The Global Novel
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"Illuminating." – The New York Times Book Review What is the future of fiction in an age of globalization?In The Global Novel , acclaimed literary critic Adam Kirsch explores some of the 21st century's best-known writers– including Orhan Pamuk, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Mohsin Hamid, Haruki Murakami, Elena Ferrante, Roberto Bolano, Michel Houellebecq, and Margaret Atwood. They are employing a way of imagining the world that sees different places and peoples as intimately connected. From climate change and sex trafficking to religious fundamentalism and genetic engineering, today's novelists use 21st-centry subjects to address the perennial concerns of fiction, like morality, society, and love. The global novel is not the bland, deracinated, commercial product that many critics of world literature have accused it of being, but rather finds a way to renew the writer's ancient privilege of examining what it means to be human.
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Chapter One
World Literature and Its Discontents
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In an unexpected turn, however, Lind also employs this ideal of global classicism as a weapon against modernism, which he characterizes as an artistic movement that cut off writers and readers from literary tradition. Global classicism would, then, be formally conservative, as opposed to the radically innovative classicism of writers like Ezra Pound or James Joyce. It would produce “a genuine world literature far more erudite and refined than global popular culture.” In this way, the attack on global literature can lead toward a cultural politics of restoration, a kind of intellectual protectionism in which writers guard their literary resources against competition from corporate behemoths.
The novelist and translator Tim Parks also argues that the winners in the game of world literature are mediocre books. But in a 2010 essay for the New York Review of Books, with the blunt headline “The Dull New Global Novel,” Parks expands the critique from genre fiction to literary fiction itself. World literature is not just the name of a canon of great books, Parks argues; it is also a market dynamic, in which authors come to define success as “an international rather than a national phenomenon.” And “from the moment an author perceives his ultimate audience as international rather than national, the nature of his writing is bound to change. In particular one notes a tendency to remove obstacles to international comprehension.” Local allusions and references disappear, along with the kind of complex wordplay that is impossible to translate. Apter, resisting this kind of simplification, writes approvingly of “the Untranslatable,” as a kind of wrench thrown into the smoothly turning gears of world literature: “Untranslatability [is] a deflationary gesture toward the expansionism and gargantuan scale of world-literary endeavors.”
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