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.
In this imaginative and provocative book, Purdy draws upon the work of a such writers as Kurt Vonnegut, Vladimir Nabokov, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Günter Grass, Samuel Becket, and Eugene Ionesco to suggest ways in which novelists explore the unknown. His ingenious consideration of Henry James in conjunction with these novelists, as well as with science fiction and detective fiction writers and with mid-century scientific discoveries and advances—black holes, hydrogen bombs, space travel—offers rich, new insights into James’s work and into the twentieth-century view of humanity’s place in the world.
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