In Modernist Futures, David James examines the implications of modernism's continuity in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century writing by tracing its political and ethical valences in emerging novelistic practices. Focusing on the work of J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, Ian McEwan, Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje and Phillip Roth, James reconsiders the purpose of literary innovation as it relates to the artistic and cultural interventions such writers perform. By rethinking critical and disciplinary parameters, James brings scholarship on contemporary fiction into dialogue with modernist studies, offering a nuanced account of narrative strategies that sheds new light on the form of the novel today. An ambitious and incisive contribution to the field, this book will appeal especially to scholars of modernism and contemporary literary culture as well as those in American and postcolonial studies.
• Offers a comparative framework for considering the politics and aesthetics of modernism's legacies within the contemporary literary tradition • Argues for the importance of approaching questions of literary craft as linked to questions of political critique
Contents
Acknowledgements; Introduction: contemporary fiction and the promise of modernism; 1. 'Advancing along the inherited path': making it traditionally new in Milan Kundera and Philip Roth; 2. 'The perfect state for a novel': Michael Ondaatje's Cubist imagination; 3. 'Spare prose and a spare, thrifty world': J. M. Coetzee's politics of minimalism; 4. 'The dead hand of modernism': Ian McEwan, reluctant impressionist; 5. 'License to strut': Toni Morrison and the ethics of virtuosity; Notes.
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