Worlding the Western

Contemporary Us Western Fiction and the Global Community
Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64779-055-4
Verlag: University of Nevada Press

Buch, Englisch, 272 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 150 mm x 226 mm, Gewicht: 295 g

Worlding the Western takes the fiction of the Western United States as a focal point for a re-examination of the consequences of exceptionalism and closed borders in the Trump Era. At a time of bounded individualism, new nativism, climate emergency, and migration crises, author Neil Campbell argues that fiction offers opportunities to put the world back in ways that challenge the dark side of globalization and proposes worlding as a different and more open form of politics. A driving force in the book is a comment from the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, who wrote "the unity of the world is not one: it is made of a diversity, including disparity and opposition. It is made of it, which is to say that it is not added to it and does not reduce it. The unity of the world is nothing other than its diversity, and its diversity is, in turn, a diversity of worlds" (The Creation of the World or Globalization, 2007, p. 109). Diversity, disparity, and opposition are central to the dynamic frictional fiction I consider in this book. The American West provides a powerful test case (a laboratory of the future in Charles Bowden's term), in which these features - diversity, disparity, and opposition - are present and yet historically have often been so masked or denied in the rush towards unanimity and nation-building. In this book, the past is never lost or irrelevant, but rather circles around, re-emerging in lives as echoes and hauntings. Worlding is, therefore, a positive, critical concept through which to put the notion of a single world under pressure.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Campbell, Neil

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft

Über Autor(innen)

Neil Campbell is professor emeritus of American Studies at the University of Derby in the United Kingdom. He has published widely on the American West in articles, book chapters, and monographs, and an interdisciplinary trilogy of books on the post-war American West. He is co-editor of the book series Place, Memory, Affect and has a volume within it, Affective Critical Regionality. He edited Under the Western Sky (University of Nevada Press, 2018).