| My project examines (1) how the Japanese British author Kazuo Ishiguro's fiction complicates notions of difference and (2) the ways in which his work is relevant to various critical discourses, even as it defies appropriation by any one of them. My study thus suggests approaches to reading both Ishiguro's narratives and transnational or transcultural writing in general ethically in a world literary context.;Focusing on Ishiguro's six novels to date I highlight a deceptive transparency and a subtly and inherently self-conscious and self-reflexive dimension at the heart of the author's prose, thus shifting the grounds of critical debates on Ishiguro's work by drawing attention to the ways in which it both presupposes and promotes a response sensitive to its subtly experimentalist, formal level. Through the latter, as I argue, the author's texts invoke intricately entwined reader expectations pertaining to aesthetics, ethics, and culture precisely in order to expose and critique them as such. In so doing, his writing gestures at a critical metanarrative about reading and writing in a world literary context.;Each chapter takes up one narrative aspect central to an understanding of Ishiguro's oeuvre that speaks simultaneously to an ethics of reading world literature. Chapter one reads what have often been referred to as the "floating signs" of Ishiguro's fiction as in fact critical or reflective signs. Chapter two reevaluates accounts of the butler Stevens's narrative unreliability in The Remains of the Day, which is seen as tied intimately to our judgment of his character, values, and choices and as complicating interpretations of the butler's experience centering on his repression, shame, and guilt. Chapter three examines an intrinsically translated and mediated quality of Ishiguro's writing that has frequently been read in terms of its supposed "English" or "Japanese" characteristics. Chapter four focuses on how, in the author's last three novels, narrative time and space are made pliable to the expression of complex feelings, moods, and atmospheres, thus suggesting a narrative ethics both more "real" and less tangible than what has so far been proposed. Ultimately, through an aesthetics inseparable from the novels' ethics that raises mediation and translation to the conscious level, Ishiguro's narratives provide a model for a critical or reflective fiction and an ethics of reading world literature in a globalized age. |
