Overview

A study of how Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels respond to and represent the world through characters that are profoundly limited in their understanding of the systems that bind them. How has a writer known principally for his contained domestic novels come to represent the most dynamic elements of world literature? In Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, Chris Holmes expands our understanding of how world literature engages with the most pressing crises of the 20th and 21st centuries by examining Ishiguro’s fascination with characters who are profoundly constrained in their ability to understand global systems to which they are subject. Rather than following the established pattern of so-called global novels, which crisscross the planet exhibiting a knowing cosmopolitanism, Ishiguro’s fictional engagement with the world comes principally in the form of characters who are cut off from the global systems that abuse them. By examining the ways in which Ishiguro foregrounds the in-process thinking of those who fail to comprehend their place in the flow of politics, culture, and ideas, Holmes positions Ishiguro as the great chronicler of everyday lives, and as such, prepares a mode of reading world literature that questions the assumptions for how we live and think with others when each of us is deeply limited.

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9781501388422

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Reviews

What a treat to read! While attending to a single writer with marvelous subtlety and sensitivity, this book also poses a powerful theoretical challenge to prevailing ideas about world literature. Satisfying on every level. * Caroline Levine, David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities, Cornell University, USA * Challenging much of the critical commonplaces that have grown around Ishiguro’s work, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature makes the surprising but powerful case that Ishiguro’s often constrained novels both theorize and practice a new approach to world literature. Holmes shows us an Ishiguro whose use of boundaries, restraint, and isolation give new voice to the importance of the experience of limitation to how we (and contemporary novelists) imagine the vast systems and powers that make up our world. This book is essential reading not just for students and scholars of Ishiguro but for those who wish to think about the place of imagination, stories, and the novel itself in an increasing mediated but disconnected social world. * Thom Dancer, Associate Professor of English, University of Toronto, Canada * In this nuanced and theoretically astute guide to the works of Kazuo Ishiguro, Chris Holmes proves himself a sophisticated interpreter able to demonstrate how this protean writer’s varied oeuvre enlarges our sense of what writing brings into being in the world. Holmes offers new ways to think beyond the frames through which World Literature has come to be understood in the academy over the past two decades. * Andrew van der Vlies, Professor of English and Creative Writing, The University of Adelaide, Australia * In this insightful and searching account, Chris Holmes provides a new angle on both Ishiguro and the question of world literature, turning to the concept of the limit as a paradoxical opening to future thought. As Holmes brilliantly illuminates, Ishiguro’s fictional forms enact complex processes of disruption, misperception, and reflection capable of destabilizing the extractive drives of late capitalism and the politically single-minded. With this, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literaturesharpens the impetus of world literature, inviting us to remember it first and foremost as existing in an interrogative rather than indicative mood. Moving deftly through Ishiguro’s oeuvre, Holmes yet again proves himself an ideal guide to the author’s ongoing narrative project, as well as a probing and incisive reader of contemporary literature. * Kelly Rich, Assistant Professor of English, Wellesley College, USA * Marshalling an impressive array of world literature critics, and in deft prose, Chris Holmes provides masterful and nuanced readings of Kazuo Ishiguro’s works in order to boldly apprehend Ishiguro—a writer seemingly unconstrained by limits; who is embraced for his staging of universal ethical paradigms and texts that circulate globally—at the limit. In so doing, he demonstrates how it is precisely the stasis, boundaries, constraints, and limits in Ishiguro’s works that offer a new theory of world literature. An important addition to Ishiguro scholarship and sure to be influential to the way we continue to read and reread this beguiling author. * Jerrine Tan, Assistant Professor of English, City University Hong Kong *

Author Information

Chris Holmes is Associate Professor and Chair of Literatures in English at Ithaca College, USA. His work has been published in NOVEL, Contemporary Literature, MFS, Literature Compass, Diaspora, The Oxford University ORE for Literature, and he is co-editor (with Kelly Mee Rich) of the special issue: “Kazuo Ishiguro After the Nobel” in MFS. He is the founder and host of the literary podcast, Burned by Books.

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