The Development Novel: World Literature and the Political Economy of Growth

Monday Seminar: Peter Ribic Dana-Allen Dissertation Fellow (2017-2018) English, UW–Madison   My dissertation research connects two genres of global writing that emerged in the immediate postwar period: development economics, which undertook to theorize and facilitate the transition from “traditional” to “modern” economies in the recently discovered “Third World”; and the postcolonial bildungsroman, which uses the coming-of-age plot to stage broader economic, political, and cultural transformations in countries that have suffered the experience of colonialism and imperialism. In this talk, I will survey the narrative politics that cohered in and around these two genres of growth during the Cold War and consider the implications of what I call “the development novel” for recent debates in postcolonial and world literature studies.   Peter Ribic is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at UW–Madison. His research focuses on the twentieth- and twenty-first-century global Anglophone novel, literature and the social sciences, postcolonial theory, and world literature studies. Ribic has taught courses in modern literature and composition at Stockholm University and UW–Madison. His research has been supported by the Departments of English at Stockholm University and UW–Madison and the UW–Madison Graduate School. He is currently completing his dissertation, “The Development Novel: World Literature and the Political Economy of Growth.”