Seo Hee Im

Abstract Readers of Paradise Lost have argued that the epic registers England’s nascent imperialism negatively through its associations of trade with Satan. This essay rethinks Paradise Lost’s relation to empire by tracing its involvement in the making of an early modern subjectivity that is constitutively informed by an awareness of debt, debit, and credit. That profane mode of thought later finds more enthusiastic expression in the early English novels of Daniel Defoe and others, but it begins

The epilogue surveys contemporary global fiction and alternate conceptions of world literature to stress the political, historical contingency of the Anglophone ambition to give formal literary expression to totality. Unlike their late modern predecessors, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie delegate the task of crafting literary totalities to their readers, suggesting that one’s best chance of assimilating the world through text lies not in devouring a splendiferous G

Abstract “The Ghost in the Account Book” claims that the imperial fiction of Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner rejects accounting as a totalizing logic and, by extension, questions the English novel's complicity in propagating faith in that false logic. Accounting, which had remained unobtrusively immanent to realist novels of empire such as Mansfield Park and Great Expectations, surfaces to the diegetic level and becomes available for critical scrutiny in high modernist novels such as Heart of

The third chapter shows that Vladimir Nabokov, seeking to replace the superannuated form of national allegory, constructs a figure of supranational metonymy through chess. Critics have explained that the Bildungsroman is a novel of socialization that displays how an individual finds his place in a social world and projects a trajectory of collective progress. Like Beckett, though, Nabokov was a post-revolutionary expatriate who made his career in another language. One of Nabokov’s targets was th

The introduction sets down the blueprint and specifies how the argument builds upon existing understandings of the novel. Taking as my starting point the critical reluctance to acknowledge Defoe as the first English novelist, I trace the interdependence of Enlightenment thought, accounting practices, and literary realism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I also offer an overview of how theories of the novel have depended on the conceptual scaffolding of the antinomy. Long deployed by p

The first chapter claims that the imperial fiction of Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner rejects accounting as a totalizing logic, and by extension, questions the English novel’s complicity in propagating that false logic. Accounting, which had remained unobtrusively immanent to realist novels of empire, surfaces to the diegetic level in a classic instance of a thematization of the device and becomes available for critical contemplation. Drawing from Max Weber, Mary Poovey, and Georg Lukács, I a

In 2008, zadie smith found two possible paths for the future of the Anglophone novel in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. Though “one is the strong refusal of the other,” the opposed works share a “constructive frustration,” namely, “the frustrated sense of having come to the authenticity party exactly a century late!” But if what Smith calls “the authenticity baton” indeed passed on from white Oxbridge graduates “to women, to those of color, to people of different sexual

The fourth chapter traces Philip K. Dick’s adaptations of ancient East Asian cosmology to structure America’s ethnically heterogeneous future in the emergent North Atlantic world order. Dick finds inspiration in I-Ching, an ancient Chinese system of divination that arose to combat chaos in an era of warring states. Dick’s references to China in The Man in the High Castle belongs to a career-long hunt for devices that might delay the decay of traditional forms of belonging. The I-Ching must be di

Abstract Critics have argued that contemporary literature and culture fail to offer compelling alternatives to a present marred by capitalist overdevelopment and environmental destruction. This essay finds counterevidence to that claim in recent dystopian fictions such as the films Blade Runner 2049, Interstellar, Children of Men, and Train to Busan and the novel The Children of Men, which prominently feature teamwork between fathers (or father surrogates) and daughters in a world where the huma

In light of the recent resurgence of realism in African and Asian literatures, this essay returns to the mid-twentieth century, when colonial writers engaged critically with realism as an alien metropolitan import. Theorists have noted that realism is a literary epistemology that must be distinguished from modernism, which is an aesthetic category; realism, unlike modernism, functioned as a means to make knowable the workings of a given social world. This essay claims that, by revising early Eng

The Late Modernist Novel explores how the novel reinvented itself for a Modernist age, a world riven by war and capitalist expansion. Seo Hee Im argues that the Anglophone novel first had to disassociate itself from the modern nation-state and, by extension, national history, which had anchored the genre from its very inception. Existing studies of modernism show how the novel responded to the crisis in the national idea. Polyglot high modernists experimented with cosmopolitanism and multilingua

The second chapter begins with a consideration of Beckett’s resistance to the logic of quid pro quo, which, organizing life in the metropolis, impoverishes the imagination. Beckett discovers in listing a form to counteract that urge to calculate. Against older readings of Beckett, recent French readers such as Pascale Casanova and Alain Badiou find the Irish writer revolutionary, associating him with beginnings, resistance, and even happiness. Similarly, I claim that Beckett’s works are surprisi

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