Pheng Cheah is Professor of Rhetoric and Chair of the Center for Southeast Asia Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of
Epilogue: Without Conclusion: Stories without End(s)
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Published:January 2016
The epilogue explores why postcolonial world literature is fascinated with the story despite the fact that the novel is the dominant mode of narrative. Based on a reading of Ninotchka Rosca’s State of War and Timothy Mo’s Renegade, it argues with the help of Benjamin’s account of storytelling that the story, of all narrative forms, has the most intimate connection with the force of time as an inexhaustible resource for opening other worlds because being grounded in the experience of finitude, it is a narrative without a rationally determinable end.
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