[PDF] Large Worlds Small Places Critical Cosmopolitanism And Stereoscopic Vision In The Global Postcolonial Novel eBook

Author : Asdghig Karajayerlian
Publisher :
Page : 191 pages
File Size : 22,87 MB
Release : 2010
Category :
ISBN :

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This dissertation looks at the new developments in the politics and narrative style of the global postcolonial novel in the most recent works of Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, V.S. Naipaul, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, namely, Fury, The Pickup, Magic Seeds, and Wizard of the Crow, respectively. I note that in varying degrees, these narratives enact a form of commitment to the postcolonial world that is critically cosmopolitan, situated between a liberal ideology of common humanity and a postcolonial outlook championing resistance. This critical cosmopolitanism moves from a discourse of dislocated subjectivity in postcolonialism to one of the multiply-linked subjectivities of globalization. It does not shun the liberatory potential of global discourses, such as modernity, human rights, and feminism, and it does not hold the "national" as the sole form of resistance to global inequities and the neocolonial threat of a globalized world. In fact, the distance found in these narratives from locality, nativity, and cultural specificity, unsettles the condition of postcoloniality and the binary dynamics of imperial centers and (post)-colonial peripheries, notions that are at the basis of established interpretive paradigms for postcolonial narratives. Taking critical cosmopolitanism as my critical paradigm, instead, I expose in these narratives a desire for globality, namely for a convivial culture and a non-fragmented world, which is attentive nonetheless to the new power relations and the tensions existing in the act of reconciling the local with the global, such as in ethnic conflicts, the plight of illegal immigrants and global strangers, the hegemony of the global "society of the spectacle," and the various activisms on behalf of the global poor and the dispossessed. I contend that the global postcolonial novels in this dissertation envision the "large worlds" that are at the global forefront always in relation to the "small places" that are within and beyond national demarcations and often below visibility. This double and complex view of globalization, which I denote as stereoscopic vision, fashions a mutually informing critique that surpasses the nation, imperial world-views, and postcolonial geopolitics. It expands onto the world and generates its literature in an era of accelerated globalization.

Author : Masood Ashraf Raja
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 227 pages
File Size : 22,77 MB
Release : 2014-01-10
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0786485558

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In twelve critical and interdisciplinary essays, this text examines the relationship between the fantastic in novels, movies and video games and real-world debates about nationalism, globalization and cosmopolitanism. Topics covered include science fiction and postcolonialism, issues of ethnicity, nation and transnational discourse. Altogether, these essays chart a new discursive space, where postcolonial theory and science fiction and fantasy studies work cooperatively to expand our understanding of the fantastic, while simultaneously expanding the scope of postcolonial discussions.

Author : Stephanos Stephanides
Publisher : Brill / Rodopi
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 27,46 MB
Release : 2015
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9789004300644

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"Vernacular Worlds, Cosmopolitan Imagination" brings together essays on literary and artistic practice involving cross-cultural transactions in the post-colonial world. The essays explore broad questions of ethics and aesthetics in the productive tension between language, culture, and the polis.

Author : Pheng Cheah
Publisher : Duke University Press Books
Page : 407 pages
File Size : 33,17 MB
Release : 2016-01-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780822360926

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In What Is a World? Pheng Cheah, a leading theorist of cosmopolitanism, offers the first critical consideration of world literature’s cosmopolitan vocation. Addressing the failure of recent theories of world literature to inquire about the meaning of world, Cheah articulates a normative theory of literature’s world-making power by creatively synthesizing four philosophical accounts of the world as a temporal process: idealism, Marxist materialism, phenomenology, and deconstruction. Literature opens worlds, he provocatively suggests, because it is a force of receptivity. Cheah compellingly argues for postcolonial literature’s exemplarity as world literature through readings of narrative fiction by Michelle Cliff, Amitav Ghosh, Nuruddin Farah, Ninotchka Rosca, and Timothy Mo that show how these texts open up new possibilities for remaking the world by negotiating with the inhuman force that gives time and deploying alternative temporalities to resist capitalist globalization.

Author : Jason Eng Hun Lee
Publisher : Open Dissertation Press
Page : pages
File Size : 25,27 MB
Release : 2017-01-26
Category :
ISBN : 9781361337547

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This dissertation, "'All is Not Well in the World': Critical Cosmopolitanism in Twenty-first Century Fiction" by Jason Eng Hun, Lee, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: This thesis considers how contemporary American and British novels at the turn of the century attempt to conceptualize global human, political, economic and ecological risks through different levels of global connectedness. Taking a theoretical approach, the thesis offers up the notion of critical cosmopolitanism as a form of literary critique that might help to connect the field of literature to current sociological debates about globalization and cosmopolitanism. Critical cosmopolitanism is summarized here as follows: a predisposition towards cosmopolitan ideals but also a self-reflexive awareness of its perceived ideological and narrative shortcomings; a desire to conceive of a planetary self-conscious by maneuvering across and between spatial containers like the nation-state; an attempt to map disjunctive flows of global capital onto various narrative 'worlds'; a type of narrative reflexivity that is transferred onto the reader. The thesis comprises of two parts. Part 1 considers how the war on terror discourse problematizes novelists' attempts to imagine planetary connectedness, and their struggles to imbue their readers with a self-reflexivity as an act of critical cosmopolitanism. Chapter 1 discusses the representational challenges that 9/11 presents to the novelist in terms of historicity, and outlines some of the prevailing metanarratives/counternarratives that are projected by them. Chapter 2 considers how alterity is used to critique or negotiate representations of the terrorist persona in novels by Don DeLillo, John Updike and Mohsin Hamid. Pointing to flaws in their narrative forms, these novelists enable their reader to transcend certain ideological boundaries which are denied to their own protagonists. Chapter 3 considers the interrelationship between terror and the spectacle in novels by Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer and Ian McEwan, looking at how 9/11's images are able to project itself across the world but still reduce viewers' capacity for imagining global connectedness. Part 2 explores how novelists use a range of postmodern strategies to represent the various connections/dislocations made possible by global capital and how it problematize perceptions of human relationships across the world. Global capital is presented as a fluid dynamic that enables greater connectivity across the globe, but it also poses difficulties in one's ability to realize a genuine cosmopolitanism against the all-incorporating power of the market. Chapter 4 deals with a variety of attempts in novels by William Gibson and Don DeLillo to cognitively map the relations of capital and consumer culture, and to make these complex global systems more intelligible to the reader. Chapter 5 discusses novels by David Mitchell and Rana Dasgupta that experiment with heterotopic, multi-layered narrative platforms to represent interconnecting but geographically separate 'worlds', and their ability to project cosmopolitan ideals across these textual horizons of space and time. DOI: 10.5353/th_b5185945 Subjects: English fiction - 21st century - History and criticism American fiction - 21st century - History and criticism Cosmopolitanism in literature

Author :
Publisher :
Page : 169 pages
File Size : 39,13 MB
Release : 2013
Category :
ISBN : 9781303634307

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Identifying cosmopolitanism as the principal ethico-political paradigm for postcolonialism's increasingly trans-national vision of the future, "Reading the Postcolonial Cosmopolitan Novel" argues novels' fundamental importance to this vision's realization. It contends that the inherently ethical experience of novel-reading means that postcolonial novels like Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988) and Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) are in fact capable of (re)-producing cosmopolitan subjectivities in the world--and therefore that novels, not theory, contain postcolonialism's most useful thinking about cosmopolitanism as both a diverse set of already existing practices in the world and an ethical model of interpersonal and transcultural encounter.

Author : Fabienne Darling-Wolf
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 201 pages
File Size : 29,6 MB
Release : 2014-12-22
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0472900153

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Based on a series of case studies of globally distributed media and their reception in different parts of the world, Imagining the Global reflects on what contemporary global culture can teach us about transnational cultural dynamics in the 21st century. A focused multisited cultural analysis that reflects on the symbiotic relationship between the local, the national, and the global, it also explores how individuals’ consumption of global media shapes their imagination of both faraway places and their own local lives. Chosen for their continuing influence, historical relationships, and different geopolitical positions, the case sites of France, Japan, and the United States provide opportunities to move beyond common dichotomies between East and West, or United States and “the rest.” From a theoretical point of view, Imagining the Global endeavors to answer the question of how one locale can help us understand another locale. Drawing from a wealth of primary sources—several years of fieldwork; extensive participant observation; more than 80 formal interviews with some 160 media consumers (and occasionally producers) in France, Japan, and the United States; and analyses of media in different languages—author Fabienne Darling-Wolf considers how global culture intersects with other significant identity factors, including gender, race, class, and geography. Imagining the Global investigates who gets to participate in and who gets excluded from global media representation, as well as how and why the distinction matters.

Author : Julian Go
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 40,47 MB
Release : 2016
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0190625139

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Social scientists have long resisted the radical ideas known as postcolonial thought, while postcolonial scholars have critiqued the social sciences for their Euro-centric focus. However, in Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory, Julian Go attempts to reconcile the two seemingly contradictory fields by crafting a postcolonial social science. Contrary to claims that social science is incompatible with postcolonial thought, this book argues that the two are mutually beneficial, drawing upon the works of thinkers such as Franz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak. Go concludes with a call for a "third wave" of postcolonial thought emerging from social science and surmounting the narrow confines of disciplinary boundaries.

Author : Jacob Edmond
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 393 pages
File Size : 27,85 MB
Release : 2019-07-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0231548672

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The world is full of copies. This proliferation includes not just the copying that occurs online and the replication enabled by globalization but the works of avant-garde writers challenging cultural and political authority. In Make It the Same, Jacob Edmond examines the turn toward repetition in poetry, using the explosion of copying to offer a deeply inventive account of modern and contemporary literature. Make It the Same explores how poetry—an art form associated with the singular, inimitable utterance—is increasingly made from other texts through sampling, appropriation, translation, remediation, performance, and other forms of repetition. Edmond tracks the rise of copy poetry across media from the tape recorder to the computer and through various cultures and languages, reading across aesthetic, linguistic, geopolitical, and technological divides. He illuminates the common form that unites a diverse range of writers from dub poets in the Caribbean to digital parodists in China, samizdat wordsmiths in Russia to Twitter-trolling provocateurs in the United States, analyzing the works of such writers as Kamau Brathwaite, Dmitri Prigov, Yang Lian, John Cayley, Caroline Bergvall, M. NourbeSe Philip, Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, Christian Bök, Yi Sha, Hsia Yü, and Tan Lin. Edmond develops an alternative account of modernist and contemporary literature as defined not by innovation—as in Ezra Pound’s oft-repeated slogan “make it new”—but by a system of continuous copying. Make It the Same transforms global literary history, showing how the old hierarchies of original and derivative, center and periphery are overturned when we recognize copying as the engine of literary change.

Author : Kwame Anthony Appiah
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 25,89 MB
Release : 2017-07-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1479829684

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An indispensable collection that re-examines what it means to belong in the world. "Where are you from?" The word cosmopolitan was first used as a way of evading exactly this question, when Diogenes the Cynic declared himself a “kosmo-polites,” or citizen of the world. Cosmopolitanism displays two impulses—on the one hand, a detachment from one’s place of origin, while on the other, an assertion of membership in some larger, more compelling collective. Cosmopolitanisms works from the premise that there is more than one kind of cosmopolitanism, a plurality that insists cosmopolitanism can no longer stand as a single ideal against which all smaller loyalties and forms of belonging are judged. Rather, cosmopolitanism can be defined as one of many possible modes of life, thought, and sensibility that are produced when commitments and loyalties are multiple and overlapping. Featuring essays by major thinkers, including Homi Bhabha, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Thomas Bender, Leela Gandhi, Ato Quayson, and David Hollinger, among others, this collection asks what these plural cosmopolitanisms have in common, and how the cosmopolitanisms of the underprivileged might serve the ethical values and political causes that matter to their members. In addition to exploring the philosophy of Kant and the space of the city, this volume focuses on global justice, which asks what cosmopolitanism is good for, and on the global south, which has often been assumed to be an object of cosmopolitan scrutiny, not itself a source or origin of cosmopolitanism. This book gives a new meaning to belonging and its ground-breaking arguments call for deep and necessary discussion and discourse.