older institutional literary values demand that they be timeless. In these works, joined together in one present we find threads of timeliness (actions and ideas that are a propos of the moment), untimeliness (actions and ideas that are retrograde or avant-garde, out of joint with the times or, from the perspective of the untimely one, that reveal time to be out of joint with itself), and timelessness (intimations of ever-lasting, extra-temporal, permanence). This article examines these temporal figures in Elizabeth Costello , Summertime , and some of J.M. Coetzee’s shorter fictions, tracing the limits of the present they produce, oppose, or, in trying to surpass, reenforce.

On Gathering: Or, The Birth of Global Fiction from the Spirit of Tragedy

AbstractThis article examines how certain works of global fiction have conceived of their ethical and political agency through the form and act of gathering. Discussions of the global novel's relationship to collective life have often adapted the ideas of Benedict Anderson in order to suggest that contemporary fiction extends “imagined community” from the nation to the globe. Yet political theorists such as Wendy Brown have shown how global economic integration under neoliberalism comes at the price of national social disintegration. In search of a collective imaginary outside the terms of global integration and nationalist resurgence, this article looks to the 1930s (rather than 1990s) as an origin point for global fiction, finding in “British” works attuned to the disintegration of the liberal world-system a model of fiction's agency relevant for neoliberal times. Works by Mulk Raj Anand, Virginia Woolf, and, later, Zadie Smith respond to social and political disintegration by insisting upon fiction's capacity to gather together a disparate audience; and they suggest how gatherings afford an unbounded, eventual, and non-sovereign arrangement of collective life within the ruins of global modernity.

What Is It Like to Be a Drone? On Jean-Noël Orengo's <em>L'Opium du ciel</em>

In his itinerant global fiction L'Opium du ciel (2017), Jean-Noël Orengo conducts an experiment involving consciousness and omniscience: the novel's narrator is a drone. This technology provides benefits from a narratorial perspective: its God's-eye view of the world and advanced software (facial recognition, Wi-Fi access, GPS) and hardware (flight mechanisms, cameras, cloaking device) allow the narrator to see and hear what most first-person-limited narrators cannot. However, the narrator's omniscience is only an illusion. Analysis of the novel shows how the drone is deficient as an omniscient narrator and can never allow the reader full access to the book's world.

Nonfictionality, Function, and Salience – Or, Affect, Ethics, Aesthetics and Huntington’s Disease in Saturday and Inside the O’Brien

Focusing on different treatments of the same nonfictional entity, Huntington’s disease, in two global fictions, Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) and Lisa Genova’s Inside the O’Briens (2015), this paper seeks to understand the affective, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of crucial problematic moments in each. It deploys the concepts of status (fictional, nonfictional, or a blurring of the two), function (how does the particular element contribute to the larger narrative purpose) and salience (how significant is that function for that larger purpose) in order unpack the rhetorical logic of those passages. This unpacking leads to a more positive view of McEwan's construction of Saturday than the one offered by many of McEwan's previous critics as well as a general defense of Genova's construction of Inside the O'Briens. More generally, the essay offers new insights into the interaction of local nonfiction and global fiction

Nouveau monde ou nouvelle utopie ? Sur la tentation transnationale du roman francophone : L’Exemple de Khatibi et Laferrière

Abdelkébir Khatibi (Maroc) and Dany Laferrière (Haïti–Québec) belong to different cultural areas, but share the same linguistic practice in a postcolonial context. They are also similar in their conception of writing literature in a transitional world for a global age where the novel, as a Western form in its origin and under its authority, and also as an access point to modernity for the writers of the global South, aims at a certain form of transnational order. Both of these writers reject the dogmatic definition of identity from the perspective of an origin and of a supposed secular pact between fiction and nation. This paper examines the shift between francophone global fiction by way of a “regional criticism.” However, this emerging global rhetoric, recently called “littérature-monde,” may appear as a new utopian paradigm.

An Ethic of Global Fiction: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Min-gyu Park’s Dinner with Buffett

An Ethic of Global Fiction: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Min-gyu Park’s Dinner with Buffett

The creative disjunctures of twenty-first century global storytelling: Rana Dasgupta's Tokyo Cancelled

ABSTRACTThis essay argues that Tokyo Cancelled (2005) paradoxically seeks to resist the very forms of world-making totality implied in its narration by rendering the world simultaneously as knowable and unfathomable, flat and uneven. Featuring an ensemble of narratives that are locally-grounded yet part of a wider global network, Tokyo Cancelled activates a series of creative disjunctures via its decentred narrative structure and use of irrealist storytelling techniques. Through its frame narrative, the simulated orality of its thirteen anonymous storytellers resist a master narrative of globality by creating an ambivalent, deterritorialised reading of place, while the novel's irrealist aesthetic serves a double function of depicting the non-objective, disorganised nature of a globalised world, whilst also pointing to the very real issues of global inequality through its asymmetrical portrayal of the economic world-system. As the individual narratives feature marginalised subjects, I explore ways in which Tokyo Cancelled highlights conditions of displacement, empowerment and alienation within a deeply fractured neoliberal economy, and in doing so, how the novel presents one successful example of experimental writing in twenty-first-century works of global fiction by opening up a borderland site for its protagonists to connect in the world-city.

Slippages in Cuban Literature: Global Fictions

Slippages in Cuban Literature: Global Fictions

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

Reviewed by: This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form by Debjani Ganguly Claire Chambers Debjani Ganguly. This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form. Durham: Duke UP, 2016. xii + 300 pp. I write this review in November 2016, soon after Donald Trump was elected US president twenty-seven years to the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall. One of This Thing Called the World's most valuable contributions is the attention it accords to "the historically significant threshold of 1989" in shaping our current Manichean political climate (1). Notwithstanding recent scholarly emphasis on the World Trade Center attacks and their aftermath, I agree with Debjani Ganguly's thesis that 1989—a year significant for, but not reducible to, the collapse of communism—marked the most profound shift in geopolitics and literary aesthetics since the revolutionary movements of 1968. However, from my perspective as a researcher of British Muslim writing and given that Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown is one of the key texts discussed in this monograph, it is surprising that Ganguly devotes little space to exploring the Rushdie affair in her nuanced analysis of 1989 as a new "temporal horizon for the emergence of a new kind of novel" (6). Ganguly, who is Director of the University of Virginia's Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures, argues that post-Cold War world novels are notable for their engagement with modern kinds of unending war and insurgency, the digital environment, and human rights discourse. She launches this ambitious and perceptive line of enquiry by bringing contemporary world novels into dialogue with the late-eighteenth-century protonovel. The eighteenth-century comparative framework is illuminating, but it seldom filters into the individual case studies about contemporary novels. For instance, especially since the Ayatollah Khomeini issued the infamous fatwa against him in 1989, Rushdie has been eager to position himself as heir apparent to Enlightenment philosophes such as Voltaire. This promising research avenue is not pursued in Ganguly's chapter on Rushdie's 2005 novel. Ganguly's disentangling of the terms "postcolonial," "global," and "world" in the introduction is much needed and persuasive. She hints at the recent emergence of global literature as a category, linked as it is with the ongoing issues of colonialism and globalization. But it is puzzling to see that this well-read study does not interact with work on global fiction by such scholars as Sanjay Krishnan, Revathi Krishnaswamy and John C. Hawley, Diana Brydon, and Richard J. Lane. With her eighteenth-century expertise, Ganguly is more immersed [End Page 177] in longstanding debates about world literature from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Edward Said and Immanuel Wallerstein. Drawing on Romantic sources, she expounds on the lovely, instructive phrase "the melancholic realism of the world novel" (19). She also reflects on the increasingly pervasive sense in academia that there are problems with the term "postcoloniality," particularly in light of transnational brands of terror and war without end. Ganguly paints a grisly picture of what she terms, with a nod to Achille Mbembe, "deathworlds" around the globe (9), as well as to resistance movements that deflagrate in response. The chapter entitled "Forensic Witnessing," for example, is an elegy for the Sri Lanka killed during its protracted civil war as portrayed in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost. Strangely, though, the 2003 Iraq War is first encountered via Ian McEwan's Saturday. In this novel, a rather objectionable middle-class man, Henry Perowne, expresses views of the war and Muslim migrants in Britain that are hardly offset by even the echo of a contestatory subaltern voice. Similarly, Martin Amis's "The Last Days of Muhammad Atta" provides readers' first window on 9/11 in this volume. Ganguly praises "Amis's deft strokes" (49) in the short story and absorbs his phrase "the thing which is called the World" (43) into her title. It is a missed opportunity that she does not challenge Amis's preoccupation with the figure of the terrorist, his simplistic view of Atta as a man with a death wish, and the hateful nature of some of his public pronouncements on Muslims and Islam. Ganguly makes...

Reading for the Planet: Toward a GeomethodologyGatekeepers: The Emergence of World Literature and the 1960s

Reading for the Planet: Toward a GeomethodologyGatekeepers: The Emergence of World Literature and the 1960s

After Human Rights: Literature, Visual Arts, and Film in Latin America, 1990–2010 by Fernando J. Rosenberg

Reviewed by: After Human Rights: Literature, Visual Arts, and Film in Latin America, 1990–2010 by Fernando J. Rosenberg Tara Daly Fernando J. Rosenberg, After Human Rights: Literature, Visual Arts, and Film in Latin America, 1990–2010. U of Pittsburgh P, 2016. 296 pp. Fernando Rosenberg's book is a theoretically sophisticated and timely inquiry into the way that human rights discourse is invoked and transformed in contemporary Latin American novels, installation art, photography, and films produced in post-dictatorial and global contexts between 1990 and 2010. Chapter 1 presents Rosenberg's main lines of argument and serves as the compelling introduction to the book. His thesis is that human rights and neoliberal common sense share common ground but neither one "exhausts the emancipatory possibilities of human rights nor exempts neoliberal politics of blatantly ignoring basic rights" (1). Rosenberg then makes the case that both discourses are relevant beyond the (post)political, marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Taking the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as his starting point, Rosenberg proves that the After of his title not only signals a posterior time to the original activation of human rights discourse, but also refers to an ongoing "expression of desire, pointing to the presence of a post-and transnational imagination for social change that resists codification" (12). Through detailed analysis of artists from most of Latin America and [End Page 541] some of the Caribbean, Rosenberg graphs the interstices of global human rights discourse, market capitalism, and a neoliberal ethos as the matrix in which the constitution of the political and justice are continuously negotiated and transformed. Chapter 2, "Literature between Rights and the Possibility of Justice" and Chapter 3, "Global Fictions, Truth and Reconciliation, and the Judgment of History" will appeal to scholars of the Latin American novel, particularly as world literature. In Chapter 2, Rosenberg revisits Rulfo's canonical Pedro Páramo to underscore the paradoxical relationship between rights and patriarchal oligarchy as illuminated through a fictional juridical order that frames Páramo's right to land as the foundation of patriarchal personhood (35). In Rulfo, human rights hover on the horizon line as a sense of possibility amid state catastrophe. Rosenberg complements Rulfo with readings of two Colombian novels, Laura Restrepo's La multitud errante and Fernando Vallejo's La virgen de los sicarios. His analysis of Restrepo demonstrates that what is usually referred to as a weak or absent state proves to be a ghostly presence in her novel, defined not by its capacity to impose force but to relinquish the very force exerted on its behalf. Rosenberg's relentless ability to articulate complex contradictions through his readings attests to his deep appreciation of the manner in which literature reveals political nuance in ways that might otherwise remain insensible. Rosenberg takes up the post-dictatorial Latin American "novel of truth and reconciliation" as it invokes a global imaginary of the post-political—that is, the way that the novel mobilizes the imaginary of human rights toward a final overcoming of insurmountable political rifts—in Chapter 3. He analyzes En busca de Klingsor by Jorge Volpi (Mexico), El desierto by Carlos Franz (Chile), Abril rojo by Santiago Roncagliolo (Peru), La hora azul by Alonso Cueto (Peru) and Insensatez by Salvadorean Horacio Castellanos Moya. In all of the novels, in different ways, Rosenberg argues that in the absence of a sense of the common, human rights is the formation that mediates and domesticates the abyss between sovereignty and subjection (91). In Chapters 4 through 7, Rosenberg moves from literature to visual media. In Chapter 4, "The Disappeared: Visual Arts and Auratic Distance," he discusses a collective exhibit of various disappeared groups that was, before touring internationally, hosted by the North Dakota Museum of Art. The exhibit exemplifies two different trends in the aesthetic representation of political violence: first, a cosmopolitan human rights sensibility that fosters an ability to identify with "distant suffering"; second, the constant flux of visual media representing this suffering and accessed by remote audiences. Rosenberg argues that the exhibit's power lies in its Benjaminian "aura," that is, the manifestation of distant power brought near through the artistic experience. Scholars of memory...

'Terrible queer creatures at the latter end of the world': Joyce's A Portrait and the Global Bildungsroman

This article considers James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a postcolonial Bildungsroman avant la lettre, in part because it establishes an attitude toward Bildung that looks beyond idealist and nationalist consolations toward something like global belonging. Central to this vision of the novel as a global form is the philosophical concept of world-making, which I argue conditions the way Joyce's protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, understands his own formative desires. This understanding drives him, ultimately, to abandon the options laid out for him by colonial society; to embrace his own inner life and the moments of aspiration that are its outward and visible signs; and to imagine a world in which his 'wayward instincts' would count as forms of aesthetic accomplishment. This relationship to inner life entails a relationship to the future that differs from conventional progressive models of selfformation. In A Portrait, Joyce describes temporality of aspiration that posits the triumphant recognition of one's own Bildung, a standpoint that redeems the path toward it from error and misprision. Stephen's formative quest isgrounded in a relationship between aspiration and freedom that was first articulated by German idealist philosophers like G.W.F. Hegel and Friedrich Schiller. As a child, his sense of freedom at first feels like a new form of bondage; but he soon learns to resist the designs others have on him and to follow his own aspirations. His turn to art which grants him the power of creating a world and himself to the worlds of others, is the only option left to a young man whose experience of the world has failed to live up to what he could imagine. Through canny and salutary misrecognitions, he moves from his early childhood experiences of méconnaissance, to the moment on the strand and his aesthetic elaboration of it, finally to arrive at a moment of creation, in which the world he creates opens him to the world at large in a new and hopeful way. This, I argue, is the force of the novel's conclusion, the corrective gaze the young artist casts on his own narrative, from the perspective of his journal entries, which bring his inner life directly into contact with the life of others. In this respect, Joyce bequeaths to postcolonial and global fiction the template for a world in which aspiration forces a heroic path toward the future and new destinies for Bildung.

A Unified Scene? Global Fictions in the C21

The twenty-first century has been marked by an unprecedented intensification in globalisation, transnational mobility and technological change. According to Peter Boxall, there has been a ‘turn in the fiction of the new century’ to reflect this ‘contemporary global condition’ (Boxall 141). This article examines how British and American literature engage with twenty-first century culture to reflect this emergent globalised state.