Two-world literature Kazuo Ishiguro's early novels

A Two-World Author -- Across and Beyond Cultures -- Memory Can Be an Unreliable Thing -- Appearance and Pretense: Narrative Responsibility -- The Butler Did It: Diegetic Responsibility

Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
1. Verfasser: Suter, Rebecca (VerfasserIn)
Format: UnknownFormat
Sprache:eng
Veröffentlicht: Honolulu University of Hawaiʻi Press 2021
Ausgabe:paperback edition
Schlagworte:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:A Two-World Author -- Across and Beyond Cultures -- Memory Can Be an Unreliable Thing -- Appearance and Pretense: Narrative Responsibility -- The Butler Did It: Diegetic Responsibility
"In this convincing and provocative study, Rebecca Suter aims to complicate our understanding of world literature by examining the creative and critical deployment of cultural stereotypes in the early novels of Kazuo Ishiguro. "World literature" has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years: Aamir Mufti called it the result of "one-world thinking," the legacy of an imperial system of cultural mapping from a unified perspective. Suter views Ishiguro's fiction as an important alternative to this paradigm. Born in Japan, raised in the United Kingdom, and translated into a broad range of languages, Ishiguro has throughout his career consciously used his multiple cultural positioning to produce texts that look at broad human concerns in a significantly different way
Through a close reading of his early narrative strategies, Suter explains how Ishiguro has been able to create a "two-world literature" that addresses universal human concerns and avoids the pitfalls of the single, Western-centric perspective of "one-world vision." Setting his first two novels, A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986), in a Japan explicitly used as a metaphor enabled Ishiguro to parody and subvert Western stereotypes about Japan, and by extension challenge the universality of Western values. This subversion was amplified in his third novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), which is perfectly legible through both English and Japanese cultural paradigms. Building on this subversion of stereotypes, Ishiguro's early work investigates the complex relationship between social conditioning and agency, showing how characters' behavior is related to their cultural heritage but cannot be reduced to it
Beschreibung:Enthält bibliographische Angaben und Index
Beschreibung:x, 143 Seiten
ISBN:9780824889814
978-0-8248-8981-4
0824889819
0-8248-8981-9