The Grammar of Identity: Transnational Fiction and the Nature of the Boundary
Stephen Clingman
Abstract
The book proceeds from a central contemporary paradox. Never before have we been confronted by such dizzying forms of multiplicity, while at the same time facing still powerful appeals to singularity in matters of location and identity. The question arises as to how we negotiate the relation between the two — whether we can fashion new understandings of self and place in a disparate and uneven world. Here the relevant problem is not whether boundaries exist, but the nature of the boundaries we construct. In this light the book takes up the idea of a ‘grammar of identity’, considering notions o ... More
The book proceeds from a central contemporary paradox. Never before have we been confronted by such dizzying forms of multiplicity, while at the same time facing still powerful appeals to singularity in matters of location and identity. The question arises as to how we negotiate the relation between the two — whether we can fashion new understandings of self and place in a disparate and uneven world. Here the relevant problem is not whether boundaries exist, but the nature of the boundaries we construct. In this light the book takes up the idea of a ‘grammar of identity’, considering notions of the generative, the metonymic, the transitive and navigational as ways of fashioning a sense of both self and place. In doing so, it explores the fiction of some of the major writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Joseph Conrad, Caryl Phillips, Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, W. G. Sebald, Nadine Gordimer, and J. M. Coetzee. Beyond the binaries of the colonial and postcolonial, the modern and postmodern, these are writers for whom questions of self and boundary have been central. If they present no form of utopia, they have described the space and time of our history, redefining what we mean by the transnational, and by transnational fiction.
Keywords:
Coetzee,
Conrad,
Gordimer,
grammar of identity,
nature of the boundary,
Caryl Phillips,
Rhys,
Rushdie,
Sebald,
transnational fiction
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2009 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199278497 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2009 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199278497.001.0001 |
