Transcending the Postmodern
The Singular Response of Literature to the Transmodern Paradigm#

Edited by Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau, both members of the Literary and theatrical studies section of Academia Europea.

Transcending the Postmodern: The Singular Response of Literature to the Transmodern Paradigm gathers an introduction and ten chapters concerned with the issue of Transmodernity as addressed by and presented in contemporary novels hailing from various parts of the English-speaking world. Building on the theories of Transmodernity propounded by Rosa María Rodríguez Magda, Enrique Dussel, Marc Luyckx Ghisi and Irena Ateljevic, inter alia, it investigates the links between Transmodernity and such categories as Postmodernity, Postcolonialism and Transculturalism with a view to help define a new current in contemporary literary production. The chapters either follow the main theoretical drives of the transmodern paradigm or problematise them. In so doing, they branch out towards various issues that have come to inspire contemporary novelists, among which: the presence of the past, the ascendance of new technologies, multiculturalism, terrorism, and also vulnerability, interdependence, solidarity and ecology in a globalised context. In so doing, it interrogates the ethics, aesthetics and politics of the contemporary novel in English.

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature
London and New York
Routledge, 2020
255 pp.
ISBN: 978-0-367-86055-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-03758-3 (ebk).

Contents#

PART I#

The Poetics of Transmodernity

The Transmodern Poetics of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas: Generic Hybridity, Narrative Embedding and Transindividuality

Susana Onega

Transnational Latino/a Literature and the Transmodern Meta-Narrative: An Alternative Reading of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Sara Villamarín-Freire

The Novel of Ideas at the Crossroads of Transmodernity: Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island

Angelo Monaco

PART II#

Ethical Perceptions

Problematising the Transmodern: Jon McGregor’s Ethics of Consideration

Jean-Michel Ganteau

Using Transculturalism to Understand the Transmodern Paradigm: Representations of Identity in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

Matthias Stephan

Transmodern Mythopoesis in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant

Laura Colombino

PART III#

Migrancy and the Possibility of Re-enchantment

A Transmodern Approach to Post-9/11 Australia: Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist as a Narrative of the Limit

Bárbara Arizti

Diversity, Singularity, Re-Enchantment and Relationality in a Transmodern World: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Merve Sarıkaya-Şen

PART IV#

Perspectives on Biopolitics

Transcorporeality, Fluidity and Transanimality in Monique Roffey’s Novel Archipelago

Julia Kuznetski

A Transmodern Approach to Biology in Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman

Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen