| Abstrakt: |
The centering concern in this article is to reconsider how a modern society may provide a representation of itself in itself, and so manage the Midas touch of modernity: contingency. The core emphasis is on the fleeting novelty of the novel and its styles of time management. That, in turn, makes for a stress-testing of current models of genre and periodization. The key examples draw on the works of Kazuo Ishiguro, Rachel Cusk, and Natsume Sōseki. The inquiry focuses on four related topics: "The temporalization of complexity" (Niklas Luhmann) "The economy of time" (Karl Marx) "The void-like space of a transition" (Rachel Cusk) "The dark side of a career" (Giancarlo Corsi) The Japanese/English novelist Kazuo Ishiguro asks, "Is it possible that what we think of as genre boundaries are things that have been invented fairly recently by the publishing industry?" We might then ask, too, if it's possible that what we think of as distinct periodizations in literary studies are boundaries reinvented fairly recently by the subdivisions, step-systems, departments, and temporal economies of the contemporary university. That is, we might consider how such literary divisions, or spaces of transition, respond to the imperatives, and side-effects, of the structures and systems that make up what the Japanese novelist Sayaka Murata calls "the world of the convenience store." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
