Description
Book SynopsisAims to complicate our understanding of world literature by examining the deployment of cultural stereotypes in the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro. Aamir Mufti has described âworld literatureâ as the legacy of an imperial system of cultural mapping from a unified perspective. Rebecca Suter views Ishiguro's fiction as an alternative to this paradigm.
Trade ReviewThis is an accomplished work, a detailed and generous reading of Ishiguro’s early novels and a needed correction to cultural essentialism that still pervades much of world literature theory. I would be delighted to point my students to Suter's book as they explore Ishiguro and consider the now more complicated question of his relationship with Britain and Japan. It is a pleasure to read and its arguments will be lasting. Convincing and provocative, Two-World Literature exhibits a radically poststructuralist approach to Ishiguro’s novels with its emphasis on the rhetorical, narratological, and transnational aspects of his work. Long before the Nobel literary prize was awarded to him, some critics wondered if Ishiguro was a Japanese novelist who wrote in English or a British novelist who injected Japanese sensibilities into his narratives. Suter attempts to establish him as a writer who transgresses the boundary between East and West.
