Entanglement and Entropy in Claire Messud's Novels
The essays collected here discuss Claire Messud’s works in sequence, thus validating the strong historical sense she nurtures through her realist fiction. They also show that the novels’ various narrative designs (such as autodiegetic retrospectivity) foster making historical connections. The book interprets Messud’s fiction in relationship to her non-fiction, and provides an interview with the author. Foci include post-World War II French Algerian emigrant identities, 1960s American Pop Art and September 11, 2001 communal trauma. Messud’s biography covers much geographical movement and she has lived on several continents. Family and direct traumas—giving rise to, or caused by, dislocation—pervade the novels, and Messud’s complex narration enacts a fictional world of multiple, cosmopolitan entanglements in which entropy increases.
Sandra Singer is Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph, Canada. Her publications include Doris Lessing: Interrogating the Times (co-edited with Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis and Debrah Raschke, 2010), Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook After Fifty (co-edited with Alice Ridout and Roberta Rubenstein, 2015), J. J. Steinfeld: Essays on His Works (2017), and Stock Characters in 9/11 Fiction: Homosociality and Nihilist Performance (2019). Her research focuses on narrative, gender, trauma studies and terrorism in fiction and film.
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