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A novel is an act, an intervention, which, most often, the naïve reader takes as a representation. The novel intervenes to modify or correct our conventional notions of a situation and, in the best and most intense cases, to propose a wholly new idea of what constitutes an event or of the very experience of living. The most interesting contemporary novels are those which try—and sometimes manage—to awaken our sense of a collectivity behind individual experience, revealing a relationship between the isolated subjectivity and a class or community. But even if this happens (which is rare), one must go on to find traces of collective praxis hidden away within the awakened feeling of inter-connection. And since it is in the sense of the nation and nationality that collectivity is most often expressed, there is an urgent need to disengage the possibilities of genuine action within these areas.
This sweeping collection of essays ranges from the elusive politics of North American literature to the sometimes frozen narrative experiences of the eastern countries and the Soviet Union and beyond. This is a voyage traversing the globe, discovering a common kinship between each literary destination in late capitalism itself.
List of contents
Introduction
1. Allegories of the Hunter
2. Limits of the Gringo Novel
3. Form-Problems in Henry James
4. Language and Conspiracy in Delillo and Yurick
5. The Autonomous Work of Art: Utopian Plot-Formation in
The Wire6. Flashes of World War II
7. Germany’s Double Plots
8. An Eastern Waiting Room
9. Immortal Stalingrad
10. The USSR that Wasn’t
11. Faith and Conspiracy in Japan
12. History as a Family Novel
13. The Religions of Dystopia
14. Fear and Loathing in Globalization
15. The Novel and the Supermarket
16. Temporalities of the Sea
17. A Businessman in Love
18. The Failure of Success
19. Days of the Messiah
Index
About the author
Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. The author of numerous books, he has developed a richly nuanced vision of Western culture's relation to political economy. He was a recipient of the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize. He is the author of many books, including Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, The Cultural Turn, A Singular Modernity, Archaeologies of the Future, Brecht and Method, Ideologies of Theory, Valences of the Dialectic, The Hegel Variations and Representing Capital
Summary
The giant of literary theory analyzes the novel: Conrad, James, Atwood, Oe, Mailer, Grass, Grossman, Garcia Márquez, Gibson, Knausgaard and more
