Identity and Credibility in the Global Blogosphere

Authors

David Sasaki

Document Type

Article

Abstract

[First paragraph]

The post-national writer, in all its manifestations, is the most interesting and fruitful thing to have happened to world literature since the birth of modernism. It's safe to say this will be the literary hallmark of the new century, with the internet its Gutenberg. And post-nationalism itself is a sign of hope. After centuries of barbarity, a Union in Europe only became possible when it was harder to define who was French or German or Italian or Dutch. We can imagine what the world would be like if only Americans would become post-American.

That was Eliot Weinberger speaking at the PEN World Voices conference in 2005; a man I had never heard of until he was mentioned on the weblog of the Jamaican novelist, Marlon James. Weinberger's quixotic vision of the post-national writer yearns for prose and plot that transcend the narrow and muffled category of nationality. A young writer living in St. Petersburg is no longer to be considered a Russian novelist as were Tolstoy and Doestevsky. Rather, she is simply a writer, touching on the same universal themes as her peers in Egypt, Ecuador, and Fiji. And because literature is a universal aesthetic, each writer should have access to a universal audience. According to PEN, however, translations account for less than three percent of all literary books published annually in the United States.

Repository Citation

Sasaki, David. "Identity and Credibility in the Global Blogosphere." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 6, no. 4, 2006, pp. 1–7. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol6/iss4/9