Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature- Epimodernism

Reinterpreting the six “memos” that Italo Calvino suggested more than thirty years ago for “the new Millennium”, in this acclaimed book Emmanuel Bouju identifies six new values for literature in the twenty-first century: Superficiality, Secrecy, Energy, Acceleration, Credit, and Follow Through. “After postmodernism’s literature of exhaustion, Emmanuel Bouju asks what new life the novel can breathe into the present. Building on Kafka and Calvino, Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, Bouju ranges freely among a host of contemporary writers, probing their complex revitalization of modernist themes and tropes in ‘a new consistency of literary and artistic discontinuity.’ At once intense and playful, Epimodernism breathes new life into narrative studies today.” —David Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University “‘Epi’” – a prefix denoting surface, as well as ‘with’ and ‘among’ – is mobilized here in bold and interesting ways for a vocabulary of literary criticism that skirts the tired ‘isms’ and ‘posts’ of late capitalism’s unraveling. A true comparatist, Bouju offers six ‘memos,’ each describing a literary epiphenomenon in its travels across multiple languages, traditions and cultural sites. Fromthe sound-values of Kafka’s ‘K,’ which rewrite ‘Amerika’ the world over, to phantom pains and mirror-boxes conserving distant wartime memories, to genetic crossings of biofiction and autofiction, to the crypto-currencies and autopilots of contemporary metanarratives, Epimodernism investigates the byways of aesthetic microworlds hitherto unknown and unauthorized.” —Emily Apter, Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature, New York University' Postmodernism has had its day. Are we now in the era of epimodernism? Reinterpreting the six…