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Scale and Catastrophe in Contemporary Anglophone Literature

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Scale and Catastrophe in Contemporary Anglophone Literature University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2017 The Exploding Globe: Scale And Catastrophe In Contemporary Anglophone Literature Chris D. Jimenez University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the American Literature Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, and the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Jimenez, Chris D., "The Exploding Globe: Scale And Catastrophe In Contemporary Anglophone Literature" (2017). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2367. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2367 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2367 For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Exploding Globe: Scale And Catastrophe In Contemporary Anglophone Literature Abstract This dissertation interrogates the interconnections between catastrophe and globality in contemporary fiction, arguing that “global Anglophone literature” has emerged as a field decisively marked by political and aesthetic engagement with transnational crisis. Ongoing scholarly debates have questioned global Anglophone literature’s utility as a critical framework and argued over what texts belong in its canon. But scholars have tended too readily to enfold the phenomenon of a “global” English literature within a paradigm borrowed from anti-globalization movements rather than consider the distinct and often resistant narratives of globality emerging from literary works themselves. Against these established framings of global literature, my dissertation investigates an array of catastrophes—nuclear disaster, terrorism, pandemics, and the worldwide exploitation of animals—that, I argue, have come to occupy a central and determining role in literary representations of the global. Using a comparative method to highlight the shared urgency of catastrophe as it has been represented in contemporary fiction from around the globe, I reframe and recuperate global Anglophone literature’s importance as a literary field against critiques that have otherwise dismissed it as indicative of neoliberal politics and shallow multiculturalism. Whatever its national origins, each of the texts I examine offers a radically scaled-up view of catastrophe that transcends national boundaries and insists on the planetary nature of catastrophic damage or threat. In effect, the world as conceived by contemporary global fiction is poised in a state of explosion, perpetually expanding in scale and threatened with comprehensive destruction. As literary fields continue ot expand outward from postcolonial studies and transnational studies to ever greater scales of analysis, my project thus traces the utility of “the global” for Anglophone literature in an era defined by rapid globalization and catastrophic risk. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group English First Advisor James F. English Keywords Anglophone, Catastrophe, Disaster, Global, Globality, World Subject Categories American Literature | Comparative Literature | Literature in English, North America This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2367 THE EXPLODING GLOBE: SCALE AND CATASTROPHE IN CONTEMPORARY ANGLOPHONE LITERATURE Chris D. Jimenez A DISSERTATION in English Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2017 Supervisor of Dissertation ____________________________ James F. English, John Welsh Centennial Professor of English Graduate Group Chairperson ____________________________ David L. Eng, Richard L. Fisher Professor of English Dissertation Committee Jed Esty, Vartan Gregorian Professor of English Josephine Park, Associate Professor of English THE EXPLODING GLOBE: SCALE AND CATASTROPHE IN CONTEMPORARY ANGLOPHONE LITERATURE COPYRIGHT 2017 Chris D. Jimenez This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ For Dad iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the University of Pennsylvania, the Penn English Department, the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their generous support of my doctoral studies over the past six years. During this time, I have been privileged to learn from some of the most brilliant and eloquent individuals I have ever known. I am particularly indebted to my advisor, Jim English, for modeling how to think expansively about the world without becoming lost in it. Likewise, I am thankful for my friends and family for supporting me during stretches when the world refused to make sense—and for showing me that it doesn’t always have to. Finally, I am grateful to the love of my life, Alisa, with whom I hope to brave any and all of life’s catastrophes. iv ABSTRACT THE EXPLODING GLOBE: SCALE AND CATASTROPHE IN CONTEMPORARY ANGLOPHONE LITERATURE Chris D. Jimenez James F. English This dissertation interrogates the interconnections between catastrophe and globality in contemporary fiction, arguing that “global Anglophone literature” has emerged as a field decisively marked by political and aesthetic engagement with transnational crisis. Ongoing scholarly debates have questioned global Anglophone literature’s utility as a critical framework and argued over what texts belong in its canon. But scholars have tended too readily to enfold the phenomenon of a “global” English literature within a paradigm borrowed from anti-globalization movements rather than consider the distinct and often resistant narratives of globality emerging from literary works themselves. Against these established framings of global literature, my dissertation investigates an array of catastrophes—nuclear disaster, terrorism, pandemics, and the worldwide exploitation of animals—that, I argue, have come to occupy a central and determining role in literary representations of the global. Using a comparative method to highlight the shared urgency of catastrophe as it has been represented in contemporary fiction from around the globe, I reframe and recuperate global Anglophone literature’s importance as a literary field against critiques that have otherwise dismissed it as indicative of neoliberal politics and shallow multiculturalism. Whatever its national origins, each of the texts I examine offers a radically scaled-up view of catastrophe that transcends national boundaries and insists on the planetary nature of catastrophic damage or threat. In effect, the world as conceived by contemporary global fiction is poised in a state of explosion, perpetually expanding in scale and threatened with comprehensive destruction. As literary fields continue to expand outward from postcolonial studies and transnational studies to ever greater scales of analysis, my project thus traces the utility of “the global” for Anglophone literature in an era defined by rapid globalization and catastrophic risk. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................ IV ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... V INTRODUCTION: INTRODUCTION: AN EXPLODED VIEW OF GLOBAL ANGLOPHONE LITERATURE ........................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER 1: NUCLEAR DISASTER AND GLOBAL AESTHETICS IN GERALD VIZENOR’S HIROSHIMA BUGI: ATOMU 57 AND RUTH OZEKI’S A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING ............................................................................................................ 28 CHAPTER 2: NAZI ECOCRITICISM IN ZADIE SMITH’S WHITE TEETH AND J.M. COETZEE’S ELIZABETH COSTELLO ........................................................................... 57 CHAPTER 3: COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE NEOLIBERAL AMERICAN DREAM IN FURY AND NETHERLAND ........................................................................ 87 CHAPTER 4: BIOECONOMICS: SPECULATIVE FICTION, PANDEMICS, AND THE CORPORATIZATION OF GLOBAL HEALTH .................................................. 129 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 159 vi Introduction: An Exploded View of Global Anglophone Literature The first atomic bomb destroyed more than the city of Hiroshima. It also exploded our inherited, outdated political ideas. We must aim at a federal constitution of the world, a working world wide legal order, if we hope to prevent an atomic World War. —Albert Einstein et al., “An Open Letter to the American People” published in The New York Times, Oct. 10, 19451 The catastrophe wrought by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki effectively ended World War II and ushered in a new political paradigm not only for the countries directly involved but for the world at large. At the moment of the bombings, however, many of the world’s countries had already been in the very process of negotiating a new global political order, symbolized by the end of the League of Nations and the ratification of the Charter of the United Nations on June 26, 1945. If the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki lent seriousness to the above claim that the atomic age “exploded our inherited, outdated political ideas,” then the political reality in the
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