Research Catalog

Title

Chimeras of form : modernist internationalism beyond Europe, 1914-2016 / Aarthi Vadde.

Author

Vadde, Aarthi

Publication

New York : Columbia University Press, [2017]

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xi, 301 pages cm.

Summary

In Chimeras of Form, Aarthi Vadde rethinks the classic concept of modernist internationalism in and beyond Europe. She explains how a wide-ranging group of writers used modernist literary forms to shape ideas of international belonging in the wake of imperialism. Rabindranath Tagore, James Joyce, Claude McKay, George Lamming, Michael Ondaatje, and Zadie Smith questioned traditional expectations of aesthetic form and, in doing so, cast doubt on parallel notions of the cohesion and wholeness of political communities. Drawing on her close readings of individual texts and on literary, postcolonial, and cosmopolitical theory, Vadde shows how these writers' formal experiments took part in debates about transnational interdependence and social obligation. She reads Joyce's use of asymmetrical narratives as a way to ask questions about international camaraderie and demonstrates how the "plotless" works of Claude McKay upturn ideas of citizenship and diasporic alienation. Her analysis of the contemporary writers Zadie Smith and Shailja Patel shows how present-day questions relating to migration, displacement, and economic inequality link modernism and postcolonial literature. Vadde illustrates how writers have reimagined the nation and internationalism in a period defined by globalization, revealing the dual nature of internationalism as an aspiration, possibly a chimeric one, and an actual political discourse.

Series Statement

Modernist Latitudes

Uniform Title

Modernist latitudes.

Subjects

• Modernism (Literature)
• Internationalism in literature

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Introduction: Chimeras of form -- Autotranslations: Rabindranath Tagore's internationalism in circulation -- Alternating asymmetry: international solidarity and self-deception in James Joyce's Dubliners and "Cyclops" -- Stories without plots: the nomadic collectivism of Claude McKay and George Lamming -- Archival legends: national myth and transnational memory in the works of Michael Ondaatje -- Root canals: Zadie Smith's scales of injustice -- Epilogue: Migritude-the re-mediated work of art and art's mediating work.

Call Number

JFE 17-64

ISBN

• 9780231180245 (cloth : acid-free paper)
• 0231180241 (cloth : acid-free paper)

LCCN

• 2016026231
• 40026692389

OCLC

953565984

Author

Vadde, Aarthi, author.

Title

Chimeras of form : modernist internationalism beyond Europe, 1914-2016 / Aarthi Vadde.

Publisher

New York : Columbia University Press, [2017]

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Series

Modernist Latitudes

Modernist latitudes.

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Standard Identifier

40026692389

Research Call Number

JFE 17-64