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Epilogue

Reading Totality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2022

Seo Hee Im
Affiliation:
Hanyang University, Korea
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Summary

The epilogue surveys contemporary global fiction and alternate conceptions of world literature to stress the political, historical contingency of the Anglophone ambition to give formal literary expression to totality. Unlike their late modern predecessors, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie delegate the task of crafting literary totalities to their readers, suggesting that one’s best chance of assimilating the world through text lies not in devouring a splendiferous Gesamtkunstwerk but in grazing across many national literatures. Recent trends suggest a privatization of world-making responsibilities; authors no longer claim the public function of rendering the world legible for their readerships, at least not within single works. I proceed from self-reflexive meditations on world literature in Calvino, Borges, and Adichie to explore the literary market in South Korea, where publishing houses have stayed solvent thanks to the evergreen demand for collectible sets of foreign literature in translation. Unlike the writers I examine in previous chapters, non-Anglophone writers frequently assume that the world is an entity to be read rather than written.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Late Modernist Novel
A Critique of Global Narrative Reason
, pp. 148 - 165
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • Epilogue
  • Seo Hee Im, Hanyang University, Korea
  • Book: The Late Modernist Novel
  • Online publication: 02 June 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009168366.006
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  • Epilogue
  • Seo Hee Im, Hanyang University, Korea
  • Book: The Late Modernist Novel
  • Online publication: 02 June 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009168366.006
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Epilogue
  • Seo Hee Im, Hanyang University, Korea
  • Book: The Late Modernist Novel
  • Online publication: 02 June 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009168366.006
Available formats
×