Focusing on Chris Abani’s The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014), this essay argues that analysis of works that enlist the conventions of popular or genre fiction is crucial for understanding the ...complex ways in which contemporary African novels engage with and respond to the material realities of globalization. Secret History, for instance, both invokes and refuses the epistemic certainties typically promised by the detective plot. In place of solving a mystery and depicting a subsequent return to order, the novel proffers a principle of hermeneutic skepticism that is attuned to multiplicity, simultaneity, and discontinuity. This principle is echoed in another, better-known work, Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), whose protagonist resembles the central character in Secret History. Together, these novels present history as an accumulation of traces, remainders, and ghostly presences, all of which are subject to new kinds of recoding and distortion in the present. The novels’ theorization of history and epistemology, in turn, controverts narratives of globalization as a unifying force or homogenizing process in which differences are smoothed out to facilitate the flows of goods and capital. In doing so, these contemporary African novels become “global” by turning critical attention to the power dynamics that structure the present.
Considering the aesthetic canon as a cultural construct or process that involves the whole cultural field, the concept is revisited nowadays in the spirit of World Literature theories. In this sense, ...there could be seen a rehabilitation of noncanonical genres or the circulation of values in the transnational space in order to cartography the (international canon(s). The aim of this paper is to analyse a specific scene from the well-known Lewis Carroll novel Alice in Wonderland (translated into Romanian) from this premises: the instable place in the frames of noncanonical genres or categories and the relationships between literary prizes and the mechanism of canonization.
The present article offers a structured account of Hungarian artistic careers in the context of Surrealism - and a possible narrative of the history of Hungarian Surrealism. While occasionally, ...individual Hungarian authors affiliated with extraterritorial surrealist groups, were included into international overviews of surrealism, the story of Hungarian surrealism as an institutional venture and as a network of artistic activities is yet to be written. The article identifies three important benchmarks that shaped the history of Hungarian Surrealism throughout the 20th century.
In this article, I examine Timothy Bewes's book, Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age, published in 2022 by Columbia University Press. My critical examination will consist of three stages: ...a contextualizing stage, which involves analysing the macro-ideological context in which Bewes's book is situated (i.e., the status of literary criticism and theory nowadays); a synthetic exposition of the book's main arguments, along with a critical analysis that highlights problematic concepts in Bewes's methodology and arguments. In the first part of the article, I will revise the genealogy of aesthetic regimes, as referred to by Jacques Ranciére. These regimes are defined as the relationship between subject, world, language, and text, and I will delve into how this relationship operates in the 21st century. In the second part of the paper, I will tackle Bewes's primary (hypo)theses concerning the free indirect structure of the novel in a postfictional age. The key concept here is "instantiation," which refers to the intrinsic structure of the novel. I aim to connect this concept with the notion of the "narrative unconscious" and explore the idea of authorial responsibility. Additionally, I will draw on Moretti's delimitation of the modern epic and the novel, as well as Mark Fisher's concept of "capitalist realism," to analyse the relationship between the contemporary novel and the (post)ideology of neoliberalism. Lastly, in the final part of my analytical approach, I will offer a critique of Bewes's "totalizing" theory from a world literature perspective. Specifically, I will focus on the unequal dynamics of literatures within the capitalist world-system. Keywords Free indirect, ideology and form, Timothy Bewes, world literature, narrative ethics, theory of the novel, 21st century literature.
Romanian Literature as World Literature indisputably possesses an inaugural character. Any doubts in this regard are resolved by merely comparing it with other supposedly influential projects ...focusing on Romanian literature. First of all, in Romanian contemporary criticism, approaches resembling those featured in the volume published in 2017 by Bloomsbury may be found in several individual and isolated studies carried out by researchers of the new wave of young critics (many of them contributors to this project) commenced after 2000.
For hundreds of years, American artisanship and American authorship were entangled practices rather than distinct disciplines. Books, like other objects, were multisensory items all North American ...communities and cultures, including Native and settler colonial ones, regularly made and used. All cultures and communities narrated and documented their histories and imaginations through a variety of media. All created objects for domestic, sacred, curative, and collective purposes. In this innovative work at the intersection of Indigenous studies, literary studies, book history, and material culture studies, Caroline Wigginton tells a story of the interweavings of Native craftwork and American literatures from their ancient roots to the present. Focused primarily on North America, especially the colonized lands and waters now claimed by the United States, this book argues for the foundational but often-hidden aesthetic orientation of American literary history toward Native craftwork. Wigginton knits this narrative to another of Indigenous aesthetic repatriation through the making and using of books and works of material expression. Ultimately, she reveals that Native craftwork is by turns the warp and weft of American literature, interwoven throughout its long history.
This dataset provides detailed metadata on ca. 10.2 million works of fiction and non-fiction written after 1799 in 521 different languages available in the HathiTrust Digital Library. The dataset ...bolsters the May 2022 Hathifile by supplying missing predicted fiction tags with a bespoke BERT-based multilingual classifier. Our classifier completes the catalogue with an additional 400,000 non-English volumes predicted to be works of fiction, capturing 95% of all works presently provided by HathiTrust. We provide each work with metadata including the work’s genre at the level of fiction or non-fiction, length in pages, original language, and the year the work was published. With a total page count of ca. 1.4 billion pages, our dataset provides researchers with a substantial source of non-English modern literature. We also present insight into how multilingual classifiers can be trained with monolingual data, itself a discovery with implications for the study of lower resource languages. We hope our provisions will accelerate empirical research into non-English prose and literature.
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