Broken novels: reflexivity, authorship, and new ethics in contemporary literature of the Americas

This thesis examines the narrative techniques and representational strategies of four “experimental” novels published in the last decade by Ben Lemer, Valeria Luiselli, and Alejandro Zambra. I argue that these texts, which self-consciously raise concerns of their own efficacy in contemporary media landscapes, negotiate various formal authorities in order to elucidate spaces for ethical attentions within the cracks of dominant discursive modes. I take up Pieter Vermeulen’s notion of the “end of the novel” and Shameem Black’s notion of “border-crossing” fiction to push beyond the insights of “the ethical turn” in literary studies, which tend to suggest that the ethical value of literary adhere either to the demands liberal pluralism or the recognition of an unknowable alterity. “Broken authenticity” refers to a narrative possibility in which alterity remains an organizing principle in new forms of potential, collective or otherwise, relationships. I propose that these novels theorize the role of the author as one that initiates and mediates this oscillatory relationship between optimistic participation and detachment. Furthermore, I suggest that this relationship may constitute a way of bearing oneself in the world sincerely without becoming subsumed by totalizing discourses of moral or political responsibility.