This Thing Called the World

Debjani Ganguly is Professor of English and Director of the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Caste and Dalit Lifeworlds: Postcolonial Perspectives.

"A dense, learned, and important study of the emergence of “this thing called the world” as its inhabitants pass from spectatorship to witnessing of trauma under the prevailing conditions of intensified mediation, remediation, and hypermediation. . . . A rich resource that will be mined by many. . . . Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty."- K. Tölölyan (Choice) "This is a brave book, a valiant and valuable book, that seeks to characterize post-1989 fiction as ekphrastically humanitarian." - Eugene Eoyang (World Literature Today) "This Thing Called the World both models and theorizes a grounded approach to modern world literature, urging its critics, despite our habit to look beyond the horizon, not to forget the dirt beneath our own feet." - Christopher McVey (Studies in the Novel) "Against the grain of much contemporary criticism, which has jettisoned the notion of imaginative sympathy from literary discourse, Ganguly seizes on exactly this as critical to the post-1989 experience: 'the information technology revolution has radically transformed our threshold of responsibility to our distant others and has perforce brought worlds of untold suffering into our intimate spaces.'" - Michael LaPointe (TLS) "Ganguly’s disentangling of the terms 'postcolonial,' 'global,' and 'world' in the introduction is much needed and persuasive. . . . A brave and important book." - Claire Chambers (Modern Fiction Studies) "Beautifully connects the sentimental novels of the eighteenth century to their contemporary equivalent . . . Ganguly remains true to the real-world voices of the novelists throughout her work, marrying aesthetics and ethics. . . . She also maintains a refreshing level of detail within the texts themselves, sweeping readers into the heart-wrenching and critical foci of the novels’ collectivity while maintaining a thorough, accessible argument outlining specific interventions into our global understanding." - Beth Miller (Comparatist) "The strength of this monograph is undoubtedly the rich, largely unpretentious description of so many contemporary works, which many would aspire to read and few actually do. . . . The book is a truly remarkable first attempt at capturing the complexity of our times through novels. . . . Those readers interested in both the form and content of the contemporary novel, especially colleagues in English and Comparative Literature, will find much to think about as they pore over Ganguly’s book." - Evan Torner (Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature)

• Acknowledgments  ixIntroduction  11. Real Virtualities and the Undead Genre  39Part I. World2. World-Making and Possible Worlds  693. Spectral Worlds, Networked Novel  874. From Midnight's Child to Clown Assassin  110Part II. War5. Visualizing Wartime: A Literary Genealogy  1356. The Sky Is Falling: The Narrative Screen of Terror  157Part III. Witness7. This I Saw: Graphic Suffering  1758. Forensic Witnessing: The (Non)Evidence of Bones  1929. Affective Witnessing: Orphic Netherworlds  219Coda  249Notes  261Bibliography  279Index  293