Saikat Majumdar

Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire Saikat Majumdar

Commendation Quotes:"Beautifully written and evidence of a fine intelligence. It offers a striking and important intervention in ongoing debates in both modernist and post-colonial studies, and as such will be a point of discussion and reference for quite a long time."Review Quotes: "Prose of the World" is an enormously compelling and vivid study. It shows convincingly that the experience of colonial banality was a principal engine of literary modernism. Bringing a transnational perspective to the history of twentieth-century Anglophone fiction, Majumdar provincializes modernism by putting its aesthetic celebration of the ordinary into conversation with the geopolitics of crushing boredom. The result is an ambitious, timely, and eloquent account of the relationship between early-twentieth-century fiction and the contemporary global novel in English.--Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Rutgers University, author of "Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation"Review Quotes: There are many impressive things in this book: it provides us with a powerful rethinking of the vexed relationship between empire and modernism, an unprecedented probing of the internal logic of the modernist movement, and a smart meditation on the role of the ordinary and banal in the making of the language of modernism.--Simon Gikandi, Princeton UniversityBiographical Note: Saikat Majumdar is an assistant professor of English at Stanford University and the author of a novel, "Silverfish."Commendation Quotes: Beautifully written and evidence of a fine intelligence, this book offers a striking and important intervention in ongoing debates in both modernist and postcolonial studies. As such, it will be a point of discussion and reference for quite a long time. Review Quotes: This well-informed, searching study throws new light on the literary consequences of empire. Its insightful account of the experience of boredom and banality on the political and cultural periphery, and of writers' responses to this experience, will be valued by all those interested in the global transformations of modernism and the relation between artistic creativity and colonial hegemony.--Derek Attridge, University of YorkMarc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Review Quotes: An ambitious and original study that is indispensable reading for any scholars of modernism and postcolonial studies.--Adam Barrows"The Comparatist" (01/01/0001) Table of Contents: Introduction: Poetics of the Prosaic1. James Joyce and the Banality of Refusal2. Katherine Mansfield and the Fragility of Pakeha Boredom3. The Dailiness of Trauma and Liberation in Zo? Wicomb 4. Amit Chaudhuri and the Materiality of the MundaneEpilogue: The UneventfulAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndexReview Quotes:"Prose of the World" is an enormously compelling and vivid study. It shows convincingly that the experience of colonial banality was a principal engine of literary modernism. Bringing a transnational perspective to the history of twentieth-century Anglophone fiction, Majumdar provincializes modernism by putting its aesthetic celebration of the ordinary into conversation with the geopolitics of crushing boredom. The result is an ambitious, timely, and eloquent account of the relationship between early-twentieth-century fiction and the contemporary global novel in English.--Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Rutgers University, author of "Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation"Review Quotes:"Prose of the World" reminds us that while the everyday is always banal, it is not always boring.--Priyasha Mukhopadhyay"Interventions" (01/01/0001) Publisher Marketing: Everyday life in the far outposts of empire can be static, empty of the excitement of progress. A pervading sense of banality and boredom are, therefore, common elements of the daily experience for people living on the colonial periphery. Saikat Majumdar suggests that this impoverished affective experience of colonial modernity significantly shapes the innovative aesthetics of modernist fiction. "Prose of the World" explores the global life of this narrative aesthetic, from late-colonial modernism to the present day, focusing on a writer each from Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and India. Ranging from James Joyce's deflated epiphanies to Amit Chaudhuri's disavowal of the grand spectacle of postcolonial national allegories, Majumdar foregrounds the banal as a key instinct of modern and contemporary fiction--one that nevertheless remains submerged because of its antithetical relation to literature's intuitive function to engage or excite. Majumdar asks us to rethink the assumption that banality merely indicates an aesthetic failure. If narrative is traditionally enabled by the tremor, velocity, and excitement of the event, the historical and affective lack implied by the banal produces a narrative force that is radically new precisely because it suspends the conventional impulses of narration. Review Citations: Choice 07/01/2013 (EAN 9780231156943, Hardcover)