Literature and the Experience of Globalization: Texts Without Borders

Description

How does literature represent, challenge and help us understand our experience of globalization? Taking literary globalization studies beyond its traditional political focus, Literature and the Experience of Globalization explores how writers from Shakespeare through Goethe to Isak Dinesen, J.M. Coetzee, Amitav Ghosh and Bruce Chatwin engage with the human dimensions of globalization. Through a wide range of insightful close readings, Svend Erik Larsen brings contemporary world literature approaches to bear on cross-cultural experiences of migration and travel, translation, memory, history and embodied knowledge. In doing so, this important intervention demonstrates how literature becomes an essential site for understanding the ways in which globalization has become an integral part of everyday experience.

Svend Erik Larsen is Professor Emeritus at Aarhus University, Denmark, Yangtze River Professor at Sichuan University, China, and Honorary Professor at University College London, UK. His previous books include, as co-author, Signs in Use: An Introduction to Semiotics (2002).

[Larsen] makes interesting and useful parallels between past and present, and his examples are often odd and refreshing ... he makes history come alive in relation to literature, with an appealing mix of fact and analysis that creates a pleasant read that avoids the obscurantism too common in academic works ... Larsen demonstrates an unwavering voice of passion for global literatures that is contagious in the reader, with plain language for complex ideas that suggests a gifted professor, and overall I would recommend this book. * World Literature Today * Larsen is best when he demonstrates how, as he writes in chapter 3, a variety of texts turn "comprehensive and complex conceptions [of globalization] into concrete reality" for individual characters and readers. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * CHOICE * This book offers a fresh, original, and wide-ranging take on what world literature is and means. Larsen's readings of a number of classics as well as of less-known works from less-known literatures are invariably illuminating. A must for anyone interested in how literature relates to globalization and for understanding what world literature studies is about. * Theo D'haen, Emeritus Professor of English, American & Comparative Literature, Leuven University, The Netherlands * Which questions can we ask to past literature from the view-point of our historical consciousness and the criss-crossing of literatures and media? How can we read literature today and relate as readers with the innumerable texts that, in the last decades, have been dealing with problems of personal or collective identity, migrations, exiles, the intermingling of languages or the discrepancies between mother tongue and adopted speech? Challenging any simple economic, political, cultural and literary determinism, Larsen forcefully claims that fiction is an indispensable tool to think the conditions we live in, not as perfect description or explanation, but as a dynamic account of the experience of human life in a present that is already hinting at our future. * Patrizia Lombardo, Honorary Professor, University of Geneva, Switzerland *