David Mitchell

Sarah Dillon

Description

The outcome of the first international conference on David Mitchell's writing, this collection of critical essays, focuses on his first three novels - Ghostwritten (1999), number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004) - to provide a sustained analysis of Mitchell's complex narrative techniques and the literary, political and cultural implications of his early work. The essays cover topics ranging from narrative structure, genre and the Bildungsroman to representations of Japan, postmodernism, the construction of identity, utopia, science fiction and postcolonialism. Contents: Foreword (David Mitchell); 1. Introducing David Mitchell's Universe: A Twenty-First Century House of Fiction (Sarah Dillon); 2. The Novels in Nine Parts (Peter Childs and James Green); 3. Or something like that : Coming of Age in number9dream (Kathryn Simpson); 4. Remediations of Japan in number9dream (Baryon Tensor Posadas); 5. The Stories We Tell: Discursive Identity Through Narrative Form in Cloud Atlas (Courtney Hopf); 6. Cloud Atlas: From Postmodernity to the Posthuman (Helene Machinal); 7. Cloud Atlas and If on a winter s night a traveller: Fragmentation and Integrity in the Postmodern Novel (Will McMorran); 8. Strange Transactions : Utopia, Transmigration and Time in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas (Caroline Edwards); 9. Speculative Fiction as Postcolonial: Critique in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas (Nicholas Dunlop); 10. Moonlight bright as a UFO abduction : Science Fiction, Present-Future Alienation and Cognitive Mapping (William Stephenson); Notes on Contributors; Index.

Informations

• Publié par: Gylphi
• Date de parution: 20 avril 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781780240053
• Langue: English

Extrait

‘Reality is the page. Life is the word.’
David Mitchell, number9dream
Gylphi Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays
Series Editor: Sarah Dillon
Gylphi Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays presents a new approach to the academic study of living authors. The titles in this series are devoted to contemporary British, Irish and American authors whose work is popularly and critically valued but on whom a significant body of academic work has yet to be established. Each of the titles in this series is developed out of the best contributions to an international conference on its author; represents the most intelligent and provocative material in current thinking about that author’s work; and, suggests future avenues of thought, comparison and analysis. With each title prefaced by an author foreword, this series embraces the challenges of writing on living authors and provides the foundation stones for future critical work on significant contemporary writers.
Series Titles
David Mitchell: Critical Essays (2011) Edited by Sarah Dillon. Foreword by David Mitchell.
Maggie Gee: Critical Essays (2013) Edited by Sarah Dillon and Caroline Edwards. Foreword by Maggie Gee.
David Mitchell
Critical Essays
Edited by
Sarah Dillon
A Gylphi Limited Book
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Gylphi Limited
Copyright © Gylphi Limited, 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, except for personal use, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form or binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78024-002-2 (hbk)
ISBN 978-1-78024-003-9 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-78024-004-6 (Kindle)
ISBN 978-1-78024-005-3 (ePUB)
Thanks are due to Kai and Sunny and Sceptre Books for allowing the cover to echo colours used on the cover of number9dream .
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For Isaac
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Anthony Levings at Gylphi and the School of English, University of St Andrews, for their support in running the David Mitchell Conference. I would also like to thank all the paper-givers and attendees at the conference for making the event such a success – papers delivered there but not included here, as well as the discussion they prompted, have informed this collection. Finally, I would like to thank David Mitchell for attending the event, giving his support to this collection and creating the fictional world in which we all take such delight.
List of Abbreviations
Abbreviations of works cited by David Mitchell:
G − Mitchell, David (1999) Ghostwritten . London: Sceptre.
n9d − Mitchell, David (2001) number9dream . London: Sceptre.
CA − Mitchell, David (2004) Cloud Atlas . London: Sceptre.
BSG − Mitchell, David (2006) Black Swan Green . London: Sceptre.
TA − Mitchell, David (2010) The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet . London: Sceptre.
Contents
Foreword David Mitchell
1. Introducing David Mitchell’s Universe: A Twenty-First Century House of Fiction Sarah Dillon
2. The Novels in Nine Parts Peter Childs and James Green
3. ‘Or something like that': Coming of Age in number9dream Kathryn Simpson
4. Remediations of ‘Japan’ in number9dream Baryon Tensor Posadas
5. The Stories We Tell: Discursive Identity Through Narrative Form in Cloud Atlas Courtney Hopf
6. Cloud Atlas : From Postmodernity to the Posthuman Hélène Machinal
7. Cloud Atlas and If on a winter’s night a traveller : Fragmentation and Integrity in the Postmodern Novel Will McMorran
8. ‘Strange Transactions’: Utopia, Transmigration and Time in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas Caroline Edwards
9. Speculative Fiction as Postcolonial Critique in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas Nicholas Dunlop
10. ‘Moonlight bright as a UFO abduction’: Science Fiction, Present-Future Alienation and Cognitive Mapping William Stephenson
Notes on Contributors
Index
Foreword
David Mitchell
One danger of the question ‘What was it like to attend a conference on your fiction?’ is that your answer can inadvertently suggest an ego-trip of Saturn-V rocket-launcher proportions. Another difficulty is that you feel not one but many things, as I found during my three days as a guest of the University of St Andrews in September 2009, when the papers in this book were presented. First up was a sense of strangeness: the strangeness of being spoken about in the third person. This privilege is usually reserved for politicians, celebrities, criminals, eavesdroppers and ghosts, but not, on the whole, novelists. Maybe it was dicey for the academics, too – what if the notorious contrarian started heckling from the back row? To cope with this awkwardness we evolved an unspoken modus operandi : simply to pretend that the David Mitchell who wrote the books under discussion was not quite the same David Mitchell in the room, but rather a sort of dodgy twin. After the strangeness came trepidation, as it sunk in that over a hundred international academics had convened to discuss various aspects of my not-fat oeuvre of four novels. All those air-miles … all those kilowatts of mind-energy expended by brains more methodical, cerebral and erudite than mine. What if I opened my mouth and pure drivel came gushing forth? (It’s happened before, God knows, and it’ll happen again.) Would all these bright people not feel hoodwinked if they found out that Derrida did my head in? Would the Literature Police kick down the bedroom door of my B&B and arrest me for imposture?
Luckily, I remained free to attend the first academic conference I’d ever been to, on writing in general and my writing in particular; and thereon in the dominant sensation was intellectual curiosity, well-fed. The range of papers was diverse and stimulating. Sessions on Japan were followed by sessions on science fiction, on language, on postmodernism, the anatomy of narrative, and a wide raft of other topics integral to what and how I write. As is true for all attendees of all conferences, some papers spoke to me more than others, but even where I disagreed, I learnt. The participants had too much class to ask me ‘Am I right?’ or ‘Did you mean … ?’ but the beauty of literary studies is that just because an author didn’t consciously put something into the text, that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. A year has passed since the conference, but what remains is a sense of gratitude and privilege that those three days in St Andrews took place and that I could be there. So thank you to Sarah Dillon for all her hard work in making the conference happen, to St Andrews for hosting the event, to Gylphi for publishing this book, and to all participants at the conference for their insights, friendliness and humour. It was a great honour that I’ll remember for the rest of my life.
September 2010
1
Introducing David Mitchell’s Universe
A Twenty-First Century House of Fiction
Sarah Dillon
I
On 3–4 September 2009, the first David Mitchell Conference took place at the University of St Andrews, bringing together in intellectual dialogue and exchange scholars working on David Mitchell’s writing. The aim of the conference was to consolidate and advance academic work currently underway on Mitchell’s writing; the outcome is this collection of critical essays. Focusing on Mitchell’s first three novels – Ghostwritten (1999), number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004) – this volume represents the first sustained analysis of Mitchell’s complex narrative techniques and the literary, political and cultural implications of his early work. [1] The essays collected here cover topics such as narrative structure, genre, the Bildungsroman , representations of Japan, postmodernism, the construction of identity, utopia, science fiction and postcolonialism. Their scope, however, is in no way exhaustive. Rather, this volume serves as a foundation stone for future critical work on Mitchell’s continually expanding oeuvre: the detailed analyses and arguments of the essays represent the most intelligent and provocative material in current thinking about Mitchell’s texts; in their footnotes can be found a breadcrumb trail of suggestions for future avenues of thought, comparison and analysis.
In order to complement the volume’s focus on Mitchell’s first three novels, this introduction will map the terrain of Mitchell’s fiction, and the volume’s engagement with it, using Mitchell’s two most recent works as its compass – Black Swan Green (2006) and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010). This is illuminating, not least, because of the structural dissimilarity of these works to Mitchell’s earlier and more experimental fiction. Ghostwritten consists of nine interconnected short stories, each narrated by a different character and set in a different geographical location; number9dream ’s main Bildungsroman narrative is interrupted by fantasies, video games, a fabulist’s children’s stories, memories, flashbacks, excerpts from a wartime journal and dreams; and, Cloud Atlas comprises six generically and temporally distinct narratives each of which is interrupted by the next until the sixth undivided narrative after