AustLit logo
Rodney Taveira (International) assertion Rodney Taveira i(9578403 works by)
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Works By

Preview all
1 A Patriarchy of Pain : Nam Le, Don DeLillo, and the Hierarchical Cosmopolitanism of Contemporary Fiction Rodney Taveira , 2016 single work
— Appears in: New Scholar , vol. 4 no. 1 2016;
'This essay examines the loop of contemporary American literary production and reception. Firstly, I read Nam Le's 'Meeting Elise,' from The Boat (2008), Le's much-awarded collection of short stories set across the globe, alongside Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis (2003), a novel that depicts the daylong journey in a limousine of a billionaire currency trader down New York's 47th St. Secondly, I compare Le's and DeLillo's different cosmopolitanisms against the cosmopolitan scene of New York City book reviews. I argue that a graphic depiction of pain and the male body-a 'patriarchy of pain'-reveals a tension between the local and the transnational in the field of contemporary literature and reception, and that this tension reflects and informs the how the field bestows and withholds value. Le and DeLillo, I argue, as figures of different cosmopolitanisms, further complicate matters. What Donald C. Goellnicht has called Le's 'refugee cosmopolitanism' is regarded differently than DeLillo's New York, older cosmopolitanism. The regard of difference demonstrates a continuation of the older mode as it encounters the newer mode. This creates a hierarchy to the scene of the cosmopolitanism of the New York book reviews, what I call 'hierarchical cosmopolitanism,' one that confers value to those it admits.' (Publication abstract)
X