Overview

Showing how museum practices shed new light on literary form How and why do books deploy objects in order to narrate the past? To answer this question, Emma Bond sifts through collections of objects stored in boxes, drawers, baskets, and displayed on shelves in contemporary texts by authors such as Valeria Luiselli, Maaza Mengiste, Orhan Pamuk, and Olga Tokarczuk and interprets them using a framework of museum practices. These practices, which include collection, curation, conservation, and display, have helped to turn real-life museums into three-dimensional narrative spaces. Curating Worlds: Museum Practices in Contemporary Literature shows how we can use this same set of practices to shed light on literary form itself: how stories are created, shaped, and communicated. Harnessing museum practices as an innovative lens for critical interpretation, Bond provides a fresh theoretical framework to engage with the meanings of object collections in literature and to make sense of the lives, and afterlives, of things today.

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9780810147959

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Reviews

“Curating Worlds proposes an exhilarating new way of understanding contemporary world literature by examining its dynamic relationships to material practices that orient readers within spatial and temporal trajectories. Dazzling in its originality and ambition, and written in engaging prose, the work comes off so successfully that the reader hardly recognizes the audacious novelty of the project.” —Rebecca Falkoff, University of Texas at Austin “Bond has mastered and synopsized the gigantic body of literature that constitutes museology, curation, collecting, and world literature. She writes with a rare elegance and erudition that makes for a lively and scholarly book. Curating Worlds is crucially adding to the blossoming field of ‘world literature.’” —Allan Hepburn, McGill University

Author Information

Emma Bond is a professor of Italian and comparative studies at Oriel College, University of Oxford. Her books include Writing Migration through the Body, and she has served as an advisor or guest curator for a number of museums, including V&A Dundee, the Watt Institution, and the Wardlaw Museum.

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