The historical imagination in the age of globalization: Historical fictions by Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Wang Anyi and Zhu Tianxin.

摘要

The thesis of my dissertation is that the formation of contemporary historical narratives results from the contestation between global boundary-shifting and local assertions of community identity. My study reveals how the literary works under discussion all reflect the immense pressure of the image-dominant representation of globalization and how each works in its own way to unfold a narrative of historical crisis. By this interdisciplinary research I hope to contribute to a critical understanding of contemporary globalization.; I explore various forms of historical imagination that respond to the globalization imaginary and I categorize them into three modes, including the traumatic in Toni Morrison's Beloved, the gothic in Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, and the melancholy in Wang Anyi's Autobiography and Fabrication and Zhu Tianxin's "The Old Capital." The narratives of historical crisis unfolded in one way or another in these literary works reveal the precariousness of our resistance to the cartographic fictions of globalization. These three modes of historical narratives are aesthetic containment, or shock defense, after the global imaginary succumbs to the social regimentation imposed on the metropolis-centered geography of global capitalism. To borrow Raymond Williams' words, we can also call these historical modes structures of feeling in the era of globalization.