Narrative Responses to Contemporary Globalization Sean Patrick O'brien Loyola University Chicago

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Loyola eCommons Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2015 Not the Whole Story: Narrative Responses to Contemporary Globalization Sean Patrick O'brien Loyola University Chicago Recommended Citation O'brien, Sean Patrick, "Not the Whole Story: Narrative Responses to Contemporary Globalization" (2015). Dissertations. Paper 1484. http://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/1484 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2015 Sean Patrick O'brien LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO NOT THE WHOLE STORY: NARRATIVE RESPONSES TO CONTEMPORARY GLOBALIZATION A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN ENGLISH BY SEAN P. O’BRIEN CHICAGO, ILLINOIS MAY 2015 Copyright by Sean P. O’Brien, 2015 AlL rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Drs. Suzanne Bost, Steven E. Jones, and especially Paul Jay for their generous and invaluable assistance throughout this process, without out which this dissertation would not have been possibLe. Thanks as well to all of my terrific mentors and coLLeagues in the EngLish Department at LoyoLa University Chicago, whose support and rigorous commitment to exceLLent research has made this a better dissertation than it would otherwise be. I would also like to thank LoyoLa University Chicago and the Graduate SchooL for the funding that enabLed my graduate study and research, particuLarLy the Arthur J. Schmitt Dissertation FelLowship for the 2014-2015 academic year that aLLowed me to focus on and compLete my research and writing. FinaLLy, thank you to my parents, my sibLings, my friends, and especiaLLy to Michelle Lilly, for their support and encouragement of me and my work over the years. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii INTRODUCTION: NOT THE WHOLE STORY: AN INTRODUCTION TO INCOMPLETION 1 CHAPTER ONE: “YOU HAVE TO IMAGINE A STORY BIGGER . THAN THE SUM OF YOUR PARTS”: COMPOSITING, CONTENT, AND FORM IN NARRATIVES OF GLOBALIZATION 33 CHAPTER TWO: DECENTERING GLOBALIZATION: THE PARADOXICAL IMPORTANCE OF KEEPING COMPLEX CONNECTIVITY ON NARRATIVES’ MARGINS 91 CHAPTER THREE: “A BLEND OF HUMAN AND COMPUTER MEANINGS”: NEW MEDIA LITERATURE AND THE GLOBALIZATION OF MODERN IDENTITIES 146 CHAPTER FOUR: POSTHUMAN TECHNOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON A GLOBALIZED WORLD 209 CHAPTER FIVE: “THERE ARE THINGS THAT MUST BE LOOKED AT INDIRECTLY”: POSTMEMORY, POST-AMNESIA, AND SPATIO-TEMPORAL COMPOSITING 262 CONCLUSION: COMPOSITING IN THE CLASSROOM 311 REFERENCE LIST 322 VITA 337 iv INTRODUCTION NOT THE WHOLE STORY: AN INTRODUCTION TO INCOMPLETION “’Everywhere was now a part of everywhere else. Russia, America, London, Kashmir. Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete” (Rushdie 37). So thinks India Ophuls, protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, even before she learns the extent of her connectedness to international politics, systematic oppression, and terrorism. Even without the deeply personal connections explored by the novel, India is acutely aware of complex connectivity and information overload as growing challenges in an age of accelerating globalization. With increased connectivity come proliferating contexts, and with rapidly developing communications media it becomes increasingly easy to explore multiple contexts in parallel, alternating, or sequential ways—in many cases directly from the smartphone in your pocket. To understand a world characterized by increasingly complex forces, structures, and experiences of globalization, we must inevitably simplify things into graspable forms. The need to understand complexity is not new, but the scale of the simplifications necessary and the widespread awareness of the need for them are dramatically increased under accelerated globalization and intensified, 1 2 technologized connectivity.1 What must I take into account? What can I safely ignore? What entities and relationships should structure my understanding of the world? Or my understanding of my place within these larger structures? Today these questions are relevant everywhere, as local frames of reference and action become increasingly interwoven with the rest of the globe. Roland Robertson defines globalization as the “concrete global interdependence” and “compression of the world” as well as “the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole,” both accelerating in modern times (Globalization 8). He asserts that “as globalization proceeds, challenges are increasingly presented to the stability of particular perspectives on, and collective and individual participation in, the overall globalization process” (29). In this dissertation I will argue that people around the world are meeting the challenges of increased globalized connectivity and increased consciousness of it by constructing—in literary and everyday contexts—composite frameworks of understanding and narrative representation. Extending the media studies technical term “compositing” (combining discrete elements into integrated images) to narrative theory, I argue that narrative compositing—piecing together representations of self and world by selecting from an overwhelming quantity of relevant issues, approaches, contexts, representations, 1 Too Much to Know, Ann M. Blair’s study of early modern European scholarly information management, details, for instance, the long history of the perception of information overload, but also stresses unprecedented jumps in the severity of the challenge in both the Renaissance and our own time as a result of new technologies, increased global connectivity, and the prominence of cultural attitudes focused on collecting and managing information (3, 11, 12). Compositing, like globalization, has a long history but has entered a new contemporary stage of acceleration. 3 identities, and communities—helps make globalized connectivity comprehensible in narrative terms. Compositing simplifies without homogenizing and allows us to remain wary of the risks of oversimplification as we read, write, and simply lead our everyday lives.2 Compositing is not a cultural condition but a pervasive strategy that offers a new way of thinking about the challenges of globalization. Since at least 1979, when Jean-François Lyotard published The Postmodern Condition, cultural critics have been asserting that we live in a postmodern age while also paradoxically arguing against the universality of any cultural condition.3 Fields like postcolonial studies and globalization studies have complicated contemporary periodization. No contemporary cultural condition claiming universality has gained critical or popular traction to nearly the degree that postmodernism did. Many critics continue to work under the rubric of postmodernism, while others wishing to break with or develop its tenets have instead adopted concepts like post-postmodernism or metamodernism to describe cultural conditions that have moved decisively beyond 2 Compositing thus addresses what Robertson sees as a “moral issue” of globalized complexity wherein “in order for one to have a ‘realistic’ view of the world as a whole” we must accept “the relative autonomy of each of the four main components” of the global field (individuals, nations, international relations and systems, and humankind as a whole) as well as their interconnection and mutual constraints (28). This is a moral issue because “overemphasis on one to the expense of attention to the other three constitutes a form of ‘fundamentalism’” (28). 3 The concept of the “information society,” another response to increasing information overload stemming from accelerating globalization and advances in knowledge production and distribution technologies, originated perhaps twenty years earlier with the work of economist Fritz Machlup (Beniger 21). 4 postmodernism (Nealon; Timmer; Vermeulen and van den Akker).4 Though it is tempting to see the era of globalization as a new period breaking with postmodernism, I argue that analysis of contemporary global fiction and new media literature suggests that globalization and increasing technological connectivity do not offer a universal cultural condition to replace postmodernism. What they do reveal is a cultural landscape in which multiple experiences and understandings of the world complement and contradict each other, one that benefits from an understanding of postmodernism. My project focuses on literary representations and enactments of these interactions between different experiences and models of the world, both within and among individuals, groups, and modern technological networks and media. My dissertation will analyze the emergence of newly prominent, composite narrative structures responsive to contemporary globalization. These narrative composites require that we rethink how the postmodern condition and postmodern narratives accommodate the challenges of globalization. Robertson notes that amidst the accelerating connectivity of contemporary globalization, we are all engaged “in this ‘postmodern game’ of making histories and inventing traditions. 4 For Jeffrey T. Nealon,

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