Module VII·Article II·~1 min read
The World Novel of the 21st Century
Postmodernism and Contemporary Literature
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The Global Literary Market
The 21st century has created conditions for the "world novel"—literature that is read and created all over the world, crossing national boundaries. The Nobel Prize in Literature is a mirror of this globalization: Mo Yan (China, 2012), Alice Munro (Canada, 2013), Patrick Modiano (France, 2014), Svetlana Alexievich (Belarus, 2015), Hisashi Kurdegari (Nobel Prize 2017, Kazuo Ishiguro—a Japanese-British writer).
Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Remains of the Day" (1989): the butler Stevens, who has served a "great master" all his life, who turned out to be a Nazi sympathizer. A novel about self-deception, repressed feelings, "service" as a renunciation of oneself. This is an English novel written by a Japanese-British author—about a specifically English malaise.
The Novel After Catastrophe
Post-9/11 literature (Don DeLillo "Falling Man," Colm Tóibín "No One Writes Letters to Me Here," Jonathan Safran Foer "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close"): how to portray trauma in narrative?
Post-Holocaust literature: Primo Levi, Imre Kertész, Paul Celan—witnesses. W. G. Sebald—postmemory: "Austerlitz" (2001), "The Rings of Saturn"—reflections on catastrophe through photographs, archives, architecture. This is literature "from the side" of trauma—not a direct depiction, but an environment.
Climate fiction (cli-fi)—a growing genre: literature of the climate crisis. Richard Powers "The Overstory" (Pulitzer 2019): about trees and the struggle to save them. Amitav Ghosh "The Great Derangement": about why realism is not capable of depicting the climate catastrophe.
Question for reflection: "Climate fiction" tries to make the reader feel the abstract global crisis through concrete stories. Which narratives are personally most convincing for you in the context of climate?
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