Not the Whole Story: Narrative Responses to Contemporary Globalization

This dissertation analyzes contemporary global fiction in English (and, in one chapter, new media literatures such as videogame-based narratives) to examine how individuals, communities, and globalized networks manage differences among historical interpretations, ideologies, lived experiences, and cultural and national traditions making competing demands. Cultural and media theorists like John Tomlinson, Anthony Giddens, Arjun Appadurai, Lev Manovich, and Ian Bogost have demonstrated the overwhelming complexity of life in an age of accelerating globalization. Building on their work and the narrative theory of Maggie Dunn and Ann Morris, I explore how literary narratives employ newly prominent composite narrative structures to represent and enact key methods of managing overwhelming globalized connectivity in our lives and narratives. Narrative compositing is exemplified in recent global fiction structured around multiple focal points dispersed across times, locations, ideologies, identities, geopolitical situations, and technological networks. These composite narrative forms complicate postmodern narrative and require that we rethink the postmodern condition in terms of the diverse influences and experiences of globalization. Early chapters analyze novels centrally concerned with globalization as well as others presenting globalization as an unobtrusive but significant structuring device. Later chapters examine technological as well as thematic and narrative compositing in a new media narrative and how compositing can help explain the posthumanist dynamics of globalization and technology and the interactions of globalization and postmemory, followed by a brief conclusion on classroom pedagogy