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Chapter 3 - Death

Moments of Possibility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2019

Caroline Edwards
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London
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Summary

This chapter explores the most minimal scale at which utopian expression can be identified through a range of lyrical formal solutions to the problem of the lived time of the individual subject and its inevitable ending at the moment of death. Ali Smith’s Hotel World (2001), Grace McCleen’s The Land of Decoration (2012) and Jon McGregor’s If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002) all offer experimental proto-utopian solutions to this question of the finitude of narrative and subjective time, through dead narrators, proliferating timescales, miraculous times and moments of temporal arrest. These novels, I argue, destabilise notions of linear time, posing a variety of simultaneous utopian ‘moments‘ through which various conceptions of time and memory are constellated, opening up the radical alterity of the future.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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  • Death
  • Caroline Edwards, Birkbeck College, University of London
  • Book: Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel
  • Online publication: 01 July 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108595568.003
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  • Death
  • Caroline Edwards, Birkbeck College, University of London
  • Book: Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel
  • Online publication: 01 July 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108595568.003
Available formats
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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.

  • Death
  • Caroline Edwards, Birkbeck College, University of London
  • Book: Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel
  • Online publication: 01 July 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108595568.003
Available formats
×