thesis
Flows, Routes and Networks: The Global Dynamics of Lawrence Norfolk, Hari Kunzru and David Mitchell
- Publication date
- Publisher
Abstract
The notion that we have entered a global age of human relations has been the
driving force behind many of the most persuasive cultural inquiries published over
the last few decades, including fictional ones, into the conditions of contemporary
existence, perhaps the most prominent of these being Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri's Empire (2000). In the era of mass migrations, proliferating media
technologies and the deterritorialised movements of labour and capital, it has
become increasingly necessary to speak of identity and citizenship in terms of
'flows', 'routes' and 'networks' that cut across the traditional boundaries of the
nation-state. Though it is through various cultural productions that such
transformations are at once performed, symbolised and comprehended, discussions
about how these changes have impacted on modes of literary representation have
largely been framed by the older discourses of postmodernism and postcolonialism,
which anticipate present circumstances while arguably offering rather limited
perspectives on them.
This text-focused thesis explores in detail the narrative strategies and
thematic concerns of three British writers who have risen to prominence since 1990
- Lawrence Norfolk, Hari Kunzru and David Mitchell - whose work announces
literary developments that may be attributed to the fluidity and multiplicity of
millennial relations and the phenomenon of globalisation. Informed by broader
debates about multinational capitalism, transnational culture, and the emergence
of new cybernetic infrastructures, this research argues that recent novels such as
Lempri6re's Dictionary (Lawrence Norfolk), Transmission (Hari Kunzru) and
Ghostwritten (David Mitchell) demonstrate an aesthetic consciousness of new
patterns of human Interaction and geo-historical interconnectedness that is
substantially different from the conceptual coordinates mapped in the fictions of a
previous generation. The work of these three important authors has yet to enter
fully into the mainstream of critical discussion, and the present study represents the
first sustained critical contextualisation of their fiction. Following an introductory chapter that, firstly, provides a wide-ranging analysis of globalisation understood as
a constellation of multidimensional processes and, secondly, considers how these
material transformations articulated themselves in the cultural context of Britain in
the 1980s and '90's, this thesis engages in close readings of the selected authors'
complex fictions over three extensive chapters