Counter-Republics of Letters: Politics, Publishing, and the Global Novel

Abstract

The international literary field centered in New York is a politicized space, with a progressive cosmopolitan orientation. The dominant position in the field sees world literature—and the global novel in particular—as an instrument of multiculturalism, and thus prizes marginality and political commitment. This dissertation analyzes the work of six well-known global novelists who challenge this paradigm. With the tools of sociological analysis, I reconstruct these writers’ life trajectories, focusing on the literary institutions and cultural mediators (mentors, agents, publishers, editors, translators, critics) that shaped their work and its reception. I read their novels as prises de position within the field and as aesthetic responses to a common problem, that is the inability to adapt completely to the new rules of the literary game that have replaced the belief in universalism, aesthetic purity, and avant-garde transgression of the old Paris-centric domain.

In the first chapter, two writers—J. M. Coetzee and Kazuo Ishiguro—refuse to be the spokespersons of their group and of “the oppressed” in the name of literature’s universality; in the second chapter, two formerly countercultural authors—Virginie Despentes and Roberto Bolaño—adapt to an environment that prizes their marginality while disallowing the value of transgression; in the third chapter, Karl Ove Knausgaard and Michel Houellebecq, excluded from the logic of multiculturalism, become the proud representatives of their respective nations. In each chapter I choose to emphasize how the novels I study are also political interventions, spanning from a refusal to write political literature (“The Unpolitical”), to a rejection of different aspects of the dominant multicultural liberalism (“Populism” and “Quandaries of Global Nationalism”).