Cosmopolitan Fictions : Ethics, Politics, and Global Change in the Works of Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Jamaica Kincaid, and J. M. Coetzee

ISBN-13: 9780415975421 / Angielski / Twarda / 2005 / 96 str.

Katherine Stanton; Stanton Stanton;Routledge

Opis

Noting the risk that the globalizing of literary studies "may simply reinforce the developments it is attempting to examine and assess," Giles Gunn insists that critics analyze not only how the cultural material we study has been produced by globalizing trends, but also how it has subjected those trends to scrutiny. It is this work that Worldwise undertakes. The fictions studied represent and revise the global histories of the past and present--including the "indigenous or native" narratives that are, in Homi Bhabha's words, "internal to" national identity itself. These works, taking as their subjects European unification, the human rights movement, the AIDS epidemic, and the new South Africa, test the infinite demands for justice against the shifting borders of the nation, rethinking habits of feeling, modes of belonging, and practices of citizenship for the global future. Confronting the pervasiveness of ethical claims, the disjointing of the global field of action, and the impediments to social redistribution, they commit to the non-finality, which is not to say the deferability, of justice. Like cosmopolitanism itself, this genre points to and participates in a field of contested ethics and politics.

Spis treści

Acknowledgements  Introduction: Contemporary Cosmopolitan Fictions  1. Foreign Feelin: Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled and the New Europe  2. Criminal Justice in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost  3. Ethical Ennui and the AIDS Epidemic in Jamaica Kincaid's My Brother  4. "History is Larger than Goodwill": Restitution and Redeistributive Justice in J.M Coetzee's Age of Iron and Disgrace  Afterword: "To Touch the Future on its Hither Side"  Notes  Bibliography  Index

O autorze

Katherine Stanton