Expansion, Interruption, Autoethnography: Toward Disorienting Fiction, Part 2
Name
Buzard Expansion Interruption Autoethnography.pdf
Size
147.43 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Buzard, James
Date Issued
January 2009
Journal
Novel: a Forum on Fiction
Publisher
Duke University Press
Citation
Buzard, J. “Expansion, Interruption, Autoethnography: Toward Disorienting Fiction, Part 2.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42.2 (2009): 261–267.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
The thesis of my 2005 book Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels is gestured at by the three words of this essay's main title: nineteenth-century Britain's imperial expansion is the ultimate context in which to make sense of the nineteenth-century novel's apparent commitment to an autoethnographic enterprise aimed at writing into existence a delimited and distinctive culture for the English or even the British people at a time when there was every encouragement for them to regard their way of life as exhausted in identification with a globally exportable “Civilization” or capital-C “Culture” itself. That delimiting impulse found expression in what I call the “self-interrupting” features prominent in Romantic-era and Victorian narrative. This essay considers the challenges facing a planned sequel to Disorienting Fiction that would extend that thesis from the later nineteenth century into the heyday of modernism.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Humanities. Literature Section
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-2009-013
