The Postethnic Literary : : Reading Paratexts and Transpositions around 2000 / / Florian Sedlmeier.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DGBA Backlist Complete English Language 2000-2014 PART1
• VerfasserIn: Sedlmeier, Florian,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter, , [2014]; ©2014
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Language: English
• Series: Buchreihe der Anglia / Anglia Book Series , 48
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (226 p.)

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 of 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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Preface: Read, Again -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- Introduction: Paratexts, Transpositions, and Postethnic Literature -- 1. Breaching the Autobiographical Pact: Sherman Alexie and the Ethics of Reading for Form -- 2. Copies, Lists, and Reading Publics in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker -- 3. Exhaustion, Abstraction, and the Longing for Postethnic Literary Presence in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy -- Coda. The How is the What: Constellations of the Postethnic Literary This study has explored the epistemological conditions -- Works Cited -- Index