Goethe's Heirs@@@The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture

"The Balance of Separateness and Communication": Cosmopolitan Ethics in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda

In Graceland (2004), Chris Abani extends a long tradition of Lagos literature by re-imagining the city from the perspective of its poorest population. By invoking and subverting the Bildungsroman genre through his narration of the young slumdweller Elvis's troubled coming of age, he suggestively critiques the instability and inconsistency of the postcolonial nation-state. Specifically, through his formal and thematic elaboration of a "suspen - sion" leitmotif, Abani demonstrates the paralyzing imbrication of the local, national, and global discourses of development that collide at the urban margins. While national models of progress are proven untenable by the discrepant trajectories of development that intersect the city, the promise of cultural transnationalism is equally circumscribed by Elvis's immersion in a global economic system that perpetuates his marginalization. In his fic - tional representation of Lagos's uneven development, Abani thus responds to calls for more holistic accounts of development than those which emerge from dominant economic analyses.

"Suspended City": Personal, Urban, and National Development in Chris Abani's Graceland

Upward Mobility in the Postcolonial Era: Kincaid, Mukherjee, and the Cosmopolitain Au Pair

This essay argues that neoliberalism has an aesthetic technology that works alongside its more obvious politico-economic technologies of subjection and subjectivity. This aesthetic technology is expressed in the economic writings of Joseph Schumpeter and in the ethnographic and financial analyses of “Rising Asia” or emerging Asian countries and cultures. Drawing on the aesthetic theories of Theodor Adorno and Jacques Ranciere, this essay contends that contemporary anglo-phone fiction creates an aesthetic dimension within which neoliberalism’s aesthetic technology is situated, traced, and interrogated. Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia are novels that perform a narrative renovation of neoliberalism’s creative destruction. In so doing, they represent the expansive networks of neoliberal globalization and the actors involved in these networks as aesthetic objects rather than sovereign subjects or fetishized commodities. Through a stylized prose that imitates rather than authenticates the economic and empirical world, Adiga’s and Hamid’s fictions reconfigure and tease a different sensibility out of the language of Rising Asia discourse. Both novels operate through an aesthetic dimension of semblance and imitation rather than an energetic mode of creative destruction. Through the formal twists and turns of literary genres, they reframe and redistribute sensibility rather than provide an authoritative affirmation of entrepreneurial subjectivity.

Creative Destruction and Narrative Renovation: Neoliberalism and the Aesthetic Dimension in the Fiction of Aravind Adiga and Mohsin Hamid

This introduction frames the principal questions of this special issue: the nature of data in criticism and the relation between data-driven literary criticism and more traditional forms of criticism. The suggestion throughout is that the current tension in critical practice can be better understood by turning to nineteenth-century narratives and their fraught attempts at encapsulating and representing data. Particular attention is paid to the means of representing data in literary criticism, particularly through visualizations. The essays in this special issue are then discussed, with emphasis on the possibilities and conceptual difficulties that come with the representation of large aggregates in novel form.

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Goethe's Heirs@@@The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture

Citations

"The Balance of Separateness and Communication": Cosmopolitan Ethics in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda

"Suspended City": Personal, Urban, and National Development in Chris Abani's Graceland

Upward Mobility in the Postcolonial Era: Kincaid, Mukherjee, and the Cosmopolitain Au Pair

Creative Destruction and Narrative Renovation: Neoliberalism and the Aesthetic Dimension in the Fiction of Aravind Adiga and Mohsin Hamid

Introduction: “Narrative against Data”

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