Florian Sedlmeier - Böcker

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.

Modernity is made and unmade by the anecdotal. Conceived as a literary genre, a narrative element of criticism, and, most crucially, a mode of historiography, the anecdote illuminates the convergences as well as the fault lines cutting across modern practices of knowledge production. The volume explores uses of the anecdotal in exemplary case studies from the threshold of the early modern to the present.

To Be Continued discusses forms of creating narrative continuation, such as adventure, parody, the saga format, fan fiction, seriality, spin-offs in case studies ranging from the 18th century to the present. Narrative Structure. Novels organized by tight plot constructions are rather rare. Episodic structures are the rule. The number of episodic sequences is not fixed, the narrative closure of episodes is preliminary, and the interrelation of episodes is open to retrospective reconfiguration, which makes additions and further narrative elaborations a constant option. Intertextual Links. Novels can thus be seen as experiments which use the modification of existing elements and the introduction of new elements to indicate and conceptualize cultural change. Seriality and parody mark the extremely divergent forms such experiments can employ: to write on or to re-write, to quote affirmatively, ironically, or satirically are basic forms of building traditions or of revising them, and can be related to conflicts over literary, economic or symbolic capital. For the reader, the entertainment value of a text may increase or decrease with the familiarity of a story world with its specific characters: the economy of attention, the level of affective bonding, and their consequences - identification, revulsion, or boredom - are molded by continuation.