Browsing by Author "Stan, Corina"

This dissertation reframes current debates over the role national culture and international connection plays in contemporary anglophone fiction in the formalist terms of genre studies. The processes and consequences of globalization continue to vex both authors who attempt to narrate them as well as those critics who attempt to make sense of the worlds those authors create. These challenges call for new rubrics from outside the matrix of nation, world, and globe, new ways of navigating the torrent of competing theories, to crystallize a path forward for the contemporary novel and its study.

The methodological strategy I propose is to turn to the narrative logics of genre fiction, which has become newly relevant after the so-called “Genre Turn” in the contemporary novel. What readers expect when they pick up a work of genre fiction is indispensable in establishing what those novels can imagine. Through readings of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2008), China Miéville’s The City & The City (2009), N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (2015-2017), and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017), Living in Other Places argues that the expectations that structure the historical novel, the detective novel, the blended category of science fiction and fantasy (SFF), and the emergent genre of the global novel itself provide clear, practical strategies for both conceptualizing global, international space, and navigating that space in everyday practice. These novels do so by staging an internationally hybrid history for the nation-state, pedagogically training readers into actively noticing the elements that keep nation-states together (and apart), worldbuilding new ways of imagining a whole world, and intimating the modes of interpersonal recognition called for as we experience the consequences of a globalized planet. The result is a new approach both to the study of genre and to the question of what the novel can do in articulating a shared global system.

The Art of Distances or, a Morality for the Everyday shows how British, French and German writers have dramatized the dilemmas of the ethical life with others in the twentieth century, and taken up the challenge of imagining new forms of community. Framed by an encounter between the thought of Theodor Adorno and Roland Barthes, the study traces an exemplary arc from 1933 to 1999, bringing together works of fiction, philosophy, critical theory, autobiography, social reportage and anthropology authored by deeply intriguing or controversial figures such as George Orwell, Paul Morand, Henry Miller, Elias Canetti, Iris Murdoch, Walter Benjamin, Annie Ernaux, Günter Grass, and others. Negotiating the ethical and the political, the role that intellectuals can, or should assume in the conflicts and debates of their time, trying to find adequate forms to express their dilemmas, these writers share a sustained attention to the question of the ideal distance between oneself and others in an age deprived of a shared morality.