Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
2-2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Program
Comparative Literature
Advisor
Sonali Perera
Committee Members
Peter Hitchcock
Ashley Dawson
Subject Categories
Comparative Literature | Environmental Studies | Modern Literature | Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies
Keywords
Contemporary African Literature; Contemporary American Literature; Ecocriticism; Extractive Fiction; World-Literature
Abstract
The “modern” novel, with its individualistic and anthropocentric bourgeois roots, is often considered inadequate to represent today’s global crises, their temporal and spatial scales, their systemic forms of violence. In my doctoral dissertation, I argue that certain contemporary novels overcome these narrative constraints by replacing the single hero at the heart of the text with a more collective protagonist. By merging the recent debate on world-literature with the ecocritical analysis of Capitalocene fictions “from below,” I read these novels as responses to the socioecological violence of capitalist modernization in various parts of the world. My formal analysis of Jennifer Haigh’s Heat and Light (2016), Ondjaki’s Transparent City (2012), Annie Proulx’s Barkskins (2016), and Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019) stems from a material comparison that connects African and American sites of extraction for energy production, while situating them in a longer history of colonial and environmental dispossession. Because of their focus on collective protagonists, these novels challenge the genre’s obsession with individualism and anthropocentrism, register the socioecological violence of capitalist modernity as systemic, and offer fictional spaces where to reflect on the agency of more-than-human collectivities.
Recommended Citation
Nolé, Leonardo, "Contemporary World-Novels and their Collective Protagonists" (2024). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5651
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Included in
Comparative Literature Commons, Environmental Studies Commons, Modern Literature Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons