떠오르는 아시아에서 당신을 세계문학으로 연루시키는 법: 모신 하미드의 『떠오르는 아시아에서 더럽게 부자되는 법』 읽기

Abstract

When we read works of world literature, literary categories, construed from a set of historical, geographical and ethnic markers welded in texts, play an important role in guiding our understanding, while it is also the case that we enter a universal literary domain encompassing and transcending the determinatives. Considered in this light, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Mohsin Hamids third novel published in 2013, is an interesting work as it seems to present no anchoring buoys for readers in it. As the title indicates, the novel reads like a pseudo self-help book, conspicuously employing language and conventions of the self-help genre, and depicts a world of non-nationality or supranationality where geographical signs and proper nouns are all expunged with densely compressed events and anonymous characters. In fact, the novels nebulousness in genre, time and nationality mirrors the authors cosmopolitan identity. Hamid, born and raised in Pakistan, educated in the US, and now residing in and oscillating among London, New York and Lahore, is hard to be fixated within a certain nations literary gene-alogy, just as his texts hybridity makes it difficult to be pinned down as a work of national literature other than that of world literature. Then, how does the novel engage readers with the non-national / supranational world of its own? Beginning with this inquiry, this paper discusses the novel through a connection between self-help and world literature, referring to arguments of Franco Moretti and Beth Blum. It observes that Morettis claim on the evolution of modern novels in world literature discourse can be related to Blums study on self-helps cultural history, as both scholars focus on how a specific form of narrative globally circulates and transforms itself while negotiating with local realities. Building on this theoretical perspective, it maintains that the texts willful and particular address you, interchangeably used as a second person narration and a reference to its nameless protagonist, implicates readers into its narrative as a co-author of the story and expands the notion of self to be helped in the act of reading. Additionally, this paper touches on how Hamids authorial presence influences and strengthens this pull of the narrators voice. Overall, the novel utilizes conventions of self-help in order to engage as many readers as possible within its fic-tional world and becomes a new possibility of world literature.