(Dis)placements

This paper examines David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010), with a particular focus on history and narrative time. It seeks to offer an alternative perspective on the multiple and intertwined fictional narratives of Mitchell’s oeuvre as these evidence a move past the "post-" of postmodernism. Keywords: David Mitchell, time, narrative, historiography, experimental fiction, post-postmodernismPostmodernism has cast an extended influence over much literary criticism in the last fifty years. However, with the end of the noughties now in reach of critical hindsight, and with the shock of September 11, 2001 beginning to subside, significant attention is turning once again toward the new literary vanguard. Efforts to discuss post-postmodernism, critical realism, new materialism, and new-millennial writing are certainly on a par with artistic and literary efforts to move beyond postmodernist playfulness and relativism. Within this broader framework,...

Transgressivity, in a broad sense, denotes a state of movement from one distinct position, mode, or territory to another, be it spatial, geographical, mental, spiritual, or even narrative. Transgression occurs when one crosses boundaries, in other words, limes of different entities. Geocritical transgressivity, which is a multifaceted concept, may lead to a variety of interpretations at many different strata. Transgressivity finds echoes in Caryl Phillips’s narratives, at times in geographical forms, where a deterritorialized character crosses borders without ever gaining reterritorialization, at other times, in his fragmented narration where the reader stands at a threshold. Our paper uses Phillips’s A New World Order (2001) in particular as a key text through this geocritical lens of transgressivity to see to what extent it functions as the author’s map legend that presents a cartographic pattern of his writing in general. Our discussion also focuses on Phillips’s distinct analyses i...

Disability studies has a history of distinguishing the “dichotomy” between the biological and the cultural identity of the body and the attempts to deal with this conflict. Identity is divided into two registers of knowledge: the corporeality of the body and cultural ideas about the normal body. In his former two books, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (1995) and Bending over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism & Other Difficult Positions (1995), Lenard Davis tries to locate these focal points of entanglement between the biological and cultural. In Enforcing Normalcy, Davis attempts to analyze the historical origin and instrumentalization of the concept of the normal body (2), whilst in Bending over Backwards, he introduces the critical concept of dismodernism – a way of rethinking postmodern concerns with identity and how these relate to disability studies (27-31). In his third book, The End of Normal: Identity in a Biocultural Era, Davis explores a wholly new av...

This paper examines the influence of Aristotle’s theory of place (topos) on the conceptualization of cultural universality. Its main focus is in reinvesting the thought of Baruch Spinoza and Henri Bergson surrounding the fossilized spatial boundaries that limit understanding in order to scrutinize both the virtual and figurative processes inherent to the sketching of a universal human plane outside of local custom in certain literary works. This investigation yields a concept of “figurative agency” that is then delineated in the Tao Te Ching and Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in order to demonstrate how the concept might serve as a bridge between the extended space of a national culture and the virtual plane invested by world literature.Keywords: world literature, Henri Bergson, Spinoza, figurative agency, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Tao Te-Ching, literary epistemology

She looked loathingly at the spoon. It was a metal spoon, dark, with a small engraving on its handle – a sharp taste. “Open your mouth, slowly, eaaaasy, like a little birdie in its nest,” he said, bringing the spoon to her mouth. He hated spoons; they had seemed despicable little things since he was small. Why did he now find himself having to wield it, full of soup, having to usher it now into this young child’s mouth, as his parents had done to him, as surely as his parents’ parents had also done? If they even had spoons then, if some fool had already invented them. He had to find himself an encyclopedia and figure out when the first spoon had been forged; he had to get his hands on an encyclopedia, a source of infinite knowledge by which he might survive. Spoon: A piece of silverware with a concave scoop at its end; typically used for carrying liquids to the mouth.

The boy was playing alone on a dusty road, not far from the big door of the courtyard of his house. On a day other than a market day or a holiday, the road would be peaceful, almost deserted, but the boy would always harbor a hidden hope that the road might produce something new, rare, and exciting. On that day the road brought nothing for quite a long time. At one moment the boy raised his eyes. High overhead he saw someone coming down the hill.The slopes of that unusually steep hill rose above the town almost perpendicularly, evoking in the boy’s mind the image of a school blackboard. The precipitous surface of the hill was streaked by a dusty white road that disappeared behind low, rocky and sparsely vegetated mounds with a well-trodden shortcut the color of clay stretching between them. High above on the hill the traveller emerged as a tiny figure whose clothes or age could not yet be discerned. The boy saw him disappear behind the rocky mounds and then appear again, coming out of ...