8/7/2023 0 Comments Utopia salon space center![]() The focus on ‘sources’ terminologically and methodologically relates to the classic formulation of Nikolaus Pevsner’s book The Sources of Modern Architecture and Design from 1968. The paper explores the emergence of architectural postmodernism in Belgrade (Serbia) and its sources, that is to say, the web of different socio-political, artistic and intellectual tributaries to the new architectural outlook. Any ‘crisis fiction’ would have to come to terms with this contraction and the decelerative ‘phase’ of capitalism. The dependence of postmodern fiction on the horizon of a unified but differentiated capital is probed in light of the effect of contraction of fictional space and a denuding or reduction of that space. ![]() Taking the work of William Gibson, best known for his science fiction writing and especially the 1984 novel Neuromancer, as a case study we find the ‘crunching’ of this space and the concomitant miring of fiction in the inertial dynamics of crisis. Arguing that the plural and differentiated fiction of postmodernism took for granted the horizon of successful capitalism, it is suggested that the current crisis implies a contraction of fictional space. Drawing on Lukács argument that capitalism in its ‘normal’ functioning operates as differentiated sub-systems that is experienced as a unity, and that capitalism in crisis functions as a unity experienced as disintegration, this intervention tracks recent pre-crisis fiction for signs of reflection on the forms of capitalism and intimations of its crisis. ![]() Previously the novel struggled with the representation of the mediated complexity of money and capital, now it has to struggle with the crisis of those forms. The global financial crisis of 2008, and its ongoing fallout, poses questions of representation to the narrative form of the postmodern novel in terms of the relation of literary to financial value. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Novel beyond Nation Jernej Habjan 1 Novels before Nations: How Early US Novels Imagined Community Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse 2 Pre-modern Joking Relationships In Modern Europe: From Le Neveu de Rameau to Le Neveu de Lacan Jernej Habjan 3 The Nation Between the Epic and the Novel: France Prešeren’s The Baptism on the Savica As a Compromise “World Text” Marko Juvan 4 Autonomy after Autonomy, or, the Novel beyond Nation: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 Emilio Sauri 5 The Narrator and the Nation-Builder: Dialect, Dialogue, and Narrative Voice in Minority and Working-Class Fiction Alexander Beecroft 6 Novel, Utopia, Nation: A History of Interdependence Hrvoje Tutek 7 Neomedievalism in Three Contemporary City Novels: Tobar, Adichie, Lee Caren Irr 8 Crisis of the Novel and the Novel of Crisis Suman Gupta The issue will hence welcome papers on any aspect of the history of the novel and/or the nation from the joint rise of the two forms to the current moment of the prevalence of the former despite the crisis of the latter. This special issue of CRCL/RCLC titled “Novel beyond Nation” is devoted to a rethinking of the conjuncture between the nation and the novel in light of the contemporary persistence of the novel despite the rise of identity politics and other post-nationalist types of social bond. The urban, constituting those neutral grounds of a problematic modernity and postmodernity, is a utopian project itself. Like literature and like the city, this project transforms the space even as it represents it. The city is utopian, not in the sense of an ideal place, but as a critical no-place, a neutral ground that is neither local nor national-that is, at Louis Marin points out in Utopiques, from the Latin ne-uter, it is “neither one or the other.” The bewildering urban experience becomes a figure for utopian writing itself, for the projection of an imaginary cartography allows one to make sense of the global space (the social totality) while also navigating amid the vicissitudinous sensual barrage of the urban landscape. From the representative topos of modernity, cities have evolved into the quintessential though problematic social space of the postmodern condition. Now, in the age of globalization, which is marked in part by a relative diminution in the influence of the nation-state and the transnational flow of economic and cultural resources, the metropolis-far from diminishing in its turn-has become all the more significant, as the “global cities” becomes key nodes in the multinational system of power relations. ![]() In the “Europe of the Capitals,” urban space embodied the centralization of state power essential to the formation of the modern world system.
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