GKAT Lecture Return, Reflect, Relate: Contemporary US Literature at the Limits of Liberal Cosmopolitanism

As the value of literature is increasingly less self-evident, it becomes ever more dependent on explicit discourses of justification. And as the most impactful of such discourses are avowedly liberal and cosmopolitan, this has made contemporary literature uncomfortably reliant on the vagaries of liberal cosmopolitanism. This talk shows how the three dominant modes of twenty-first-century US literature are shaped by that reliance as it moves from liberalism’s complicity in the War on Terror over its complacency during the Obama years to its impotence in the face of Trump. It highlights how these ideological shifts shape the production and reception of key literary oeuvres such as those of W.G. Sebald, George Saunders, Teju Cole, and Zadie Smith.