One Big Happy Family? Redefining World Literature in an Age of Global Capitalism: The Boundaries of the Exotic

Abstract

This paper will explore the emergence of a counter-canon of literary works which are gradually replacing the classics on the syllabi of many higher education institutions. In an age when all culture seems diasporic and engaged in a constant process of dissemination, how does contemporary literature in English resist or espouse complicity with the global culture industry and what are the consequences for the aesthetics of the novel in the 21st century? Can the contemporary critic posit the existence of an ‘International Style’ based on a confident post-realist aesthetics going hand in hand with postnationalism or, are novelists in the twenty-first century increasingly confined to random intensities and professional ventriloquism? The postcolonial trope of the migrant empowered by his wandering, as expressed by Rushdie, among others, reflects the reluctance of contemporary culture to be tied down to a specific location and context. Does this refusal of territorialisation signal artistic freedom or an inability to resist the pull of the worldwide market which helps to justify its existence? The redrawing of the map of world culture as an all-inclusive entity raises important literary, political and social questions and constitutes a threat to the novel as well as a possibility.