The Novel after the Global Turn: Decentered Perspectives from the Spanish Literary Field

Abstract

This essay addresses current debates on the global novel through the analysis of two contrasting yet comparable case studies: J. M. Coetzee's Jesus trilogy The Childhood of Jesus (2013), The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), and The Death of Jesus (2019) and the significantly less well-known novel Sudd (2007), by the Spanish novelist and travel writer Gabi Martínez. Mobilizing a growing body of criticism, we identify a key constellation of social, political, affective, and ethical concerns that are increasingly present in recent theories of the novel such as global interconnectedness and violence, cosmopolitanism, a new order of affects, humanitarianism, translatability, and planetarity and discuss them through our two case studies. Working from different narrative aesthetics and unequal positions in the literary system, Coetzee and Martínez thwart exclusive adherence to normative or pragmatic approaches to the global novel, evincing the unevenness of international circulation and academic institutionalization against the backdrop of global Anglophone literature.