Toward the World Novel: Genre Shifts in Twenty-First-Century Expatriate Fiction
2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/alh/ajr021
ISSN1468-4365
Autores Tópico(s)Diaspora, migration, transnational identity
ResumoThe dream of the great American novel is past. We need to write the global novel. I am working myself up to writing a kind of epic global novel. I suppose a lot of people are always working themselves up to writing that kind of novel. Since at least the late 1980s, ambitious writers have been imagining a new kind of narrative called the global, planetary, international, or simply “world” novel, and in recent years, their visions have started to come to fruition. Paralleling the much-remarked phenomena of accelerated migration and increased interpenetration of global markets, this new genre of the novel is changing the face of twenty-first-century US literature. Most importantly, the world novel is beginning to make global conditions newly legible to American readers. For some readers, this world or worldly novel replaces the Holy Grail of an earlier generation—the so-called great American novel.1 Yet several features thought to characterize the world novel also seem to derive from the earlier form: namely, multistranded narration, broad geographical reach, cosmopolitan ethics, multilingual sensitivity, and a renewed commitment to realism.2 With the possible exception of multilingualism, all of these features could also describe Dos Passos's Depression-era U.S.A., for example, as well as characterizing recent novels celebrated for their worldliness, such as Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). Recognizing this continuity in form, a number of critics have identified national narratives that might inspire contemporary global fiction. Political scientist Benedict Anderson proposes José Rizal's classic of the Filipino anti-imperial movement, El Filibusterismo (1891); Malcolm Bradbury offers Angus Wilson's East/West fantasy, As if By Magic (1973); and Guy Reynolds suggests Worlds of Color (1961), the final volume of W. E. B. Du Bois's trilogy on African-American family life. Tim Brennan's candidate is Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch (1963), and Salman Rushdie's somewhat underrated novel of Bombay musicians turned international celebrities, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (2000), has been mentioned more than once in this context as well.3
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