Genres Of Modernity

Genres of Modernity maps the conjunctures of critical theory and literary production in contemporary India. The volume situates a sample of representative novels in the discursive environment of the ongoing critical debate on modernity in India, and offers for the first time a rigorous attempt to hold together the stimulating impulses of postcolonial theory, subaltern studies and the boom of Indian fiction in English. In opposition to the entrenched narrative of modernity as a single, universally valid formation originating in the West, the theoretical and literary texts under discussion engage in a shared project of refiguring the present as a site of heterogeneous genres of modernity. The book traces these figurative efforts with particular attention to the treatment of two privileged metonymies of modernity: the issues of time and home in Indian fiction. Combining close readings of literary texts from Salman Rushdie to Kiran Nagarkar with a wide range of philosophical, sociological and historiographic reflections, Genres of Modernity is of interest not only for students of postcolonial literatures but for academics in the fields of Cultural Studies at large.

"Genres of Modernity maps the conjunctures of critical theory and literary production in contemporary India. The volume situates a sample of representative novels in the discursive environment of the ongoing critical debate on modernity in India, and offers for the first time a rigorous attempt to hold together the stimulating impulses of postcolonial theory, subaltern studies and the boom of Indian fiction in English." "Combining close readings of literary texts from Salman Rushdie to Kiran Nagarkar with a wide range of philosophical, sociological and historiographic reflections, Genres of Modernity is of interest not only for students of postcolonial literatures but for academics in the fields of Cultural Studies at large."--BOOK JACKET.

Focused on the relation between processes of globalization and literary genres, this volume intervenes in the prevalent notions of globalization, literary history, genre, and the novel. Using both close reading and world history, both literary criticism and political theory, the book is a timely intervention in the debates about world, postcolonial, and transnational literature as they have been intensified by critical globalization studies, world-systems analysis, Bourdieuan sociology, and cosmopolitanism studies. It contends that globalization, far from starting in recent decades, has a long and complex history, not unlike the history of literature itself, meaning that when we speak of globalization and literature, we in effect invoke the entire history of literature. Essays examine literary genres in relation to broader historical processes, connecting the present state of globalization to such key world-historic events as the early modern geographical and scientific explorations, the Enlightenment, the expansions of modernity in the long nineteenth and twentieth centuries, postmodernity and postcoloniality, and contemporary counter-hegemonic movements. The book offers innovative readings of the pastoral from Saint-Pierre to Carpentier; the novel in Kant and Wieland, and in Diderot and Marx; travel writing from Verne to Cortázar; sports writing in James and Kahn; entrelacement in Bolaño, Ghosh, and Soderbergh; and also the Mozambican ghost story, Indian genre fiction, "fake" autobiographies, Sephardic "language memoirs," the postcolonial Gothic, Irish "chick lit," and counter-hegemonic novels. Making important theoretical contributions to a renewed discussion about genre, especially genres of narrative fiction, this volume addresses global studies, the history of the novel, and debates over periodization and nationalism in literary history.

Living Genres in Late Modernity rehears the American 1970s through the workings of its musical genres. Exploring stylistic developments from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, including soul, funk, disco, pop, the nocturne, and the concerto, Charles Kronengold treats genres as unstable constellations of works, people, practices, institutions, technologies, money, conventions, forms, ideas, and multisensory experiences. What these genres share is a significant cultural moment: they arrive just after “the sixties” and are haunted by a sense of belatedness, loss, or doubt, even as they embrace narratives of progress or abundance. These genres give us reasons—and means—to examine our culture’s self-understandings. Through close readings and large-scale mappings of cultural and stylistic patterns, the book’s five linked studies reveal how genres help construct personal and cultural identities that are both partial and overlapping, that exist in tension with one another, and that we experience in ebbs and flows.

Focused on the relation between processes of globalization and literary genres, this volume intervenes in the prevalent notions of globalization, literary history, genre, and the novel. Using both close reading and world history, both literary criticism and political theory, the book is a timely intervention in the debates about world, postcolonial, and transnational literature as they have been intensified by critical globalization studies, world-systems analysis, Bourdieuan sociology, and cosmopolitanism studies. It contends that globalization, far from starting in recent decades, has a long and complex history, not unlike the history of literature itself, meaning that when we speak of globalization and literature, we in effect invoke the entire history of literature. Essays examine literary genres in relation to broader historical processes, connecting the present state of globalization to such key world-historic events as the early modern geographical and scientific explorations, the Enlightenment, the expansions of modernity in the long nineteenth and twentieth centuries, postmodernity and postcoloniality, and contemporary counter-hegemonic movements. The book offers innovative readings of the pastoral from Saint-Pierre to Carpentier; the novel in Kant and Wieland, and in Diderot and Marx; travel writing from Verne to Cortázar; sports writing in James and Kahn; entrelacement in Bolaño, Ghosh, and Soderbergh; and also the Mozambican ghost story, Indian genre fiction, "fake" autobiographies, Sephardic "language memoirs," the postcolonial Gothic, Irish "chick lit," and counter-hegemonic novels. Making important theoretical contributions to a renewed discussion about genre, especially genres of narrative fiction, this volume addresses global studies, the history of the novel, and debates over periodization and nationalism in literary history.

Gnostic Return in Modernity demonstrates the possibility that Gnosticism haunts certain modern discourses. Studying Gnosticism of the first centuries of the common era and utilizing narrative analysis, the author shows how Gnosticism returns in a select band of narrative discourses that extends from the seventeenth century German mystic Jacob Boehme through Hegel and Blake down into the contemporary period. The key concept is that of narrative grammar. Unlike the hypothesis of an invariant narrative, a Gnostic narrative grammar allows room for the differences between modern and ancient forms of Gnosticism, and respects the dignity of both periods.

It's a critical cliché that Cervantes' Don Quixote is the first modern novel, but this distinction raises two fundamental questions. First, how does one define a novel? And second, what is the relationship between this genre and understandings of modernity? In Forms of Modernity, Rachel Schmidt examines how seminal theorists and philosophers have wrestled with the status of Cervantes' masterpiece as an 'exemplary novel', in turn contributing to the emergence of key concepts within genre theory. Schmidt's discussion covers the views of well-known thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel, José Ortega y Gasset, and Mikhail Bakhtin, but also the pivotal contributions of philosophers such as Hermann Cohen and Miguel de Unamuno. These theorists' examinations of Cervantes's fictional knight errant character point to an ever-shifting boundary between the real and the virtual. Drawing from both intellectual and literary history, Forms of Modernity richly explores the development of the categories and theories that we use today to analyze and understand novels.

The logic of modernity is an ironical logic. Modern irony, a flash of genius produced by Romantic theorists, is first discussed, e.g. in Hegel and Kierkegaard, as an ethical problem personified in figures such as the aesthete, the seducer, the flaneur, or the dandy. It fully develops in the novel, the modern genre par excellence: in novels of the early 19th century no less than in those of postmodernity or in those of the masters of citation, parody, and pastiche of classical modernism (Musil, Joyce, and Proust). This book, however, goes one step further. Looking at how such different authors as Schmitt, Kafka, and Rorty identify the political conflicts, contradictions, and paradoxes of the 20th century as ironical and offers a comprehensive account of the constitutive irony of modernity’s ethical, poetical, and political logic.