American literature(s) in motion: Migration, imagination, and identity in contemporary U.S. fiction

Abstract

This article analyzes the remaking of American literature and its identity, focusing transnational American literature in general and, in particular, the contemporary American novel. It discusses a sense of post-national and anational motion of/in U.S. fiction, with an emphasis on the 21st-century American novel, created by both American and non-American authors and observed from a perspective of both American and non-American Americanists. Aimed at exploring literature in motion across "imagined" borders, the article also discusses the synergies between literature and other arts and disciplines in contemporary American literatures in order to provide new insights into literature in general and American literatures in particular. In the dialogue of literature with other disciplines, it examines the synergies between the local, regional, national, and global in contemporary U.S. fiction, as well as the synergies between different discourses of contemporaneity. Moving beyond established models in the way that even the term "transnational" transcends its own definition, the aim is to newly theorize a transnational/post-national/anational as well as transtextual motion of/in American fiction toward new directions of both American and non-American creation of American literatures.