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Worlding the Westerntakes the fiction of the Western United States as a focal point for a re-examination of the consequences of exceptionalism and closed borders in the Trump Era. At a time of bounded individualism, new nativism, climate emergency, and migration crises, author Neil Campbell argues that fiction offers opportunities to put the world back in ways that challenge the dark side of globalization and proposes worlding as a different and more open form of politics. A driving force in the book is a comment from the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, who wrote "the unity of the world is not one: it is made of a diversity, including disparity and opposition. It is made of it, which is to say that it is not added to it and does not reduce it. The unity of the world is nothing other than its diversity, and its diversity is, in turn, a diversity of worlds" (The Creation of the World or Globalization, 2007, p. 109). Diversity, disparity, and opposition are central to the dynamic frictional fiction I consider in this book. The American West provides a powerful test case (a laboratory of the future in Charles Bowden's term), in which these features - diversity, disparity, and opposition - are present and yet historically have often been so masked or denied in the rush towards unanimity and nation-building. In this book, the past is never lost or irrelevant, but rather circles around, re-emerging in lives as echoes and hauntings. Worlding is, therefore, a positive, critical concept through which to put the notion of a single world under pressure.
Worlding the Westerntakes the fiction of the Western United States as a focal point for a re-examination of the consequences of exceptionalism and closed borders in the Trump Era. At a time of bounded individualism, new nativism, climate emergency, and migration crises, author Neil Campbell argues that fiction offers opportunities to put the world back in ways that challenge the dark side of globalization and proposes worlding as a different and more open form of politics. A driving force in the book is a comment from the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, who wrote "the unity of the world is not one: it is made of a diversity, including disparity and opposition. It is made of it, which is to say that it is not added to it and does not reduce it. The unity of the world is nothing other than its diversity, and its diversity is, in turn, a diversity of worlds" (The Creation of the World or Globalization, 2007, p. 109). Diversity, disparity, and opposition are central to the dynamic frictional fiction I consider in this book. The American West provides a powerful test case (a laboratory of the future in Charles Bowden's term), in which these features - diversity, disparity, and opposition - are present and yet historically have often been so masked or denied in the rush towards unanimity and nation-building. In this book, the past is never lost or irrelevant, but rather circles around, re-emerging in lives as echoes and hauntings. Worlding is, therefore, a positive, critical concept through which to put the notion of a single world under pressure.
Neil Campbell is professor of American studies at the University of Derby and the author or coauthor of several books, including TheCultures of the American New West, American Cultural Studies, and The Rhizomatic West.
"This ambitious and wide-ranging text works to upend the Western
and common discourses about Western American literature and
representations of the American West. Campbell makes a major
contribution to Western American Studies, transnational literary
studies, contemporary literary studies, and a literary criticism
that embraces social change and an ethic of care."
--Nancy Cook, emerita professor of English, University of Montana,
and a past president of the Western Literature Association
"Campbell is one of the leading scholars of Western American
literature. One emerges from Worlding the Western recharged about
the role of literature as a fundamental critique of and counter to
US politics since 2016. The book will carry weight and cast a wide
net of influence with the next generation of Western American
literature scholars."
--O. Alan Weltzien, professor emeritus of English, University of
Montana Western, author of Savage West: The Life and Fiction of
Thomas Savage
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