Description
Book SynopsisTranscending 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 MarÃa RodrÃguez 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.
Trade Review"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
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Transcending the Postmodern
Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau
PART I
The Poetics of Transmodernity
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- The Transmodern Poetics of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas: Generic Hybridity, Narrative Embedding and Transindividuality
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Susana Onega
- Transnational Latino/a Literature and the Transmodern Meta-Narrative: An Alternative Reading of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
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Sara Villamarín-Freire
- The Novel of Ideas at the Crossroads of Transmodernity: Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island
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Angelo Monaco
PART II
Ethical Perceptions
- Problematising the Transmodern: Jon McGregor’s Ethics of Consideration
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Jean-Michel Ganteau
- Using Transculturalism to Understand the Transmodern Paradigm: Representations of Identity in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah
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Matthias Stephan
- Transmodern Mythopoesis in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant
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Laura Colombino
PART III
Migrancy and the Possibility of Re-enchantment
- A Transmodern Approach to Post-9/11 Australia: Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist as a Narrative of the Limit
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Bárbara Arizti
- Diversity, Singularity, Re-Enchantment and Relationality in a Transmodern World: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
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Merve Sarıkaya-Şen
PART IV
Perspectives on Biopolitics
- Transcorporeality, Fluidity and Transanimality in Monique Roffey’s Novel Archipelago
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Julia Kuznetski
- A Transmodern Approach to Biology in Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman
Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen
