Saikat Majumdar’s ‘Prose of the World’
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In ‘Prose of the World,’ Saikat Majumdar suggests that the impoverished affective experience of modernity, as felt in colonial settings, significantly shaped the innovative aesthetics we have come to see as a hallmark of modernist fiction.
Full Title: Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire
Author: Saikat Majumdar, Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University.
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Place: New York, New York
Description: Everyday life in the far outposts of empire can be static, empty of the excitement of progress. A pervading sense of banality and boredom are, therefore, common elements of the daily experience for people living on the colonial periphery. Saikat Majumdar suggests that this impoverished affective experience of colonial modernity significantly shapes the innovative aesthetics of modernist fiction.
Prose of the World explores the global life of this narrative aesthetic, from late-colonial modernism to the present day, focusing on a writer each from Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and India. Ranging from James Joyce’s deflated epiphanies to Amit Chaudhuri’s disavowal of the grand spectacle of postcolonial national allegories, Majumdar foregrounds the banal as a key instinct of modern and contemporary fiction — one that nevertheless remains submerged because of its antithetical relation to literature’s intuitive function to engage or excite.
For more, see the book’s publication site at Columbia University Press.
