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  • Under Construction: “World Literature” in the Twenty-First Century1
  • Jerry A. Varsava (bio)

Suman Gupta’s Globalization and Literature joins others in Polity Press’ series on Themes in 20th and 21st Century Literature and Culture. Gupta’s project is timely given both the acceleration of globalization as a structuring phenomenon of—or, minimally, an inescapable backdrop to—nearly every aspect of our day-to-day lives. Still, and Gupta makes the point, literary scholars have been a little late to the party of globalization studies, an area marked out already in the seventies and eighties (and beyond) by social scientists working in sociology, political science, and anthropology.

The vastness and variegation of the topic of globalization and literature leave an unusually broad range of possible approaches to it. Gupta chooses an eclectic model which concentrates heavily on literature review and suggestive synopses, yielding a text that is focally extensive, though at times diffuse in insight. Chapter 1 briefly reviews the provenance of “globalization” as a term and, collaterally, theories of globalization, citing, among others, the work of Anthony Giddens, Roland Robertson, David Held, and Immanuel Wallerstein. Gupta himself construes globalization as a relatively recent and contemporary development, separating himself from those who would trace it back centuries and view all manner of human interaction across space as (notionally) symptomatic of globalizing processes. Rather than “empty the term ‘globalization’ of its historical and contextual content,” rather than “extend it retrospectively in an ahistorical and acontextual fashion,” Gupta foregrounds globalization’s “specificities” as defined by time and space (10–11). Finally, while acknowledging the determinative role of economics in the shaping of globalization, Gupta eschews the econocentric biases found in, notably, Wallerstein, Mandel, and Jameson.

As the author sets out in the introductory chapter, the book falls into “broadly two uneven parts”: chapters 2 and 3, which deal with prominent [End Page 329] themes of contemporary Anglo-American fiction—anti-globalization protests and social movements in one, and the global city and cosmopolitanism in the other—and the remaining four chapters devoted to how, in the author’s view, literature and literary studies have themselves become globalized. For reasons that I will set out below, I think the close critical readings of the fiction in the first section advance our understanding of the subject to a greater degree than do the various subsequent chapters with their metacritical engagement of well-known theoretical concerns, period and field issues, the politics of text production and reception, debates on translation, and, in minor key, as it turns out, imaginative literature’s implication in the foregoing.

Contemporary Anglo-American fiction of course portrays many of globalization’s major topics and processes: intercultural relations, intercultural conflict, transnationalism, population mobility, heterogenization, homogenization, hybridity, the public-private interface, economic integration, and so on. Certainly, the two topics that Gupta chooses for examination in chapters 2 and 3 are central to how we experience, and understand, globalization. Deriving impetus from the meetings of the G-8, G-20, WTO, IMF, etc., the anti-globalization demonstration, with its scripted actions and reactions, has become an established part of a cacophonous international politico-economic dialogue. Gupta offers a series of articulate, carefully contextualized readings of important novels: DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003), soon to be a major motion picture; a lesser-known but highly topical work by Robert Newman, The Fountain at the Centre of the World (2003); McEwan’s Saturday (2006); and Nicholson Baker’s controversial Checkpoint (2004), with its would-be presidential assassin. Somewhat unexpectedly, the chapter concludes with an analysis of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues (1998; 2001), the latter seen—and Gupta makes the case well—as something of a “global mobilization” of gender consciousness, with the play being translated into dozens of languages and performed in well over a hundred countries (32).

Chapter 3 extends the discussion of literary representations of globalization, taking up again Cosmopolis but also other novels that depict the two most cosmopolitan cities of the Anglosphere—London and New York. As “hubs of international media and communications conglomerates and agencies,” as major sites of information and knowledge aggregation, these global cities are “attuned…to a global consciousness,” but also constitutive of...

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