Metafictions of development
The Enigma of Arrival, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town , and the place of the world in world literature
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9003974 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kara Lee Donnelly (University of Notre Dame, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2013 |
| Volume | 49 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 63-80 |
| Publication date | 2013-10-07 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-9894 • E-ISSN: 1741-6442 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0021989413502353 |
| OpenAlex | W2119360235 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 22 |
This article examines two works of fiction: V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival and Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town . Although these are works by authors who write out of different cultural formations, both link their narrator’s development to his or her success at becoming a published author. To be fully mature, the narrator must recognize his or her own experiences as a disenfranchised subject from the colonial hinterland as the appropriate subject for literature. In conjunction with this particular form of character development, both Naipaul and Wicomb use metafiction to reflect on the complex and unequal structures that shape world literary markets. They integrate their protagonists into global markets by strategically deploying the Bildungsroman . These formal features allow these works to serve as a critique of world literature even as they participate in world literary culture and markets. Taking the impetus from these works of fiction, this article proposes a redefinition of world literature as literary works that develop strategies of representation that respond to fundamental global inequalities
Aesthetics · Art · Cape · Character (mathematics · Colonialism · First World · Literary criticism · Literature · Metafiction · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Representation (politics · Sociology · Subject (documents · Third world · World literature · Computer Science · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · History · Law · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South African History and Culture
The Postcolonial Exotic
Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace
Salman Rushdie and the Third World
Human Rights, Inc.
What Is World Literature?
The Enigma of Arrival
Snow on the Canefields
The Politics of Postmodernism
Nationalism and the Development of Identity in Postcolonial Fiction
I’m only grateful that it’s not a Cape Town book”, or
Finding the Centre?” Publishing Commonwealth Writing in London
Sir Vidia’s Shadow
The Struggle Over the Sign
Metafiction
Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures
| Citations per year | 0.13 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2018 - 2018 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |