Ruxandra Cesereanu The Atlas of Globalization Fiction

David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas (2004) explores the intricacies of time-transcending human connections by introducing six seemingly unrelated narratives in a recursive, multi-layered narrative structure. Therefore the object of this BA paper is the novel’s embedded narrative structure and its major themes of rebirth and predacity with relation to the contemporary aesthetic and cultural mentality beyond postmodernism. The time transcending soul’s journey and human coexistence conveyed through the symbol of a comet-shaped birthmark is explored with the novel’s embedded narrative structure making it an ontological grand narrative, a term introduced by Jean-François Lyotard to define a unique kind of metanarrative which “sees” an inner connection between events related to one another. The symbol of a comet-shaped birthmark symbolizes a cyclical return of the soul, which incarnates into different characters throughout different historical epochs. The characters are bound to each other through the past, the present and the future. Jean-Luc Nancy claims that there is no being without “being-with”, no existence without coexistence which resonates with Ihab Hassan’s reasoning on a necessity to establish a sense of planetary civility grounded on truth and trust in order to emancipate from postmodern fallout or the “clash of civilizations” that resulted in tribalism and fundamentalism. Therefore the aim of this BA paper is to analyse the novel’s embedded narrative structure and the aforementioned themes, and to facilitate an intellectual discussion with regards to supplanting postmodernism. The novel’s strive for civil human coexistence and planetary civility makes it a post postmodernist novel. It is as if this novel is laying the road for some new cultural and aesthetic mentality yet to be defined by providing a sense of hopefulness and emancipation from the postmodern fallout characterized by numerous, violent military conflicts in the end of the twentieth century.

The South Atlantic Quarterly, 2001

2016

Today, world literature is seen as a mode of reading and ‘problem’ that demands new critical methods, especially in the light of globalization. This article proposes that certain contemporary fictions take the form of world literary allegory: striving aesthetically and politically to articulate the contexts and conditions of their own existence, intervention, and status as ‘readable’ participants in world culture and the global literary marketplace. To what extent might such fictions test the limits and possibilities for literary experimentation in a globalizing world? What kinds of maps, methods, and capacities for ‘reading’ a globalizing world emerge through this kind of world literature so anxiously concerned about its own status and world-making potential? By way of response to these questions, this article reads David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas as a world allegory and experimental epic that creatively ‘cannibalizes’ global discourses and world culture, challenging its readers to p...

ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 2016

Drawing on world-systems analytic perspectives and development studies, this article argues for the emergence of an experimental world epic during our era of global capitalist transition. As represented by David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, among other fictions, this epic demonstrates a radical commitment to global justice through its multi-scalar efforts to reconstitute the histories and horizons of world development, both for the subjects it represents and the global readership it addresses. For Mitchell, an ambivalent aesthetics of global cannibalism serves as a way to encode, critique, and exceed the logic of unfettered global capitalist accumulation, especially as the text self-consciously problematizes its role as a "global cannibal" of world culture and status as a commodity fiction to be consumed in the global literary marketplace. While the aesthetics of cannibalism may be distinctive to Mitchell, this article proposes that the experimental world epic might generally be characterized by its radical commitment to interrogating pivotal moments in world development and global transformation. Such an epic mobilizes world cultural knowledge and global literacies to highlight the deprivations associated with uneven development, enact global cognitive justice, and involve readers as active participants in articulating more ethical horizons for global transformation.

1. Moods constitute "specifications of affectedness, the ontological existential condition that things always already matter" (Dreyfus 169). 1. See also Chun: "Without them [computers] there would be no government, no corporations, no schools, no global marketplace, or, at the very least, they would be difficult to operate" (Programmed Visions, introduction).

American Literary History, 2011

A full-text version of this article apepars in the Brandeis University Institutional Repository: http://bir.brandeis.edu/bitstream/handle/10192/27252/IrrArticle2011.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y Here is an extract: 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 …

Modern Languages Open, 2018

2016

The paper suggests that the increasing proliferation of network fictions in literature, film, television and the internet may be interpreted through a theoretical framework that reconceptuallises the originally strictly psychoanalytic concept of the Unheimlich (Freud’s idea of the ‘unhomely’ or ‘uncanny’) within the context of political, economic and cultural disources fo globalisation. ‘Network fictions’ are those texts consisting of multiple interlocking narratives set in various times and places that explore the interconnections of characters and events across different storylines: novels such as William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003), Hari Kunzro’s Transmission (2005) and Gods Without Men (2011), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), or Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled (2005) are some examples. My argument is that central to these fictions is a sense of a ‘global unhomely’. The sense of displacement, unhomeliness and global mobility that is conveyed in these fictions is fundamental to the experience of the Unheimlich. In addition, the ability of the concept to convey a combined sense of the familiar and the strange is useful in exploring the ways in which these fictions engage with theoretical debates on globalisation that perceive the interaction between global flows and local cultures either in terms of homogenisation and uniformity or of heterogenisation and hybridity. Moreover, the repetitive temporality of the Unheimlich is another distinctive aspect that allows a reading of the disjunctive, non-linear temporal structure of these fictions from this perspective. The ‘repetition compulsion’, however, that Freud considered to be an example of uncanniness was also theorised by him as a post-traumatic symptom, and this implicit association of uncanniness with post-traumatic experience also allows to interpret the persistent preoccupation of these fictions with suffering and disaster, as well as their explorations of the ways in which collective tragedy and personal trauma reverberate within an increasingly globalised, interconnected world.

Book Presence in a Digital Age, 2018