New release: The Postethnic Literary. By Florian Sedlmeier
9. December 2014
Reading Paratexts and Transpositions around 2000
Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter Mouton 2014
(Anglia Book Series, 48)
Reference
The book explores the discursive and theoretical conditions for conceptualizing the postethnic literary. It historicizes US multicultural and postcolonial studies as institutionalized discursive formations, which constitute a paratext that regulates the reception literary texts according to the paradigm of representativeness. Rather than following that paradigm, the study offers an alternative framework by rereading contemporary literary texts for their investment in literary form.
By means of self-reflective intermedial transpositions, the writings of Sherman Alexie, Chang-rae Lee, and Jamaica Kincaid insist upon a differentiation between the representation of cultural sign systems or subject positions and the dramatization of individual gestures of authorship. As such, they form a postethnic literary constellation, further probed in the epilogue of the study focused on Dave Eggers. (publisher)
Prof. Florian Sedlmeier is assistant professor for North American Literature at Free University Berlin. Between 2006 and 2008 he was a Doctoral Fellow at the DFG Graduiertenkolleg “Die Figur des Dritten” at the University of Konstanz.
The Center of Excellence “Cultural Foundations of Social Integration” has funded the release of this book.