Birgit Neumann

Examining a range of contemporary Anglophone texts, this book opens up postcolonial and transcultural studies for discussions of visuality and vision. It argues that the preoccupation with visual practices in Anglophone literatures addresses the power of images, vision and visual aesthetics to regulate cultural visibility and modes of identification in an unevenly structured world. The representation of visual practices in the imaginative realm of fiction opens up a zone in which established orders of the sayable and visible may be revised and transformed. In 12 chapters, the book examines narrative fiction by writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, David Dabydeen and NoViolet Bulawayo, who employ word-image relations to explore the historically fraught links between visual practices and the experience of modernity in a transcultural context. Against this conceptual background, the examination of verbal-visual relations will illustrate how Anglophone fiction models alternative modes of re-presentation that reflect critically on hegemonic visual regimes and reach out for new, more pluralized forms of exchange.

Engaging with recent research in literary multilingualism studies, the global anglophone and comparative studies, this book theorizes so-called post-monolingual anglophone novels. Inspired by Yasemin Yildiz’s Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (2012), post-monolingual anglophone novels are understood as literary texts that activate multi- and translingual strategies to mount a challenge to the ‘monolingual norm’ and the homogenizing aspirations of English. Post-monolingual novels employ literary configurations of multi- and translingualism without ignoring the ongoing validity of the monolingual norm in the international book market and major civil institutions. This corpus of texts is therefore highly self-conscious about the use of language. As post-monolingual novels stage exchange and movement between languages, they also model, in the realm of fiction, new concepts of language. In several case studies of contemporary anglophone post-monolingual novels from different parts of the world, the book demonstrates how the post-monolingual in literature operates within different cultural, and political contexts. The readings of Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Yvonne A. Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, J.M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous propose theoretically and methodologically innovative ways of engaging with literary multi- and translingualism. While the analyses focus on the post-monolingual poetics, they also give attention to the novels’ modes of production and circulation in the anglosphere.

Examining a range of contemporary Anglophone texts, this book opens up postcolonial and transcultural studies for discussions of visuality and vision. It argues that the preoccupation with visual practices in Anglophone literatures addresses the power of images, vision and visual aesthetics to regulate cultural visibility and modes of identification in an unevenly structured world. The representation of visual practices in the imaginative realm of fiction opens up a zone in which established orders of the sayable and visible may be revised and transformed. In 12 chapters, the book examines narrative fiction by writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, David Dabydeen and NoViolet Bulawayo, who employ word-image relations to explore the historically fraught links between visual practices and the experience of modernity in a transcultural context. Against this conceptual background, the examination of verbal-visual relations will illustrate how Anglophone fiction models alternative modes of re-presentation that reflect critically on hegemonic visual regimes and reach out for new, more pluralized forms of exchange.

Der vielschichtige Zusammenhang zwischen Erinnerung, Identität und Narration ist im aktuellen wissenschaftlichen Diskurs ebenso allgegenwärtig wie in der zeitgenössischen Erzählliteratur. Ziel der Studie ist es, die bislang nur vage konturierte Begriffstrias systematisch zu erfassen und für die literaturwissenschaftliche Gedächtnisforschung fruchtbar zu machen. Durch eine Verknüpfung von Gedächtnistheorien, Erzähltheorie und Funktionsgeschichte wird erstmals eine Typologie der Gattung der Fictions of Memory entworfen, die das Spektrum literarischer Erinnerungs- und Identitätskonstruktionen beschreibbar macht. Am Beispiel zeitgenössischer kanadischer Romane (u.a. von Margaret Atwood, Yann Martel, Alistair MacLeod, Michael Ondaatje, Mordecai Richler und Jane Urquhart) wird diese Bandbreite eindrucksvoll dokumentiert und gezeigt, dass und wie Fictions of Memory einen eigenständigen Beitrag zur Konstitution und Reflexion von Gedächtnis leisten.