The Problem of Worldmaking: Critical Irrealism in Contemporary Anglophone World Literatures

In this project, I suggest that critical irrealism – a term applicable to “oeuvres that do not follow the rules governing the ‘accurate representation of life as it really is’ but that are nevertheless critical of social reality” (Löwy 2007, 196) – offers an aesthetic category whose study has repercussions for two seemingly opposing strands of world literary research. Systemic-material accounts of world literature understand the world as the underlying globally interconnected material conditions and, as such, as determinative of world literature. The counterposition holds that world literature wields what Pheng Cheah (2008 and 2016) calls worldmaking force: a normative potential to shape the world actively. My project acts at the intersection of these two positions and asks how contemporary Anglophone world literatures engage with both these dimensions in order to shed light on how texts relate to their normative qualities in the face of the world-historical contexts they negotiate. Specifically, the aim of this research project is to investigate the way contemporary Anglophone world literatures use irrealist aesthetics to engage with the limits of their worldmaking potential. English-language novels provide fruitful terrain for this research because of the intimate association of the novel as a form and of English as a language with the systemic flows of global capitalism (Neumann and Rippl 2017b). I contend that contemporary irrealist Anglophone novels are attuned to the question of their political efficacies: they engage as much with remaking their world-historical subject matter as they do with the limits it imposes. While scholars have noted the affinity between irrealist forms and world literature (Siskind 2012; WReC 2015), I go further by claiming that an aesthetic of irrealism is used to express the dialectical relationship between fiction’s overdetermination by a global capitalist system of ‘combined and uneven development’ (WReC 2015) and its imaginative power to suggest alternative visions. Consequently, the worldmaking efforts of the novels I analyze are themselves connected to an interrogation of the role fiction can be expected to play in the constitution of the world.