1st Edition
Transcending the Postmodern The Singular Response of Literature to the Transmodern Paradigm
Transcending the Postmodern: The Singular Response of Literature to the Transmodern Paradigm gathers an introduction and ten chapters concerned with the issue of Transmodernity as addressed by and presented in contemporary novels hailing from various parts of the English-speaking world. Building on the theories of Transmodernity propounded by Rosa María Rodríguez Magda, Enrique Dussel, Marc Luyckx Ghisi and Irena Ateljevic, inter alia, it investigates the links between Transmodernity and such categories as Postmodernity, Postcolonialism and Transculturalism with a view to help define a new current in contemporary literary production. The chapters either follow the main theoretical drives of the transmodern paradigm or problematise them. In so doing, they branch out towards various issues that have come to inspire contemporary novelists, among which: the presence of the past, the ascendance of new technologies, multiculturalism, terrorism, and also vulnerability, interdependence, solidarity and ecology in a globalised context. In so doing, it interrogates the ethics, aesthetics and politics of the contemporary novel in English.
Introduction: Transcending the Postmodern
Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau
PART I
The Poetics of Transmodernity
- The Transmodern Poetics of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas: Generic Hybridity, Narrative Embedding and Transindividuality
- Transnational Latino/a Literature and the Transmodern Meta-Narrative: An Alternative Reading of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
- The Novel of Ideas at the Crossroads of Transmodernity: Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island
- Problematising the Transmodern: Jon McGregor’s Ethics of Consideration
- Using Transculturalism to Understand the Transmodern Paradigm: Representations of Identity in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah
- Transmodern Mythopoesis in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant
- A Transmodern Approach to Post-9/11 Australia: Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist as a Narrative of the Limit
- Diversity, Singularity, Re-Enchantment and Relationality in a Transmodern World: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
- Transcorporeality, Fluidity and Transanimality in Monique Roffey’s Novel Archipelago
- A Transmodern Approach to Biology in Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman
Susana Onega
Sara Villamarín-Freire
Angelo Monaco
PART II
Ethical Perceptions
Jean-Michel Ganteau
Matthias Stephan
Laura Colombino
PART III
Migrancy and the Possibility of Re-enchantment
Bárbara Arizti
Merve Sarikaya-Sen
PART IV
Perspectives on Biopolitics
Julia Kuznetski
Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen
Biography
Susana Onega is Professor of English Literature at the University of Zaragoza, (Spain). Jean-Michel Ganteau is Professor of Contemporary British Literature at the University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 (France).CONTRIBUTORSSara Villamarin-Freire, Angelo Monaco, Matthias Stephan, Laura Colombino, Barbara Arizti, Mervew Sarikaya-Sen, Julia Kuznetski, and Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen
"This book stands out as an unyielding and timely repositioning of paradigms in the domains of philosophy, aesthetics, literary criticism and cultural theory through the lens of contemporary literature in English…the ten chapters of the book succeed in producing a close view of how themes such as postcolonialism, subalternity, eco-criticism, feminist criticism, etc. fall into the transmodern pattern." Sorin Cazacu, University of Craiova, British and American Studies
