Atopian Limits: Questions of Self, Complexity, and Contingency in Postmodern American Narrative - Hardcover

El Moncef, Salah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3906768163 ISBN 13: 9783906768168

Publisher: Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2002

Synopsis

This comprehensive study of postmodern subjectivity explores some of the most significant challenges confronting the individual in the third millennium – from the role of ethnic difference and immigration in the public sphere, to questions of sexual politics in the work- and marketplace, to the effects of technological interference with human and animal bodies, to the increasing unpredictability of global economics. What emerges from the analysis of these issues is a work of unique foresight, clarity, and scholarly integrity – a relentlessly meticulous scrutiny of our complex and uncertain world. In its treatment of the most pressing questions of our times, Atopian Limits is a gripping attempt to anticipate and understand the different forces of evolution looming on the horizon of our socioeconomic destiny, the future waves of change coming upon us fraught with their catastrophic as well as their emancipatory possibilities.

About this title

About the Author

The Author: Salah el Moncef is Associate Professor of American literature at the University of Nantes, France. From 1988 to 1993 he was a Fulbright fellow at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has written several short stories along with many essays on modernist and postmodern literature.

Review

«Through the analysis of a series of American fictions which burst the reassuring limits of modern rationality to open upon the paroxystic, the catastrophic, the chaotic, Moncef gives an original, cutting-edge approach of postmodern imagination.... It is an extremely sharp and enlightening interdisciplinary approach of some fractured and destabilizing narratives that situate themselves at the edge of the abyss of madness, cruelty and death. A highly important contribution to the exegesis of most troubled fantasies of the postmodern condition.» (Jean-Joseph Goux)
«Very interesting.» (Julia Kristeva)
«A remarkable piece of historiography.» (Paul Maltby)
«Few critics have managed to read Auster’s metafiction in the same context as Updike’s suburban realism, and fewer still would have thought to look for Acker’s nomadic subjects in Vidal’s ‘Duluth’. If Kesey’s ‘Combine’ runs on bio-power and Harris’s ‘Silence of the Lambs’ exposes a society that is no less species-centered than it is sexist, then perhaps the time has come to re-read fictions we thought we knew well. Salah el Moncef’s systems-based approach has the potential to dislodge American literature from provincial moorings toward a more global context, whether or not American authors want to go there. This un-placed, atopian literature emerges as both a cognitive resource and a counternarrative, an imaginary alternative to the narrative of the industrial system with its national boundaries, representational structures, and linear spaces of «straight» reproduction. Postmodern theory may have reached its atopian limits, but in Moncef’s hands theory can still open out into the wider field of contemporary fiction rather than closing in on a few canonical works.» (Joe Tabbi)
«This is the best study of subjectivity, postmodernity and American fiction I have read. My understanding of all three has been enriched by Moncef’s very sophisticated work.» (Stephen Watt)

Edition details

• Publisher: Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 3906768163
• ISBN 13: 9783906768168
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 203