TRANSCENDING THE POSTMODERN: THE SINGULAR RESPONSE OF LITERATURE TO THE TRANSMODERN PARADIGM

Abstract

SUSANA ONEGA, JEAN-MICHEL GANTEAU (Editors) TRANSCENDING THE POSTMODERN: THE SINGULAR RESPONSE OF LITERATURE TO THE TRANSMODERN PARADIGM New York and London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2020, 266pp. ISBN-13: 978-0367860554, ISBN-10: 0367860554.

SUSANA ONEGA, JEAN-MICHEL GANTEAU (Editors) TRANSCENDING THE POSTMODERN: THE SINGULAR RESPONSE OF LITERATURE TO THE TRANSMODERN PARADIGM New York and London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2020, 266pp. ISBN-13: 978-0367860554, ISBN-10: 0367860554

The book stands out as an unyielding and timely repositioning of paradigms in the domains of philosophy, aesthetics, literary criticism and cultural theory through the lens of contemporary literature in English. Its main argument is that transmodernity, a term borrowed by the Spanish philosopher Rosa María Rodríguez Magda and theorized especially in her seminal Transmodernidad (2011), though not a water-tight box sensu stricto mainly due to its fluidity and interconnectedness, is the new norm of our age when it comes to paradigm adherence. If all is said and done in postmodernism, and post-postmodernism is a vague and rather dismissive term, transmodernity focuses less on what comes next, since chronologies have been blurred in the accelerated 20th and 21st centuries, and more on what lies beyond.

Susana Onega is an internationally acclaimed scholar, professor at the University of Zaragoza, Spain, with important publications in the field of literary criticism and theory, including the well-known Narratology. An Introduction (Routledge, 1996). She has written books and articles on 20th century British writers, such as John Fowles, Peter Ackroyd and George Orwell and is the recipient of important national and international awards and honours. Jean-Michel Ganteau, professor of English studies at the University Paul Valéry-Montpellier, France, has edited and co-edited numerous volumes on contemporary British fiction and is the author of the acclaimed The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Fiction (Routledge, 2015).

The present volume is a logical continuation of the fruitful collaboration between Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau, who have co-authored several volumes and studies, examining aspects of ethics and experimentalism, trauma and romance, liminality, victimhood, vulnerability and marred heroism (such as Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature, in the Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature Series, 2013). The spark of inspiration ignited during two seminars convened by the editors, in 2016 and 2018, on the occasion of the thirteenth International Conference of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE) in Galway, Ireland, and then, the fourteenth, in Brno, the Czech Republic.

The introductory section of the book includes an extensive review of all major works of the theorists who have investigated the same matter, collectively problematizing but calling it differently, which demonstrates its impact on many layers of society. While Rodriguez Magda defines transmodemity dialectically as "the third totalizing synthesis of the modern thesis and the postmodern antithesis, incorporating elements of both, in the triad formed by Modernity, Postmodernity and Transmodemity" (2011: 2), arguing that it is, in essence, a "weak, diminished, light Modernity", the editors of the present volume adopt a much more optimistic stance towards the new cultural shift.

The first part of the volume is dedicated to "The Poetics of Transmodemity" and includes three essays: Susana Onega's "The Transmodern Poetics of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas: Generic Hybridity, Narrative Embedding and Transindividuality"; Sara Villamarin-Freire's "Transnational Latino/a Literature and the Transmodern Meta-narrative: An Alternative Reading of Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"; and Angelo Monaco's "The Novel of Ideas at the Crossroads of Transmodernity: Tom McCarthy's Satin Island." The selected novels resonate with the paradigm under scrutiny and employ experimentation-based approaches to address visions of the fluid, interconnected, and unstable reality in the transmodern era.

Part II feeds on "Ethical Perceptions" and explores three novels that disregard boundaries in the essays by: Jean-Michel Ganteau("Problematising the Transmodern: Jon McGregor's Ethics of Consideration"; Matthias Stephan("Using Transculturalism to Understand the Transmodern Paradigm: Representations of Identity in Zadie Smith's White Teeth and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah"); and Laura Colombino ("Transmodern Mythopoesis in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant"). As the title of the section announces, the novels in this section share their focus on ethical issues investigated in a transmodern key.

The novels examined in Part III, entitled "Migrancy and the Possibility of Reenchantment," follow transmodernity's horizontal organization and focus on the issue of transmodern possibility of overcoming class, racial, gender and ideological differences. This part includes two essays: Bárbara Arizti's "A Transmodern Approach to Post-9/11 Australia: Richard Flanagan's The Unknown Terrorist as a Narrative of the Limit"; and Merve Sarikaya-Sen's "Diversity, Singularity, Reenchantment and Relationality in a Transmodern World: Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness."

Part IV, "Perspectives on Biopolitics," concludes the volume with two essays: Julia Kuznetski's "Transcorporeality, Fluidity and Transanimality in Monique Roffey's Novel Archipelago" and Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen's "A Transmodern Approach to Biology in Naomi Mitchison's Memoirs of a Spacewoman." The authors delve into the idea of environmental vulnerability and how it affects embodiment, intelligibility, and human knowledge.

As the editors claim, the aim of the book was "to contribute to the elucidation and foregrounding of this paradigm shift" (2020: para. 2) - a tectonic rift of contemporary reasoning - by analyzing the way in which a host of writers coming from totally unrelated backgrounds of cultural identity felt the urge to address the same question: what comes next? Everything is interconnected and pervaded by the presence of everything else around, which resembles a young tree whose branches - postmodernity, postcolonialism, and transculturalism - intertwine and sprout in new directions. The main attribute of the paradigm shift currently in action is transcendence in the shape of past versus present, the impact of new technologies, multiculturalism/migration, vulnerability, interdependence, solidarity and ecology in the current globalized context. Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau consider that the complexity of this paradigm requires "a new interpretive grid capable of articulating the spatio-temporal inter-connectedness of identity, history, memory and culture".

Set out by envisaging transmodernity as an umbrella term on which to build their hypothesis that "contemporary narratives in English are responding to tensions at work in our globalised society by generating new stylistic, generic and/or modal forms that would correspond to a transmodern culture"(2020: para. 17), the ten chapters of the book succeed in producing a close view of how themes such as postcolonialism, subalternity, eco-criticism, feminist criticism, etc. fall into the transmodern pattern. One of the common features of the literary texts analysed in the volume was "a tension between contradicting forces" (2020: para. 20) manifested in a paradoxical love-hate relationship between humans and advanced tech, a fragile negotiation which blurs out race, ethnicity, or gender and elicits trans-interaction.

Footnote

(Note: The version used for this review was Transcending the Postmodern: The Singular Response of Literature to the Transmodern Paradigm, New York: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2020, 266 pp. - Kindle Edition)

References

References

Rodríguez Magda, Rosa María. 2011. "Transmodernidad: un nuevo paradigma" in Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1(1), pp. 1-13 [Online] Available: https://escholarship.org/content/ qt57c8s9gr/ qt57c8s9gr.pdf. [Accessed 2021, January 20].